The hardest failure of John Carpenter’s career: “It was way too ferocious for them”
Strolling on London’s embankment, you might come across John Carpenter Street. While this confusing strip next to the JP Morgan office is actually anointed after a 15th-century town clerk and not the eminent director and composer, it rings true that the master of horror is more than befitting of a street in his name.
A restless creative, the New Yorker has committed some of the most influential horrors and action flicks to the great cultural melting pot and penned many memorable soundtracks to boot. Clearly understanding the potency of the audio-visual pairing in cinema, his movies, even the old ones, are sensory delights that elicit feelings that so many other blockbusters often fail to do.
Giving an emphatic hint of just how impactful he’s been on popular culture, his disciples include James Cameron, Bong Joon-ho, Quentin Tarantino and, of course, the Stranger Things creators, the Duffer brothers. Without the many iconic archetypes he committed to screen, this duo would be nowhere.
Managing to tap into what the later Mark Fisher might have dubbed the weird and the eerie, Carpenter’s best movies open the door in the back of the mind into sheer terror and pure nightmare, sending a chill down the spine. They produce the all-encompassing type of unease, where you start to believe that the rustling in the corner of the room is not just your cat inanely poking around.
A master of the cult classic, whether it be horrors such as Halloween, Prince of Darkness, The Fog, Christine, or more campy tales such as Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China, despite the darkness, he has covered a range of topics and themes, all while managing to keep his unique atmosphere at the maximum, which of course, is augmented by his musical nouse.
As the term cult classic heavily suggests, not all of John Carpenter’s films have been commercial hits. The movie that most of his fans deem his finest, 1982’s The Thing, starring Kurt Russell as R.J. MacReady, was a flop upon first release. Based on John W. Campbell Jr’s novella, the film tells the story of a group of researchers in Antarctica who encounter the eponymous extraterrestrial being that imitates other organisms and kills them. This bloody game of guess who stokes paranoia to levels rarely experienced in cinema and has viewers hooked until the masterful finale, which continues to divide opinion.
Speaking to Time Out in 2008, Carpenter reflected on his cinematic failures and revealed he takes all of them hard, with The Thing being the one he took “the hardest” due to its sheer brilliance being widely misunderstood. The director maintained that his career would have been much different if the movie had been a big hit, and asserted that the studio knew precisely what type of project he was making, despite them wanting a “crowd-pleaser” such as Alien, which is resolved in the end as Ripley blasts the titular creature into space.
He added: “It was way too ferocious for them. They were upset by the ending—too dark.”
Carpenter continued by describing how intensely his movie was hated and compared it to the year’s biggest sci-fi flick, E.T. He said: “But that’s what I wanted: Who goes there? Who are we? Which one of you is real? The movie was hated. Even by science-fiction fans. They thought that I had betrayed some kind of trust, and the piling on was insane. Even the original movie’s director, Christian Nyby, was dissing me.”
Unlike himself, Carpenter knows Spielberg has a knack for comprehending exactly what the audience wants from a movie. Regarding the tale about the sweet alien longing to get home, he assumed they wanted a sentimental flick that made them cry, and he was bang on the money. Unfortunately, The Thing came out two weeks later, carrying a much different load of emotions.
