John Carpenter and Sandy King have four TV shows in the works

Last Updated on August 5, 2021

Things have been pretty quiet for master of horror John Carpenter since the turn of the century. In the last fifteen years, he has only directed two features – 2001's GHOSTS OF MARS and 2010's THE WARD – and two episodes of the Masters of Horror TV show. Over the course of his career, he has provided more greatness (like HALLOWEEN, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, THE THING, CHRISTINE, BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, the list goes on) than you could typically expect from one man, and certainly enough to earn a peaceful retirement, but it's always nice to see our icons continue to produce new things. Recently, Carpenter has entered the world of comic books with the bi-monthly series Asylum and the anthology book Tales for a Halloween Night. On the musical front, he released the Lost Themes album earlier this year. But what are the chances of him getting back behind the camera?

According to his wife and producing partner Sandy King in an interview on the Killer POV podcast, Carpenter is doing his best to get a new directorial project off the ground. The pair have developed four different potential television series that are waiting to go to network.

King says, 

They're great, and they're different from anything that's out there, and they push the boundaries of what's horror.

(John) would be directing the pilots and we'd be executive producing them. One of them we wrote. Actually we wrote the whole concept and the pitch and then we brought in another writer to keep going because at a certain point we can't keep up.

There's sci-fi, there's horror, there's one that's kind of sci-fi horror, futuristic kind of thing. They're all across the board, and I think they'll fulfill what people expect out of him by also being unpredictable."

It all sounds very intriguing, and I'd love to see these projects move forward. The thought of getting a television series developed by Carpenter where the pilot episode was directed by him, and maybe he might even drop by to direct more episodes from time to time (some fanboy daydreaming there), is very cool to me.

In the meantime, Carpenter and King continue to work on the comic books, Carpenter will be performing some concerts, and the couple has also been approached about coming up with the story for a virtual reality game.