John Carpenter
Genius Again... for a While

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, director John Carpenter must be the most flattered filmmaker around.

Kurt Russell and Jamie Lee Curtis want Carpenter to make sequels to their early hits. Twenty years after the release of Carpenter's Halloween, studios can't grind out Halloween knock-offs fast enough to meet box office demand.

"I know that the producer of The Thing went to Universal recently and pitched them the idea of making The Thing II. But he said: 'Imagine it: these teenagers arrive in Antarctica...'" Carpenter told fans at the Atlanta, Ga., science fiction convention DragonCon on September 4.

The audience laughed when Carpenter added he didn't think it was going to work. But the director's tone was wry. In the 28 years since his student short, The Resurrection of Bronco Billy, won an Academy Award, he's seen stranger cinematic couplings.

Carpenter's own career is no less unlikely. Although best known for the seminal slasher flick Halloween and other horrors, Carpenter's credits range from the TV biopic Elvis to the lush science fiction romance Starman. Carpenter can neither read nor write music, yet he composes and plays the scores to most of his movies.

Carpenter has streaks of big screen homers, then strikes out repeatedly. Halloween, starring the young Jamie Lee Curtis, earned $75 million on a budget of $300,000. But Halloween III, in which a shadowy conspiracy seeks to incite mass death through a mix of sorcery and TV advertising, was in Carpenter's words, "financially, a terrible mistake."

In Carpenter's 1981 Escape from New York, leather-garbed Snake "I thought you was dead" Plisskin (Russell) redefined swashbuckling for the post-apocalyptic age as he journeyed through the penal colony of Manhattan. But audiences and critics alike sloughed off the 1996 Carpenter/Russell sequel, Escape from L.A., as another pointless remake of a "classic."

The phrase "pointless remake" routinely finds its way into the first reviews of new Carpenter movies, including films like The Thing, which later achieve "classic" status. Popular and critical opinion of his work seesaws from film to film, hour to hour.

Carpenter strives to set himself above the furor. "I think every director goes through that," he said. "You're a genius for a while, then you're a bum for a while."

Real or reel, Carpenter's attitude must be easier to sustain now that people are calling him a genius again. His latest movie, Vampires, played to packed houses in France for months. From the almost ear-splitting buzz on the Internet, on public Web sites and private lists, the movie is a shot of distilled darkness -- taut, gripping and infinitely seductive.

Carpenter calls the movie, "Vlad the Impaler meets The Wild Bunch." Despite its supernatural elements, the story would've made Wild Bunch director Sam Peckinpah feel right at home. Vampires, based on James Steakley's novel, explores some of Peckinpah's favorite themes: hard-living heroes hellbent on revenge, and the hell that awaits them at the end of their quest.

These themes obsess Carpenter too. Carpenter loves westerns, and he emphasizes the classic western elements in Steakley's tale. In Carpenter's hands, the Vampires' New Mexico locales become more than scenery. The lovingly framed vistas deliberately evoke the majestic West of director Howard Hawk's Red River and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon.

The sere, unforgiving beauty of the landscape also makes sense of the characters' casual cruelties. Solitary mountains rear from the flat desert floor. Wind-blasted...

John Carpenter (continued)