Halloween and The Thing director John Carpenter refutes his title as the master of horror. During an interview with Insider, the horror icon was told that he’s often considered a master of the horror genre, but he wasn’t really all that bothered. “That’s nice,” he said. “Sorry, I’m eating a Popsicle.”
“Look, I’m not a master of anything,” he added. “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 is currently promoting his upcoming TV series, John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, but it seems he’s not even too bothered about doing that. “I made a little series,” he explained. “If you don’t like it, f**k off. If you do like it, I like you. So, there you go.”
Asked if there’s one project from his career that he would really want to talk about, he was, again, not that bothered. “No, I don’t care,” he said. “I’d rather talk about basketball.”
Thankfully, he did have a lot to say about horror in general, with Carpenter explaining that it’s always about creating a good story at the heart of it.
“The thing that matters, in a horror movie, most of all — forget everything else — is a great story,” he said. “I 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 mentions that some of his favorite horror directors include Jordan Peele and David Gordon Green. He also has a good idea why horror movies are finally being taken more seriously:
“Look, horror movies have been around since the beginning of cinema, a hundred years ago,” he said. “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. Look back at the Depression era — out came Dracula. It was a huge sensation followed by Frankenstein, also a huge sensation.”
“Why were these movies a sensation?” he posed. “Because they spoke to the people of the generation who were going through a tough, tough, tough time.”
“Then later, horror changed again,” he added. “It evolved, the generation changes. And I think a turning point for horror was Psycho in 1960. Alfred Hitchcock, he really changed it. And then later there were other turns. I remember seeing Night of the Living Dead in 1968. It was a huge turn for horror. Later was The Texas Chainsaw Massacre — massive turn for horror. So, these things happen, and they’re generational. Our generation is doing it, and the next generation will come along and pick up the pieces of horror, the tropes, the stories, and remake it. And I love that. That’s something that keeps renewing it.”
Want to read more about John Carpenter? Check out what he thought of the Barbie movie as well as our review of John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams true-crime series.
Image credit: Photo by Robert Marquardt/Getty Images
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.
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