John Carpenter | Biography, Movies, Albums, & Facts

John Carpenter, in full John Howard Carpenter, (born January 16, 1948, Carthage, New York, U.S.), American filmmaker who is regarded as a master of the low-budget horror film. He often wrote, produced, and scored the movies he directed, many of which became cult classics.

When Carpenter was five years old, he moved with his family from northern New York to Bowling Green, Kentucky, where his father began teaching music history and theory at Western Kentucky University. Carpenter was a fan of western and horror films and wanted to make his own movies from an early age. After high-school graduation he spent two years (1966–68) at Western Kentucky before transferring to the University of Southern California’s cinema program (now the School of Cinematic Arts). As a student, he cowrote, composed the music for, and edited a short western film, The Resurrection of Billy Broncho (1970), which won an Academy Award for best live-action short subject. He also began his first feature film as a student, but he left school to complete Dark Star (1974), a science-fiction comedy that he wrote with Dan O’Bannon while they were classmates.

Carpenter then wrote, directed, scored, and edited the thriller Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). The movie, often described as a combination of Howard Hawks’s Rio Bravo and George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead, was initially poorly received but quickly became regarded as a high achievement. Carpenter then made the classic horror film Halloween (1978). Starring Jamie Lee Curtis as a terrorized babysitter, the movie relied more on creating tension and fear than on ostentatious gore. It won critical praise and immediate popularity, and it inspired numerous imitations, including sequels that Carpenter neither wrote nor directed.

Carpenter’s next movie, The Fog (1980), a ghost story, was not as well reviewed but still found a large audience. The sci-fi thriller Escape from New York (1981) starred Kurt Russell as a convict tasked with rescuing the U.S. president from a New York City converted into a maximum security prison. It was a box-office hit that became another cult favourite. The Thing (1982), the first of several movies for which he served as director only, was more appreciated later than at the time of its release. Christine (1983), adapted from a Stephen King novel about a possessed car, and the sci-fi movie Starman (1984) were both well received.

Following the failure of the big-budget action film Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Carpenter returned to writing and directing low-budget horror movies, including Prince of Darkness (1987) and They Live (1988). He also helmed the comic Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), Village of the Damned (1995), Escape from L.A. (1996), Vampires (1998), and The Ward (2010). Although these were not as popular as his earlier movies, some of them developed devoted followers. One of his segments for the anthology TV show Masters of Horror, entitled John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns (2005), was praised as a return to form.

Carpenter’s film scores were regarded as major contributors to the artistic success of his movies, and he began releasing albums of such music, much of it new, in the 21st century. These included Lost Themes (2015), Lost Themes II (2016), Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998 (2017), and Lost Themes III: Alive After Death (2021).

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