John Carpenter

John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American filmmaker and composer.

Carpenter was born on January 16, 1948, in Carthage, New York, the son of Milton Jean (née Carter) and Howard Ralph Carpenter, a college music professor.

John Carpenter was interested in films from an early age, particularly the westerns of Howard Hawks and John Ford, as well as 1950s low-budget horror films such as The Thing from Another World and high-budget science fiction like Godzilla and Forbidden Planet (1956), and began filming horror short films with 8 mm film even before starting high school.

He and his family relocated to Bowling Green, Kentucky, during 1953, when his father took a job as a music professor at Western Kentucky University.

For much of his childhood, John and his family lived in a log cabin on Western Kentucky University's campus.

Just before becoming the age of 14 (in 1962), Carpenter made a few major short films: Godzilla vs. Gorgo, featuring the monsters Godzilla and Gorgo played via claymation, and the science fiction Western Terror from Space, which has the one-eyed creature from It Came from Outer Space (1953).

Carpenter graduated from College High School before enrolling at Western Kentucky University for two years as an English major and History minor.

Wanting to study filmmaking, which no university in Kentucky offered at the time, he transferred to the University of Southern California's School of Cinematic Arts during 1968.

Carpenter would ultimately drop out of school in his final senior semester to make his first feature film.

In a beginning film course at USC Cinema during 1969, Carpenter wrote and directed an 8-minute short film, Captain Voyeur.

Most commonly associated with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, he is generally recognized as one of the greatest masters of the horror genre.

His other productions from the 1970s and the 1980s only later came to be considered cult classics, and he has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker.

The next year he collaborated with producer John Longenecker as co-writer, film editor, and music composer for The Resurrection of Broncho Billy (1970), which won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Film.

The short film was enlarged to 35 mm, sixty prints were made, and the film was released theatrically by Universal Studios for two years in the United States and Canada.

The film received a critical reassessment in the United States, where it is now generally regarded as one of the best exploitation films of the 1970s.

Carpenter both wrote and directed the Lauren Hutton thriller Someone's Watching Me!.

This television film is the tale of a single, working woman who, soon after arriving in L.A., discovers that she is being stalked.

These include Dark Star (1974), Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Thing (1982), Christine (1983), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), and Escape from L.A. (1996).

Carpenter's first major film as director, Dark Star (1974), was a science-fiction comedy that he co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon (who later went on to write Alien, borrowing freely from much of Dark Star).

The film reportedly cost only $60,000 and was difficult to make as both Carpenter and O'Bannon completed the film by multitasking, with Carpenter doing the musical score as well as the writing, producing, and directing, while O'Bannon acted in the film and did the special effects (which caught the attention of George Lucas who hired him to work with the special effects for the film Star Wars).

Carpenter received praise for his ability to make low-budget films.

Carpenter's next film was Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), a low-budget thriller influenced by the films of Howard Hawks, particularly Rio Bravo.

As with Dark Star, Carpenter was responsible for many aspects of the film's creation.

He not only wrote, directed, and scored it, but also edited the film using the pseudonym "John T. Chance" (the name of John Wayne's character in Rio Bravo).

Carpenter has said that he considers Assault on Precinct 13 to have been his first real film because it was the first film that he filmed on a schedule.

The film was the first time Carpenter worked with Debra Hill, who would collaborate with Carpenter on some of his most well-known films.

Carpenter assembled a main cast that consisted of experienced but relatively obscure actors.

The two main actors were Austin Stoker, who had appeared previously in science fiction, disaster, and blaxploitation films, and Darwin Joston, who had worked primarily for television and had once been Carpenter's next-door neighbor.

Carpenter's early films included box office and critical successes like Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Starman (1984).

Eyes of Laura Mars, a 1978 thriller featuring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Irvin Kershner, was adapted (in collaboration with David Zelag Goodman) from a spec script titled Eyes, written by Carpenter, and would become Carpenter's first major studio film of his career.

Halloween (1978) was a commercial success and helped develop the slasher genre.

Originally an idea suggested by producer Irwin Yablans (titled The Babysitter Murders), who thought of a film about babysitters being menaced by a stalker, Carpenter took the idea and another suggestion from Yablans that it occur during Halloween and developed a story.

He won a Saturn Award for Best Music for the film soundtrack of Vampires (1998).

The film was rediscovered in the USC archives in 2011 and proved interesting because it revealed elements that would appear in his later film, Halloween (1978).

Since 2012, John Carpenter has co-owned a comic book company, Storm King Comics, along with his wife and Editor Sandy King.

This company is a division of Storm King Productions.

He has also released four studio albums, titled Lost Themes (2015), Lost Themes II (2016), Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998 (2017), and Lost Themes III: Alive After Death (2021).

He returned to the Halloween franchise as composer and executive producer of the sequels Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022).

Carpenter usually composed or co-composed the music in his films.

At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the French Directors' Guild gave him the Golden Coach Award, lauding him as "a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions".