As the proud parents gazed down at their squalling newborn son on a cold January day they would have had no idea that he would one day become a leading director of horror films and change the face of the genre forever. John Howard Carpenter was born on January 16, 1948 in Carthage, New York. The son of music professor Howard Ralph Carpenter and Milton Jean Carter, he spent his early years in New York state and, later, in Bowling Green, Kentucky. Like so many children of the 1950's, he was fascinated by the world of film, sitting spellbound as he watched westerns by John Ford, B-rated horror films and early science fiction movies.
Before long, however, it wasn't enough to watch the films. By the time he reached junior high school, John was trying his hand behind the camera, shooting short horror films with an old 8 millimeter camera. After graduating from high school, he began attending Western Kentucky University, however before long his love for films led him to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts. While learning the basics of theater and motion picture production at USC, he began to show the multiple facets of his talent; co-writing, composing the music and editing the film for the 1970's film, The Resurrection of Broncho Billy. This film won an Academy Award for "Best Live Action Short Film" and was released by Universal Studios.
After graduating from USC in 1971, Carpenter began working on his next project. In both of his next two films, John Carpenter, once again, showed his talent in multiple areas - writing, production, directing and composition of the musical score for the films. Carpenter's 2nd film, Dark Star, was released in 1974. The low-budget ($60,000) science fiction film was a success, unlike the one that followed. Assault on Precinct 13 (an action/thriller), though well received in Europe, had only limited success in the United States when it was released in 1976. Reviewers were mixed in their reactions and the public seemed unimpressed, resulting in poor box office.
It was in 1978 that John Carpenter released a movie that would forever change horror films. Prior to this time, many of the movies that were considered "horror" were not actually horror films, but rather thrillers or suspense, by directors like Roman Polanski and Alfred Hitchcock. With the combination of Carpenter's directing and his unforgettable and repetitively haunting musical score, Halloween was to become a box office hit and introduce movie-goers to Jamie Lee Curtis. And with the birth of Michael Myers, evil now had a new face; horror a darker and more menacing persona. An emotionless killer who seemed unstoppable, Michael Myers introduced audiences to the phenomena of the teen slasher film. To many, Halloween remains John Carpenter's best film.
The late 1970's and early 1980's were a busy time for John Carpenter. In addition to the highly successful Halloween, Someone's Watching Me was released in 1978, followed by Elvis in 1979. It was not until the 1980 release of The Fog, however, that John Carpenter had another hit. Plagued by problems during production and many rewrites, the cast and crew faced extra weeks of filming after Carpenter saw the finished film and scrapped and re-taped about 30% of the movie. Despite this, or maybe because of this, the movie went on to gross in excess of $20,000,000.
Only a year later, in 1981, the world was introduced to an unlikely hero, the one-eyed Snake Plissken (played by Kurt Russell) in Escape from New York and was offered yet another scary autumn holiday with the release of Halloween II. 1982 brought The Thing into local theaters and in 1983 John Carpenter brought Stephen King's novel about a lonely teenage boy obsessed with a demonic 1958 Plymouth Fury to life with his release of Christine.
In 1984 John Carpenter released a unique and beautiful movie that was part science fiction and part star-crossed romance. In Starman, Carpenter's insightful direction is combined with brilliant performances by Jeff Bridges as the innocently, beguiling alien trying to return home and Karen Allen as a grieving, young widow attempting to recover from the loss of her husband. Starman is one of John Carpenter's most critically acclaimed films and a total surprise for many film-goers who knew him only for movies like Halloween or The Fog.
Big Trouble in Little China (1986) was one of Carpenter's attempts at an action/comedy film. Despite a bigger budget than most of his other films, the public was not impressed and Carpenter returned to his niche of horror films. Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988), Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) and Body Bags (1993) followed. In 1995, Carpenter once again directed a film with a somewhat larger budget than normal and pulled together a cast including such notables as Charleton Heston (with a cameo appearance) for his production of H.P. Lovecraft's In the Mouth of Madness. That same year, he gave us Village of the Damned, followed by Escape From L.A. in 1996. Vampires (1998), Ghosts of Mars (2001), Cigarette Burns in 2005 and 2006's Pro-Life are some of John Carpenter's more recent offering to movie-goers. With the possible exception of In the Mouth of Madness, most of Carpenter's films since the 1990's have not enjoyed the same success as his earlier works either with the critics or at the box office, though many of his movies seem to have developed an almost cult-like following.
John Carpenter is many things - a director, screenwriter, producer, composer and sometimes a cameo actor. Though not everyone knows his name, most people know his work and the characters he has created. John Carpenter, working on often low-budget films, within a little respected genre has, with the help of Michael Myers, Snake Plissken, a fog bank and the theme song from Halloween managed to carve himself a niche in film history.