John Carpenter

Colin Odell, Michelle Le Blanc

• Publisher: Kamera Books
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781842434987
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

From his hands-on filmmaking style to his writing and his composing—an indispensable guide to the ultimate cult auteur
 
One of the most iconic directors of American cinema, John Carpenter has astonished audiences the world over with his tightly crafted horror, thriller, and science-fiction films. Not just a director, Carpenter's talents also extend to writing the screenplays and soundtracks to many of his films, and this guide covers his work as a director, composer, writer, and producer. It examines Carpenter's influences and style and the films that have, in turn, been influenced by him. From the existential comedy classic Dark Star through to the terrifying smash hit Halloween, the taut siege of Assault on Precinct 13 to the visceral Vampires there's action and tension all around. But it's not all ghosts from The Fog or horrific mutations in The Thing, there's time for romance in the science-fiction road movie Starman and even for the King himself in the superior bio-pic Elvis: The Movie. John Carpenter's films are always memorable, distinctive, and unashamed of their genre roots.

‘HE WHO HAS THE GOLD
MAKES THE RULES’

After They Live, Carpenter had a break from directing, and during this time he and Adrienne Barbeau were divorced. A couple of his scripts became TV westerns (El Diablo and Blood River). He was remarried in 1990, to producer Sandy King, who had already worked with him on several projects and was to become involved with many more. Both Prince of Darkness and They Live had been successful, which gave Carpenter the confidence to return to the major studios for another bash at big-budget productions. He was to become involved with Chevy Chase on Memoirs of an Invisible Man. Chase was a huge star at the time and renowned for slapstick and comedy, but on this occasion wanted to prove to the world that he was also a serious actor. Having directed a number of fairly downbeat pictures during the 1980s, this was an opportunity for Carpenter to lighten up.

Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992)

Directed by: John Carpenter

Produced by: Bruce Bodner and Dan Kulsrud

Written by: Robert Collector, Dana Olsen and William Goldman from the book by HF Saint

Music: Shirley Walker

Cast: Chevy Chase (Nick Halloway), Daryl Hannah (Alice Monroe), Sam Neill (Jenkins), Michael McKean (George), Stephen Tobolowski (Warren Singleton), Jim Norton (Dr Wachs)
100 mins

‘I’m not sick. I’m not crazy, but I am invisible.’

Nick Halloway is a rich and successful lawyer but his life is empty. One night his friend George introduces him to Alice, a beautiful and articulate maker of cosmological and anthropological documentaries. He’s so smitten that, when she leaves, he gets blind drunk and turns up to a devastatingly dull lecture the next day with the mother of all hangovers. Trying to find somewhere to sleep, he unwittingly sets off an explosive sequence of events culminating in the evacuation of the Magnoscopics Institute. When he wakes up, he finds that parts of the building have become invisible, a strange affliction which seems to have affected him too. Quick to the scene is David Jenkins, a ruthless government operative who sees the potential for an invisible man in espionage work and is determined to track Nick down as a recruit: ‘Assassination is entirely ethical if you’re on the right side.’ But Nick has other plans. Being invisible is not all about free seats at the cinema and sneaking into girls’ changing rooms; just avoiding people is trouble enough and hailing a cab even more of a nightmare than usual. Dr Wachs, who ran the research project, cannot find the cause of the invisibility, so Nick seeks refuge in George’s summerhouse. But when George arrives unexpectedly with his wife Ellen, Alice and the amorous and somewhat smarmy Richard, Nick realises that he can’t live without the woman he’s briefly loved. He reveals his predicament to Alice, unaware that Jenkins and his hardware-enhanced SWAT team have tracked him down…

Memoirs of an Invisible Man features many of the themes that are prevalent in Carpenter’s other works, particularly in regard to the lone protagonist facing the might of his own government whose interests are all concerned with self-preservation as opposed to the rights of the citizen. There are Hitchcockian elements too, such as the man-on-the-run plot structure. Like Roger Thornhill in North By Northwest (indeed, one of the projects Nick is working on is the Kaplan Project, a reference to that film’s MacGuffin), Nick is a corporate nobody forced into a preposterous situation. Carpenter provides self-references, finely realised set pieces, dry humour and even some anti-establishment dialogue – ‘Do you expect me to trust a politician?’ In the cold light of day it is an enjoyable, big-budget, Hollywood popcorn film, but therein lies the rub. It is like Carpenter squash, diluted so much that there’s enough hint to get the flavour, but too insipid to make it wholly satisfactory.

