Many artists garner their much-earned appreciation after their time. John Carpenter has the distinction of making many classics that have finally given the filmmaker his much-due credit, and yet, he’s been so disheartened by the movie industry that he couldn’t care less of his stature among film fans. After major pop culture contributors such as Halloween and The Thing, John Carpenter is seen as “The Master of Horror.” For the prolific director, he’s perfectly fine just making music, playing video games, watching basketball and eating popsicles.
IGN reports on Carpenter’s recent interview with The Insider. When he’s told that people hold him in such high regard as a genre filmmaker, Carpenter’s knee-jerk response was, “That’s nice. Sorry, I’m eating a Popsicle.” He continues, “Look, I’m not a master of anything. I just want to play video games and watch basketball. That’s all I care about doing. I don’t want to bother anybody.” Carpenter does have a new project out with the TV show John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams hitting Peacock, and his promotion of it in the interview is just as blunt. He simply stated, “I made a little series. If you don’t like it, f**k off. If you do like it, I like you. So, there you go.” When inquired about if there’s a project from his career that he would be interested in talking about, Carpenter again puts it bluntly, “No, I don’t care. I’d rather talk about basketball.”
The Halloween director would not completely shut out the interviewer. When it came to talking about what makes a good horror film, Carpenter explained what he feels is the secret sauce, “The thing that matters, in a horror movie, most of all — forget everything else — is a great story. don’t care about final girls or jump scares or anything else. That’s all secondary. That’s all beside the point. Good story is what horror is all about. That’s what I searched the world for, what I try to do.”
Carpenter shared that some of his favorite recent horror filmmakers include Jordan Peele and David Gordon Green. He also expounded on why he thinks horror is now taken more seriously in the film world, “Look, horror movies have been around since the beginning of cinema, a hundred years ago. The origins of cinema are in horror and mainly because it is very cinematic, and audiences love to be scared. And it’s always been with us. Every generation, a director will come along, a producer will come along, and reinvent the horror film.”