The movie franchise John Carpenter accidentally helped create: “Fuck ’em”
John Carpenter changed horror for good with his slasher Halloween, a terrifyingly simple escaped-killer-stalks-a-babysitter story that had people unable to sleep at night as it felt all too real.
There’s a grittiness to Halloween, paired with an innovative POV shot from a young Michael Myers’ perspective, which hardly makes it feel like a work of fiction, but before this, Carpenter had directed a film that was much more grounded in fantasy, the real world cast aside for Dark Star, which started out as a student film that he chipped away at for several years.
The sci-fi film was intended as a parody of popular movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey, made on a budget of just $60,000, and while it took a long while for the movie to gain attention, it was much more important in the grand scheme of cinema than you’d think, for even as a low-budget satirical movie that failed to make much of a dent in the box office, it kick-started Carpenter’s career and also led to the creation of Alien.
Ridley Scott’s iconic sci-fi horror film came out in 1979, and it marked another huge moment for the scary genre, essentially taking the form of a slasher movie but setting it in space, where a terrifying alien antagonist, known as the Xenomorph, is responsible for killing off each member of the Nostromo crew, leaving just one survivor: Ellen Ripley.
It’s since spawned a franchise, ranging from the acclaimed Aliens to the spin-off series Alien vs Predator, and while some movies from the franchise are certainly better than others, can you really get much better than Alien, which manages to balance sci-fi and horror perfectly, communicating our deepest fears about extraterrestrial beings.
But it only exists because Dark Star didn’t make enough people laugh, as intended, leading screenwriter Dan O’Bannon to say (according to Brian Narelle via The Guardian), “‘Fuck ’em. If I can’t make them laugh, I’ll scare the shit out of them’”, and that was the seed for his screenplay for Alien.
Many people didn’t seem to understand the humour at the heart of Dark Star, which frustrated O’Bannon, as Narelle explained, “Dark Star opened in 45 theatres: a movie starring nobody anyone knew, that people didn’t understand was a comedy. Dan O’Bannon left a screening where 12 curious people walked in and didn’t know what they were looking at.”
So, with a new challenge under his belt to actually scare people, he went away and came up with Alien, hence showing that without his collaboration with Carpenter, it might not have existed, although the Halloween director isn’t exactly bothered that Dark Star was essentially just O’Bannon’s springboard into a much more successful project.
In an interview with Battle Royale with Cheese, when asked if he feels any resentment, Carpenter replied, “Not really. Dan O’Bannon was a close friend, and we worked on Dark Star for four years. We parted ways after the movie. In 1976, he told me he was writing an It: The Terror From Beyond Space variation. I read his script some time later. It was close to Dark Star in many ways, but really not similar in tone or vision.”