Turning a wry, insular story into a Chevy Chase comedy-romance was never going to be easy and the strains clearly show in the finished piece. When Chase asks the whereabouts of the men’s room, he inadvertently causes a scientist to spill coffee on his computer, setting off a chain reaction which culminates in the loss of half the building and resulting in Nick’s invisibility. It is a funny scene because it is ludicrous and plot driven, tells us about Nick’s attitude and furthers the narrative. Later, Nick has problems getting around town and uses a drunk to hail a cab by knocking him unconscious and treating him like a human mannequin. The concept is darkly funny – after all, Nick had been this intoxicated the previous night. Chase milks this scene for all it’s worth, getting the drunk to ‘talk’ to the driver by moving his lips with his hands, culminating in him faking the man vomiting out of the cab door. A scene with witty potential becomes less interesting and more irritating as it progresses. His later capture at the hands of the evil governmental operative Jenkins makes the humour incongruous. Unfortunately, the whole piece ping-pongs between these extremes; for every moment of grim, sub-Raymond Chandler voiceover about the futility of flight and the inevitability of capture, the pain of not being seen and the anguish of being denied your love, there is a counterpoint of base tomfoolery.

Key to any romance is that the romance must seem right or, at the very least, plausible. Nick is a lecherous businessman. When he first meets the intelligent and charming Alice over dinner, she is reduced to a simpering devoted admirer, slobbering in the ladies’ toilets and arranging their next dinner date. She does try to disarm his one-track mind, though; when he glibly states ‘Love blonde hair’ she responds ‘Love garlic’. After this fleeting encounter it is some time before he sees her again, at George’s summerhouse being molested by a desperate Richard. Of course, he uses his invisibility to turf Richard out, but stays in the room watching as Alice prepares to go to bed. This seedy side to his nature is fobbed off as love, but basically he is exploiting his position. Indeed, when she questions whether he was in her room that night he initially denies it before confessing, turning his voyeurism into a joke by telling her that he covered his eyes. Of course, he can see through his hands. Alice does help Nick to come to terms with his invisibility, painting a pasty face on him so they can go out to dinner – ‘If I had eyes and teeth I’d be a whole head’ – and coping with his melancholic outbursts. But the relationship still feels implausible.

Invisible men films have always relied on special effects to carry their credibility. The finest example remains James Whale’s visual tour de force The Invisible Man (1933) starring Claude Rains. Up until Memoirs of an Invisible Man an astonishing 60 years later, the groundbreaking effects work had not been bettered. Carpenter acknowledges Whale’s classic in the scene where Nick finally reveals to Alice that he is invisible. Perhaps in an attempt to make her understand more easily, she finds him dressed as Claude Rains, complete with bandaged head, dark glasses and lounge wear, peeling off the bandages to reveal nothing. This scene also reinforces one element that emphasises the extent to which a ‘star’ must be seen in a film. In Whale’s original, and even in Paul Verhoeven’s Hollow Man (2000), the invisible person remains invisible to the viewer. However, Chase is the star, so we are put in the position of being able to see the unseeable, which, while making the events easier to interpret, interrupts narrative causality. It’s far more interesting for the viewer when he cannot be seen, for then ILM (Industrial Light and Magic) can take over. The complexity of the revolutionary effects ranges from elementary visual tricks to intricate and time-consuming CGI. Among the simpler effects is the moment when Nick escapes from Jenkins’ office by placing a gun to his head. A combination of Sam Neill’s excellent body contortions and a model gun literally stuck to his head make the scene feel surprisingly realistic. At the other end of the scale, Nick has approached Dr Wachs in the park disguised as a tramp in order to get him to find an invisibility cure. But Jenkins’ men spot him and Nick flees the park. Running along the streets, he takes off his clothes piece by piece to reveal the emptiness beneath. In the end there is just a pair of trousers running down the road. The sequence is long, exciting and accompanied by a big, loud Hollywood orchestra – escapist entertainment at its best but painstaking to realise. A combination of blue screen, motion tracking and digital painting were used alongside careful model work and in-camera effects to create the shot. While this is all cutting edge, the principle is not far from Whale’s original, where the back of the coat’s collar hidden by Rains (who was wearing all black) was hand painted frame by frame to complete the illusion. The other way that we ‘see’ Nick is by reactions to his body. Physically, this manifests itself as objects falling over, doors opening or pens waving in the air. More impressive is when things react on and within Nick. At the beginning we see him chewing gum and blowing a bubble; later the contents of his stomach can be seen being digested (yuck!); and when Nick has a cigarette, we see the smoke entering his lungs before being exhaled. In the penultimate reel Nick can be ‘seen’ in the rain because of the water that surrounds him.

The main language used in Hollywood is fiscal – the more money something costs, the more nervous studio executives become about the resulting film, resulting in filmmaking by a committee of accountants. This generally has the effect of removing creative control from the director. Memoirs of an Invisible Man just about manages to be better than your average summer blockbuster, but it could have been so much more.

Memoirs bombed. Yet again, fortune was not on Carpenter’s side when it came to big-budget productions. He was despondent and decided to return to television work after a 14-year break. Working for Showtime, he was allowed enough freedom to inject the kind of violence that network-syndicated terrestrial services would have found hard to stomach.

