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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.

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