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Carpenters name has become synonymous with horror, and rightly so.
(Though, for the sake of brevity, weve just gone with the core titles below.
So,The Fog, rather thanJohn Carpenters The Fog.)
For a while, it was too easy to take Carpenter for granted.
Few directors use every inch of a wide-screen frame quite as well as Carpenter.
Shown in pan-and-scan, his films could look sloppy, even incoherent.
Letterboxed, they make sense again.
Its easy to see why, at least in theory.
It could have beenFletchbut with a science-fiction twist.
The film flopped, leading Carpenter to take some time off.
The humor is broad, the effects occasionally janky, and nobody needed to see Snake surf.
14.Someones Watching Me!
But for Carpenter converts, the confusion is a feature, not a bug.
This shouldnt be anyones first Carpenter film, but its easy to see why its some fans favorite.
Making a haunted hotel scary is a lot easier than doing the same with a vintage Plymouth Fury.
Or was this a failure of nerve on Carpenters part?
Still, the redone finale isnt terrible, just a comedown from whats come before.
YetThe Fogremains one of the most fascinating films of his career.
A countercultural gloss on2001: A Space Odyssey(with an ending inspired byDr.
It came and went in 1974, but became a midnight-movie fixture in the years that followed.
AsBig Trouble in Little Chinahero Jack Burton, Russell would show no such restraint.
Its also an example of how limiting labels can be.
Packed with references to H.P.
And then the worlddoesspin out of control.
He didnt set out to make movies that made viewers comfortable.
When the mask comes off, its one of the horror genres most mysterious moments.
The face of evil looks just like an ordinary, unremarkable guy.
Then, in defeat, he finds away to fade into the night and kill again.
The nightmare never really ends.
No place, not even a quiet suburb, is safe.
Its the perfect horror movie, the standard many have aspired to reach while realizing they never could.
1.The Thing(1982)
What if you made your masterpiece and everyone hated it?
But its as much a subversion of Hawks as a tribute to him.
