Perfect Imitation – The spreading influence of… | Little White Lies

Per­fect Imi­ta­tion – The spread­ing influ­ence of John Carpenter

26 Oct 2016

Words by Padraig Cotter

Two men, one with long hair and the other with a moustache, standing in front of a large golden and metallic backdrop.
Two men, one with long hair and the other with a moustache, standing in front of a large golden and metallic backdrop.
He may be all but retired from fea­ture film­mak­ing, but traces of the genre director’s lega­cy can be found everywhere.

The famous quote Good artists copy, great artists steal” feels like a par­tic­u­lar­ly fit­ting descrip­tion of Hol­ly­wood film­mak­ing. Acclaimed direc­tors such as Mar­tin Scors­ese, Steve Spiel­berg and Rid­ley Scott have read­i­ly admit­ted to bor­row­ing” ideas or imagery from film­mak­ers they admire, while their con­tem­po­rary Bri­an De Pal­ma has spo­ken at length about his Hitch­cock fanboyism.

If imi­ta­tion is a form of flat­tery, how­ev­er, it appears John Car­pen­ter has been exalt­ed enough for one life­time. Luc Besson found this out the hard way with Lock­out, a futur­is­tic action thriller he co-wrote and pro­duced in 2012. Essen­tial­ly an Escape from New York remix with the Big Apple set­ting swapped out for a space prison, the film’s hero must res­cue the President’s daugh­ter instead of the Com­man­der in Chief himself.

Numer­ous reviews at the time not­ed the obvi­ous par­al­lels between the films, and in 2016 Car­pen­ter was award­ed a nice chunk of com­pen­sa­tion after suc­cess­ful­ly tak­ing out a law­suit against Besson’s pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny. In a way this suit has served to under­line Carpenter’s grow­ing influ­ence on genre cin­e­ma in the last decade, where indie and main­stream direc­tors alike have drawn on his visu­al and musi­cal stylings.

There’s always been some­thing slight­ly curi­ous about Carpenter’s career. From Dark Star through to They Live, the cult direc­tor enjoyed one of the hottest cre­ative streaks of any Amer­i­can film­mak­er, even if the box-office receipts dis­agreed some­what. Each movie con­tained recur­ring ele­ments that made them unde­ni­ably his: a terse anti-hero with an old-fash­ioned code of hon­our, char­ac­ters trapped phys­i­cal­ly or psy­cho­log­i­cal­ly, widescreen cin­e­matog­ra­phy and an effec­tive synch-based sound­track. Carpenter’s name even fea­tured in the title of most of them.

Three men, one wearing a mask, talking on a city street in front of a shop.

For a gen­er­a­tion raised on repeat VHS view­ings of Hal­loween, The Thing and Big Trou­ble in Lit­tle Chi­na, Carpenter’s name was a stamp of qual­i­ty, since he typ­i­cal­ly took B‑movie mate­r­i­al and ele­vat­ed it using his own inim­itable blend of style and sub­stance. Although he effec­tive­ly went into semi-retire­ment short­ly after 2001’s box-office flop Ghosts of Mars, his influ­ence on genre cin­e­ma con­tin­ued to grow. When the remake tide swept Hol­ly­wood dur­ing the 2000s it felt like every sec­ond movie was a Car­pen­ter rehash, even if new takes on Hal­loween or The Fog failed to have the desired impact.

What this did do, how­ev­er, was reignite an inter­est in Carpenter’s work. A gen­er­a­tion of film­mak­ers who had grown up watch­ing his films began aping his style, result­ing in sol­id genre fare like Neil Marshall’s Dooms­day, which might as well be dubbed Escape from Glas­gow. Dooms­day is a mix­tape of Marshall’s favourite movies, with a sto­ry fea­tur­ing a one-eyed, chain smok­ing anti-hero­ine infil­trat­ing a walled off Scot­land and fight­ing off fer­al can­ni­bals; she’s even forced into a cli­mat­ic are­na bat­tle. Short of star­ring Kurt Rus­sell, it couldn’t be a more affec­tion­ate homage.

More recent­ly the likes of Dredd and The Raid have been tagged with the Die Hard label, when in fact they have a lot more in com­mon with Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 – the director’s own ode to Rio Bra­vo – with their lean plots, terse dia­logue, lo-fi sets and puls­ing elec­tron­ic scores. Both films also tap in Carpenter’s love of movie west­erns, where actions speak loud­er than words, and char­ac­ters bond over bloodshed.

Oth­er obvi­ous love let­ters to Car­pen­ter can be found in The Purge fran­chise, which owes a tremen­dous debt to his work. The orig­i­nal is an Assault on Precinct 13-style thriller, where masked killers attack Ethan Hawke’s bar­ri­cad­ed home. The sec­ond film in the series, Anar­chy, takes the same con­cept and goes full on Escape from New York, intro­duc­ing Frank Grillo’s surly vig­i­lante try­ing to sur­vive while trapped on the streets dur­ing Purge night.

In many ways, David Robert Mitchell’s It Fol­lows is the sequel Hal­loween deserved: a young girl is relent­less­ly pur­sued by a sex­u­al­ly trans­mit­ted wraith, and every­thing from the prowl­ing, voyeuris­tic cam­er­a­work to Disasterpiece’s mes­meris­ing score evokes the creep­ing tone of Carpenter’s sem­i­nal work.

Two people examining an animal in a medical setting.

Carpenter’s self-com­posed music is anoth­er vital ele­ment of his fil­mog­ra­phy, which hasn’t been lost on his imi­ta­tors. Adam Wingard’s 2014 thriller The Guest chan­nels – of all things – Hal­loween III: Sea­son of the Witch, which Car­pen­ter pro­duced and com­posed the music for. Even Netflix’s recent binge watch suc­cess Stranger Things dis­plays an overt fond­ness for his work, from the catchy theme tune to the Star­man-esque romance at its core.

Main­stream cin­e­ma has also caught up in recent years. Tarantino’s The Hate­ful Eight is a spir­i­tu­al sequel to The Thing, shar­ing the same set­up of a group of peo­ple trapped in a cold, remote locale; instead of an alien shapeshifter, it’s hatred that dri­ves them apart. They both share a lead­ing man in Kurt Rus­sell and the sound­track even employs unused pieces of Ennio Morricone’s score for Carpenter’s snow­bound hor­ror classic.

Even Marvel’s Sui­cide Squad cap­tures some of the director’s spir­it. The face­less ene­mies and aban­doned city are text­book JC, in addi­tion to the dis­parate band of heroes” hav­ing bombs implant­ed in their necks. And that’s just the tip of the ice­berg: Green Room, Mid­night Spe­cial, Cold in July and Attack the Block all doff their genre caps in his direc­tion, too.

While Lock­out clear­ly took things a step too far, it’s heart­en­ing to see movies like Dredd, The Guest, It Fol­lows and oth­ers pay­ing homage to Car­pen­ter while branch­ing off in their own direc­tion. He may not have reached the same lev­el of sus­tained com­mer­cial suc­cess as many of his con­tem­po­raries, but his dis­tinct brand of genre cin­e­ma will sure­ly inspire film­mak­ers for gen­er­a­tions to come.

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