Body Bags (1993)

Directed by: John Carpenter (The Gas Station, Hair) and Tobe Hooper (Eye)

Produced by: Sandy King

Written by: Billy Brown and Dan Angel

Director of Photography: Gary Kibbe

Music: John Carpenter and Jim Lang

Cast: Links: John Carpenter (Coroner); The Gas Station: Alex Datcher (Anne), Robert Carradine (Bill), Wes Craven (Pasty Faced Man), Sam Raimi (Dead Attendant); Hair: Stacy Keach (Richard), David Warner (Dr Lock), Sheena Easton (Megan), Deborah Harry (Nurse); Eye: Mark Hamill (Brent), Twiggy (Cathy), Roger Corman (Dr Bregman)
91 mins

‘I love stories about our national past-time – violent death.’

Introducing our horrific host – the Coroner – who gives us a whirlwind tour of his favourite corpses and shares the odd tickled rib. His pet hate? Natural causes.

The Gas Station: Anne has landed herself a night job at the local gas station, giving her plenty of time to brush up on her studies between customers. All would be well but, wouldn’t you know it, there’s a killer on the loose who has already notched up six bodies and is looking to improve on his psychotic qualifications. Still, Bill, the nice chap who worked the early shift, has given her his phone number should things get a bit scary. All too soon it becomes apparent that there are more than just customers who are interested in the gas station. There are gruesome paintings daubed in the men’s toilets and a mutilated body in the staff locker. Anne is definitely not alone…

Hair: Richard is suffering from the ravages of age – follicle degeneration. Unwilling to accept his fate like a man, he goes to inordinate lengths to recover his good locks with a bewildering and expensive array of potions, massagers and unsightly concoctions made from lamb foetuses. However, fortune strikes when he signs up for a new treatment courtesy of Dr Lock, a patented protein that can give him any hair he dares to wear. Rather than a subtle approach he chooses the Stallion look – ‘Oh yes! Giddy-up!’ – and, sure enough, the next day he’s turned into a babe-magnet sex-machine with hair down to his knees. Unfortunately, he has also developed a nasty sore throat and slowly realises that his manly mane is not all it seems. These extra-terrestrial tresses of terror, these felonious follicles have a vicious life of their own and, if a solution isn’t found soon, Richard could find himself hair today, gone tomorrow…

Eye: Baseball, like many sports, is far easier at a professional level if you are in possession of stereoscopic vision, so having a big chunk of car windscreen rammed into your eyeball is unlikely to improve your home-run potential. Such an automotive disaster has befallen Brent and it seems as though his career is over. But, as luck would have it, a donor eye is available and the transplant is a success. The adopted optic is not all it seems, however, and, rather like pianists tend to receive the severed hands of executed murderers, this has come straight from the state gas chamber. With increasingly painful migraines and disturbing hallucinations of his wife Cathy, dead and bursting from her unhallowed shallow grave, the future looks grim…

Body Bags’ roots are manifold – from anthology films such as Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965), Creepshow (1982) and Dead of Night (1945), via short ‘twist in the tale’ television shows (The Twilight Zone, Tales of the Unexpected) to the EC horror/crime comics of the 1950s. All of these have a literary lineage in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, HP Lovecraft and MR James. Perhaps the most obvious precedent for Body Bags is that of Tales from the Crypt, the most successful of the EC Horror comics. It was also an Amicus film in 1972 and an unexpected cult television hit in the 1990s. This later entry with an atrociously punning host – The Cryptkeeper from the original comics – traditionally links events with nasty gags and a variety of morbid props. Body Bags is clearly in this mould: overtly gory, nasty and ultimately harmless, like the campfire stories of The Fog, sufficiently removed from logic to be dismissed but close enough to reality to create a chill. Body Bags’ three segments easily stand out as separate half-hour programmes, introduced by the Coroner, played by Carpenter himself, with some typically excellent make-up courtesy of Rick Baker. This is a hoot from start to finish, the opening screen emblem a pastiche of the MGM lion, but instead of a roar we have John Carpenter wielding a buzzing chainsaw with the Latin motto Sanguis Gratia Artis (blood for the sake of art).

The best of the bunch is undoubtedly The Gas Station, an ‘urban myth’ film which manages to be a ball of tension from the outset, punctuated by sudden jolts and sticky splatter. Like the best of the stalk ‘n’ slash genre you are almost shou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• Table of Contents
• JOHN CARPENTER – AMERICAN AUTEUR
• ATTENTION, INCOMING COMMUNICATION
• THE SHAPE OF TERROR
• HOLLYWOOD CALLING
• BACK TO BASICS
• ‘HE WHO HAS THE GOLD MAKES THE RULES’
• OTHER PROJECTS
• THE MORE THINGS CHANGE, THE MORE THEY STAY THE SAME: THE LEGACY
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Copyright
• Plates
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