Four unexpected filmmakers heavily influenced by John Carpenter: “Some of them have burned into my brain”
Directors who specialise in genre fare are rarely spoken of in the same reverential tones as the industry’s most influential auteurs, but John Carpenter must have been doing something right if he’s continued to inspire the next emerging generation of filmmakers.
Everyone looks towards the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Quentin Tarantino, and Akira Kurosawa as greats of various eras who changed the medium forever, but the easiest way to gauge Carpenter’s impact and influence is simple: look at how many of his movies have been remade, and it’s easy to see how deeply he’s gotten his hooks into cinema.
Halloween changed the horror genre forever and created ripples that still reverberate today. The Thing has been cited as a touchstone for countless atmospheric tales of sci-fi terror, Escape from New York launched a thousand dystopian imitators without an ounce of the cool Carpenter and Kurt Russell brought to the table, and Big Trouble in Little China is almost the perfect embodiment of the cult classic.
Admittedly, the latter years of his career weren’t quite as fruitful, but regardless of genre, Carpenter’s golden period of creativity between the release of Assault on Precinct 13 in 1976 and the arrival of Big Trouble ten years later – a period that brought Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Starman, and Christine – remains one of the best runs any director has ever had.
With that in mind, four modern filmmakers have gone on the record citing Carpenter as a massive inspiration, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg.
Four modern filmmakers inspired by John Carpenter:
Tilman Singer
“My favourite scary movie is The Thing by John Carpenter,” Tilman Singer told Pop Horror, which is as self-explanatory as it appears. “It’s hard to pick favourites, but this is one that comes to mind. Scary movie, straight-up horror film. It’s a very good film.”
His sophomore feature, Cuckoo, should make the filmmaker proud, then. The vibey atmospheric horror set in the picturesque German Alps follows Hunter Schafer’s Gretchen, who, after moving in with her estranged father, discovers a sinister plot involving time loops, embryonic parasites and strange screaming women who appear in the middle of the night.
The film is a spiritual successor to Carpenter’s late career, namely the palpable paranoia of In The Mouth of Madness or Village of the Damned and the sick kicks of Prince of Darkness. It builds slowly to an explosive, transcendent finale in much the same vein as Carpenter’s works and features many of the same aesthetic idiosyncrasies.
David Robert Mitchell
David Robert Mitchell’s breakout hit, It Follows, was a smash hit. Its success is reminiscent of Halloween, which launched Carpenter to fame – as is its looming, stalking camera and its damn catchy, already iconic score. The sheer unknowability of Mitchell’s monster follows in Carpenter’s footsteps.
“I’ve definitely studied his framing and his blocking, his staging of actors; I’ve literally watched his movies with just an eye on his compositions,” the filmmaker explained. “I was not necessarily framing shots thinking, ‘This is my Carpenter shot’. I don’t believe I’ve ever thought that, but I was certainly aware of the time we were placing this in, the kind of suburbs we were in. There are all these parallels, and clearly, in the music, there are places where we certainly make reference, but it goes beyond that.”
The entity at the heart of It Follows has no motivations, no reason to exist beyond that of chaos. It is fate personified, slowly but surely crawling towards our teenage protagonists. Even if at a snail’s pace, they know it will arrive. As for Carpenter’s influence, Mitchell put it down to cinematic osmosis: “I guess that’s a long way of saying that I’ve watched those films enough that some of them have sort of burned into my brain, and that comes out.”
Edgar Wright
Speaking of absorbing things after they’ve been seared into the brain: When Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg were writing Shaun of the Dead, they recorded a CD-R of John Carpenter scores, playing it on a loop “to be in the zone.”
As a result, the end product feels like it’s in much the same wheelhouse as Carpenter’s work – especially Assault on Precinct 13, which focuses on the inhabitants of a police station under attack by an overwhelming opposing force.
Wright was heavily inspired by Carpenter’s filmmaking style, stating that Shaun of the Dead “used his idea of making a low-budget film look artsy. “I was always taken with the glowing-eyed pirates in The Fog,” he said. “The Fog is one of my favourites, and even though he only put it on screen for a couple of minutes, that image was burned into my subconscious.“
Adam Curtis
The documentary filmmaker behind Hypernormalisation, All Watched Over by Machines of Love, Grace, and The Power of Nightmares is obsessed with John Carpenter.
Each of Curtis’ films contains powerful moments scored by Carpenter’s iconic themes, and he references the director’s work constantly. He’s never really explained the significance, but it seems clear that both are weaving together parables. Curtis’ narratives are real, while Carpenter’s are fictional, but both tell stories about societies on the micro and macro scale that are on the brink of collapse, societies where social bonds are slowly breaking because of greed, paranoia, or dismissal.
They Live and The Fog, in particular, tell stories of maverick figures who can see the writing on the wall and warn the people around them of what is coming. These figures are silenced, either through direct violence or through quiet rejection. It’s only when it’s too late that the world listens.
On a deeper level, Adam Curtis and John Carpenter both ask the same question: “How do we get the world to listen?”
