The scene John Carpenter wants to delete from history: “I was young and stupid”
John Carpenter is one of the most influential filmmakers in history, even though his genres of choice – horror and science fiction – are systematically undervalued by critics. Known for making movies on a shoestring budget and acting at various points as producer, writer, director, composer, and editor, Carpenter is the definition of a cinematic auteur, and movies like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, and The Thing have been inspiring filmmakers for decades.
Although it has taken years for Carpenter to be adequately recognised for his contributions to film, he scored a very early critical success. In 1971, while still in film school, he won the Academy Award for ‘Best Live Action Short Film’ for The Resurrection of Broncho Billy, a western about a man in the present day who dreams about escaping to the Old West.
An Oscar-winning film is a tough act to follow, especially for a 23-year-old who’s never made a feature-length movie, and Carpenter wasn’t thrilled with the next movie he made. Dark Star was his first feature, and he began making it while still at university. It’s a science fiction comedy that centres on a crew that is tasked with destroying unstable planets that could interfere with human colonisation of space, and critics and audiences were unimpressed with the blending of genres.
Starting again from square one, Carpenter made what would become a cult classic, Assault on Precinct 13. Instead of continuing down the science fiction road he’d been travelling, he tried his hand at action but drew on the western and horror genres for inspiration. Based loosely on Howard Hawks’ 1959 Rio Bravo and George A Romero’s 1968 The Night of the Living Dead, Assault on Precinct 13 stars Austin Stoker and Darwin Joston as a cop and a Death Row inmate who defend a precinct against a violent gang.
It’s a svelte, relentless thriller that became a touchstone of the genre, but one scene was just a little too violent for the censors. During a long, drawn-out sequence, a young girl orders an ice cream cone from an ice cream truck and realises that she got regular vanilla instead of a vanilla twist. When she returns to the truck to inform the driver of his error, a gang member appears and shoots her in the chest at point-blank range.
The MPAA threatened to give the film an X rating for the scene, so Carpenter sent them a new edit in which it was cut. Securing an R rating, he then distributed the edit of the film in which the scene was left intact. He now regrets it. Speaking to Review Graveyard, the director said, “It was pretty horrible at the time – explicit. I don’t think I’d do it again, but I was young and stupid.”
He wasn’t particularly proud of fooling the MPAA either. “I don’t know,” he said. “I don’t really think it was very clever, it was pretty ham-fisted.”
Even by today’s standards, the scene is shocking and even taboo, and while the film would certainly be just as tense and groundbreaking without it, it demonstrates Carpenter’s brash approach to filmmaking that has made him such a trailblazer.
