John Carpenter
Complete Works
September 4 to October 16, 2025
We dedicate the start of our season to probably the most influential living genre director in the United States: John Carpenter. A film school drop-out born in 1948, Carpenter already began to attract attention as a staging virtuoso with his own signature in the early 1970s with his first, low-budget independent productions. The worldwide success of his third feature, Halloween (1978), established him early on as a master of horror. This label fails to do justice to Carpenter's versatility, however, even if he – not least for his distinct love for the fantastic – often returns to this genre. But with his unmistakable approach, Carpenter has inscribed himself in genre cinema from sci-fi to action thriller and including a few comedic interludes, most of which are scored by his own electronic compositions, whose catchy minimalism is as memorable as the dazzling clarity of his visual compositions.
Despite the occasional compromise, Carpenter also managed to preserve his independent spirit in larger studio productions, even when these often did not provide him any commercial success: Although unthinkable today, upon its release, his masterpiece The Thing (1982) was a financial disaster, and other initial flops like Big Trouble in Little China (1986) are now long celebrated as classics. With characteristically terse sarcasm, Carpenter beautifully summed up his fate in Hollywood: "In France, I'm an auteur. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In Great Britain, I'm a horror movie director. In the U.S., I'm a bum."
Carpenter's worldview is not only expressed in his particular form, but also in dissident subject matter. The most obvious example is the proletarian satire of Reagonomics They Live (1988), in which the rule of Yuppies turns out to be an extraterrestrial invasion, which a homeless man named Nada, played by professional wrestling star Roddy Piper, sees through. In classic genre form, Carpenter prefers to serve up his social criticism in passing, for instance when the vengeful ghost in The Fog (1980) evokes the United States' historical guilt. Carpenter: "If I had a message, I'd send a telegram."
Such statements reflect a filmmaker who completely bridges the gap between old and new Hollywood like no one else. Perhaps Carpenter's massive influence on later generations of directors is also due to the fact that – overlooking his personal sensibility – he passes on, practically unfiltered, the lessons of the master directors of the Dream Factory's Golden Era. The rise of New Hollywood in the 1970s owed itself to the influence of European auteur films on young, cinephilic American filmmakers, Martin Scorsese being the prime example. However, Carpenter remained fully in the tradition of the unpretentious American genre movies which had already excited him as a kid and inspired his first 8mm efforts.
The economy of his mature style betrays Carpenter's particular weakness for the multi-talented Howard Hawks, whose direct approach spoke to him as much as his preference for strong female characters. While Carpenter's great film school debut, the sci-fi satire Dark Star (1974), is still strongly marked by Dan O'Bannon, the future co-writer of Alien, the thrilling big city crime film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) already encapsulates his cinema, and not only in his very precise use of technology. A new take on the siege scenario from Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo (1959), Carpenter turns the the main confrontation with absolute evil central to his work into a paranoid, urban nightmare. Significantly, the group which defends itself against the anonymous mob of gangs encompasses multiple ethnicities and genders. This line is drawn further with the headstrong Final Girls played by Jamie Lee Curtis or Carpenter's then-wife Adrienne Barbeau in Halloween and The Fog as well as with outlaw characters like Snake Plissken, embodied by favorite Carpenter actor, Kurt Russell, in Escape from New York (1981) and Escape from L.A. (1986).
The fact that Carpenter's direct follow-up to likely the most horrifying extraterrestrial invasion in cinema (The Thing, another Hawks revision) was a charming, romantic comedy version (with Jeff Bridges as the alien in Starman, 1984) reveals a lot about the versatility hidden behind his trademark name. (Even if his work is associated with cityscapes, Starman and Village of the Damned, 1995, show off his wonderful feeling for widescreen compositions of rural America.) Although Carpenter has always maintained his forceful, straightforward storytelling, many of his later films were considered disappointments because he chose not to repeat himself – he let others direct the sequels to his cash cow Halloween. Instead, with the same unpretentious mastery as his role models, he continued to direct wonderful genre triumphs like In the Mouth of Madness (1994) and small pleasures like his late comeback The Ward (2010) – in Carpenter's work there are no uninspired films. (Christoph Huber / Translation: Ted Fendt).
We are screening all of John Carpenter's movies on original 35mm prints (with one exception), as well as three fantastic TV works, music videos, and a short film.
