![]() The first movie I saw that made me want to be a director was The Forbidden Planet, from 1956. What sparked your interest in synthesizers? When you made Dark Star and Assault on Precinct 13, it wasn’t that far along in the grand scheme of synthesizer music in the mainstream, nor long after the Pink Floyd and Stevie Wonder records that hip the public to a lot of those sounds. Instead, he talked me through his inspirations as a horror writer and an unwitting synth-music pioneer and his interests outside of the day job, indulging a lot of my long-held horror-nerd notions but laughing off quite a few of them, too. ![]() Carpenter doesn’t care about all that stuff, though. The plan was to discuss legacies and career highlights as this month’s Halloween Ends puts a bookend on the story of the deathless knife-wielding killer Michael Myers. So earlier this month, when the opportunity presented itself to speak to the director and musician about his history and process, I rang him up, having spent a good bit of the last year obsessed with the philosophy and world-building in his 1987 religious thriller Prince of Darkness, a low-key masterpiece. Growing up drawn to 20th-century popular culture that skews toward the macabre was to obsess over the Carpenter catalogue. Toronto singer the Weeknd’s “Starboy” music video references The Fog the American artist and entrepreneur Shepard Fairey’s Obey clothing line nods to They Live. Escape’s resourceful hero Snake Plissken was a major inspiration for the main character in Japanese video-game designer Hideo Kojima’s Metal Gear Solid series. The simple, foreboding, hypnotic title theme and the creeping, deathly pace of Halloween impacted generations of film and television. ![]() John Carpenter directed so many of the greatest horror and action films - The Thing, Christine, Escape From New York, Big Trouble in Little China, Halloween - and you can see his fingerprints on them all, and nearly everything that came after. Photo: George Wilhelm/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images ![]()
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