Though he’s made a variety of movies—from fantasy to science fiction films—John Carpenter will forever be known as a master of horror, thanks in large part to the role he played in reinventing the genre with 1978’s Halloween. To celebrate the award-winning filmmaker’s 69th birthday, we’ve gathered up 20 of his most memorable quotes about Hollywood.
1. ON THE DEFINITION OF HORROR
“Horror is a reaction; it’s not a genre.”
—From a 2015 interview with Interview Magazine
2. ON THE RULES OF MOVIEMAKING
“I think the rules of filmmaking are essentially the same as they were since, I guess, The Birth Of A Nation. The way you make movies: long shot, close-up, camera movement, structure—it’s all the same. Not much has changed. But the technology of movies has vastly changed. From 35mm black-and-white to color, from nitrate film to safety film and now into digital—and yet we’re still breaking scenes into master shots and close-ups. The cinema narrative has not changed that much since the silent film.”
—From a 2015 interview with The A.V. Club
3. ON THE TWO TYPES OF HORROR STORIES
“There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don’t understand. Internal is the human heart.”
—From a 2011 interview with Vulture
4. ON THE IMPORTANCE OF NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD
“One movie that showed me it was possible to make a low-budget horror movie was Night of the Living Dead (1968). When I saw that, I was like, ‘Wow, that’s really effective, but it’s obviously low budget.’ They didn’t have any money but they actually made something cool. That was inspirational to me when I was in film school.”
—From a 2015 interview with Interview Magazine
5. ON THE TRUTH ABOUT HOLLYWOOD
“Film buffs who don’t live in Hollywood have a fantasy about what it’s like to be a director. Movies and the people who make movies have such glamor associated with them. But the truth is, it’s not like that. It’s very different. It’s hard work. If you were suddenly catapulted into that situation—without any training—you would say after it was over: ‘Oh, God! You’re kidding! You mean, this is what it’s like? This is what they put you through?’ Yes, as a matter of fact, it is like this—and it’s often worse. People have tried to describe the film business, but it’s impossible to describe because it’s so crazy. You must know your craft inside out and then pick up the rules as you go along.”
—From an essay for Santa Fe Studios
6. ON THE HORROR OF WATCHING HIS OWN MOVIES
“I don’t watch my films. I’ve seen ’em enough after cutting them and putting the music on. I don’t ever want to see them again.”
—From a 2012 interview with Entertainment Weekly
7. ON THE EMOTIONAL TOLL MAKING MOVIES CAN TAKE ON A DIRECTOR
“I’ve been feeling old for years and years, and I think the movie business did it to me. At one point I just did movie after movie, and it starts tearing you down physically—emotionally too, if you do one after another. The stress, the emotional exertion of dealing with others. I’ve worked with really great actors and really difficult actors. The difficult ones are no fun. And the style of the movies today have changed a great deal. To me, I’m not a big fan of handheld. That’s just my tastes. That’s a quick fix for low budget. Let the operator direct it! Walk around. That’s how you burn through the pages. And found footage—how many times do we need to do that?”
—From a 2014 interview with Deadline
8. ON WHAT MAKES A GOOD HORROR FILM
“There’s a very specific secret: It should be scary.”
—From a 2015 interview with The A.V. Club
9. ON THE PERCEPTION OF A MOVIEMAKER
“In England, I’m a horror movie director. In Germany, I’m a filmmaker. In the U.S., I’m a bum.”
—From The Films of John Carpenter
10. ON STANDING OUT
“I don’t want to be in the mainstream. I don’t want to be a part of the demographics. I want to be an individual. I wear each of my films as a badge of pride. That’s why I cherish all my bad reviews. If the critics start liking my movies, then I’m in deep trouble.”
—From an essay for Santa Fe Studios
11. ON MAINTAINING CONTROL
“My years in the business have taught me not to worry about what you can’t control.”
—From a 2007 interview with MovieMaker Magazine
12. ON HIS FAVORITE MOVIES
“I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid; anything you see in your formative years is more powerful, because it really stays with you forever. The second category is films that I saw while I was learning the craft of motion pictures.”
—From a 2011 interview with Rotten Tomatoes
13. ON BEING STUCK IN THE 1980S
“Well, They Live was a primal scream against Reaganism of the ’80s. And the ’80s never went away. They’re still with us. That’s what makes They Live look so fresh—it’s a document of greed and insanity. It’s about life in the United States then and now. If anything, things have gotten worse.”
—From a 2012 interview with Entertainment Weekly
14. ON THE IMPORTANCE OF INSTINCT
“I think every director depends primarily on his instincts. That’s what’s got him where he is, what’s going to carry him through the good times and the bad. I generally go with what I instinctually think I can do well.”
—From a 2011 interview with Vulture
15. ON BEING TYPECAST AS A DIRECTOR
“I haven’t just made horror. I’ve made all sorts of movies. There have been fantasy movies, thrillers, horrors, science fiction. In terms of the ultimate reward, listen, man, when I was a kid, when I was 8 years old, I wanted to be a movie director, and I got to be a movie director. I lived my f*cking dream, you can’t get better than that. That’s the ultimate.”
—From a 2015 interview with Interview Magazine
16. ON THE REALITY OF MONSTERS
“Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero’s movies are us. They’re hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy; the part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.”
—From a 2011 interview with the Buenos Aires Herald
17. ON MOVIES AS A SENSORY EXPERIENCE
“A movie’s not just the pictures. It’s the story and it’s the perspective and it’s the tempo and it’s the silence and it’s the music—it’s all the stuff that’s going on. All the sensory stuff. Sometimes you can get a lot of suspense going in a non-horror film. It all depends. But, look, if there was one secret way of doing a horror movie then everybody would be doing it.”
—From a 2015 interview with The A.V. Club
18. ON THE UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE OF HORROR
“Horror is a universal language; we’re all afraid. We’re born afraid, we’re all afraid of things: death, disfigurement, loss of a loved one. Everything that I’m afraid of, you’re afraid of and vice versa. So everybody feels fear and suspense. We were little kids once and so it’s taking that basic human condition and emotion and just f*cking with it and playing with it. You can invent new horrors.”
—From a 2015 interview with Interview Magazine
19. ON THE REMAKE TREND
“It’s a brand new world out there in terms of trying to get advertising. There’s so much going on that if you come up with a movie that people have never heard of they don’t pay attention to it—no matter how good it is. So it becomes, ‘Let’s remake something that maybe rings a bell and that you’ve heard of before.’ That way, you’re already ahead. I’m flattered, but I understand what’s going on. They’re picking everything to remake. I think they’ve just run down the list of other titles and have finally got to mine.”
—From a 2007 interview with MovieMaker Magazine
20. ON THE LASTING INFLUENCE OF HALLOWEEN
“I didn’t think there was any more story [to Halloween], and I didn’t want to do it again. All of my ideas were for the first Halloween—there shouldn’t have been any more! I’m flattered by the fact that people want to remake them, but they remake everything these days, so it doesn’t make me that special. But Michael Myers was an absence of character. And yet all the sequels are trying to explain that. That’s silliness—it just misses the whole point of the first movie, to me. He’s part person, part supernatural force. The sequels rooted around in motivation. I thought that was a mistake. However, I couldn’t stop them from making sequels. So my agents said, ‘Why don’t you become an executive producer and you can share the revenue?’ But I had to write the second movie, and every night I sat there and wrote with a six-pack of beer trying to get through this thing. And I didn’t do a very good job, but that was it. I couldn’t do any more.”
—From a 2014 interview with Deadline
January 16, 2017 – 12:00pm