In collaboration with SLASH Film Festival
We dedicate the start of our season to probably the most influential living genre director in the United States: John Carpenter. A film school drop-out born in 1948, Carpenter already began to attract attention as a staging virtuoso with his own signature in the early 1970s with his first, low-budget independent productions. The worldwide success of his third feature, Halloween (1978), established him early on as a master of horror. This label fails to do justice to Carpenter's versatility, however, even if he – not least for his distinct love for the fantastic – often returns to this genre. But with his unmistakable approach, Carpenter has inscribed himself in genre cinema from sci-fi to action thriller and including a few comedic interludes, most of which are scored by his own electronic compositions, whose catchy minimalism is as memorable as the dazzling clarity of his visual compositions.
Despite the occasional compromise, Carpenter also managed to preserve his independent spirit in larger studio productions, even when these often did not provide him any commercial success: Although unthinkable today, upon its release, his masterpiece The Thing (1982) was a financial disaster, and other initial flops like Big Trouble in Little China (1986) are now long celebrated as classics. With characteristically terse sarcasm, Carpenter beautifully summed up his fate in Hollywood: "In France, I'm an auteur. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In Great Britain, I'm a horror movie director. In the U.S., I'm a bum."
Carpenter's worldview is not only expressed in his particular form, but also in dissident subject matter. The most obvious example is the proletarian satire of Reagonomics They Live (1988), in which the rule of Yuppies turns out to be an extraterrestrial invasion, which a homeless man named Nada, played by professional wrestling star Roddy Piper, sees through. In classic genre form, Carpenter prefers to serve up his social criticism in passing, for instance when the vengeful ghost in The Fog (1980) evokes the United States' historical guilt. Carpenter: "If I had a message, I'd send a telegram."
Such statements reflect a filmmaker who completely bridges the gap between old and new Hollywood like no one else. Perhaps Carpenter's massive influence on later generations of directors is also due to the fact that – overlooking his personal sensibility – he passes on, practically unfiltered, the lessons of the master directors of the Dream Factory's Golden Era. The rise of New Hollywood in the 1970s owed itself to the influence of European auteur films on young, cinephilic American filmmakers, Martin Scorsese being the prime example. However, Carpenter remained fully in the tradition of the unpretentious American genre movies which had already excited him as a kid and inspired his first 8mm efforts.
The economy of his mature style betrays Carpenter's particular weakness for the multi-talented Howard Hawks, whose direct approach spoke to him as much as his preference for strong female characters. While Carpenter's great film school debut, the sci-fi satire Dark Star (1974), is still strongly marked by Dan O'Bannon, the future co-writer of Alien, the thrilling big city crime film Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) already encapsulates his cinema, and not only in his very precise use of technology. A new take on the siege scenario from Hawks' classic western Rio Bravo (1959), Carpenter turns the the main confrontation with absolute evil central to his work into a paranoid, urban nightmare. Significantly, the group which defends itself against the anonymous mob of gangs encompasses multiple ethnicities and genders. This line is drawn further with the headstrong Final Girls played by Jamie Lee Curtis or Carpenter's then-wife Adrienne Barbeau in Halloween and The Fog as well as with outlaw characters like Snake Plissken, embodied by favorite Carpenter actor, Kurt Russell, in Escape from New York (1981) and Escape from L.A. (1986).
The fact that Carpenter's direct follow-up to likely the most horrifying extraterrestrial invasion in cinema (The Thing, another Hawks revision) was a charming, romantic comedy version (with Jeff Bridges as the alien in Starman, 1984) reveals a lot about the versatility hidden behind his trademark name. (Even if his work is associated with cityscapes, Starman and Village of the Damned, 1995, show off his wonderful feeling for widescreen compositions of rural America.) Although Carpenter has always maintained his forceful, straightforward storytelling, many of his later films were considered disappointments because he chose not to repeat himself – he let others direct the sequels to his cash cow Halloween. Instead, with the same unpretentious mastery as his role models, he continued to direct wonderful genre triumphs like In the Mouth of Madness (1994) and small pleasures like his late comeback The Ward (2010) – in Carpenter's work there are no uninspired films. (Christoph Huber / Translation: Ted Fendt).
We are screening all of John Carpenter's movies on original 35mm prints (with one exception), as well as three fantastic TV works, music videos, and a short film.
In collaboration with SLASH Film Festival
Link SLASH Filmfestival