John Carpenter has no idea what Letterboxd is, isn’t posting any reviews there

Prestige filmmakers such as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Michael Mann have joined Letterboxd – the online community to share reviews, create lists and fanboy out – but one who never has is John Carpenter. Hell, he doesn’t even know what it is! So, no, those reviews you’ve seen “him” allegedly post are all phony.

Amid a swirl of repostings of supposed reviews that John Carpenter put on Letterboxd, the director took to social media to not only debunk them but ask a serious question: “What the hell is a Letterboxd!??”

But these weren’t just any old reviews – these were, by and large, for John Carpenter movies. While the phony account has since been deleted, saved screenshots point to “John Carpenter” rating every one of his movies. Now that we know it was all a gag, it does take a lot of the fun out of it, but it was still incredible picturing John Carpenter at his desk and conjuring up a scathing review of Memoirs of an Invisible Man.

One of the more popular fake reviews was for Halloween II, in which “John Carpenter” wrote: “They paid me more money than I had ever seen to write a sequel to a film that did not need one. I took the check and spent it on beers to get me drunk enough to plow through this crap. I looked at the final script, which took a whopping 2 days to write, and said “wow, now that’s a piece of shit.” And it was.” While it’s true that Carpenter didn’t care for the 1981 sequel, he actually called it “an abomination and a horrible movie.” More direct and to the point, I’d say…Five stars.

Sticking within the horror genre, another fake review gave 1981’s An American Werewolf in London three stars and questioned the logic of werewolves. Vampires? Now those he can get behind!

As it stands, the top five best-reviewed John Carpenter films on Letterboxd are The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, In the Mouth of Madness, and They Live. But we can’t help but wonder what Carpenter would pick as his own top four…