Tag: John Carpenter


  • Halloween II (1981): The Night the Hospital Became a Slaughterhouse

    ​Forget the modern reboots for a second. Strip away the tangled timelines and the increasingly elaborate explanations for why Michael Myers just won’t stay dead .If you want to understand the moment early-80s horror changed gear, when the slow tension of the 70s gave way to the bloodier energy of the slasher boom, you have…

  • Halloween (1978): The Night Evil Came Home

    In 1978, a young, cigarette-smoking film geek named John Carpenter sat down to make a babysitter murders movie. What he actually unleashed was a lean, stalking nightmare, less a movie and more a cold breath on the back of your neck. He took the tropes of the drive-in, blood, boobs, and boogeymen, and filtered them…

  • The Thing (1982): Flamethrower Therapy

    When John Carpenter’s The Thing landed in theaters in the summer of 1982, it didn’t just walk through the front door; it burst through the wall like something that had run out of room inside its own skin. It was a high-tension, high-octane masterpiece that arrived at the worst possible time. Audiences were busy falling…

  • Halloween Franchise Ranking: From 13 to 1

    John Carpenter and Debra Hill had no idea back in 1978 that they were changing the horror genre. They set out to make a scary movie about babysitters being stalked on Halloween night. They weren’t thinking about sequels – let alone 12 of them. They weren’t thinking about Corey Cunningham’s awful night of babysitting, heavy…

  • If you walk into a room of hardcore horror fans and ask them to name the best John Carpenter film, about 99% of them are probably going to give one of two answers. They’ll say either Halloween or The Thing, and with good reason. Those are hands down his two best and most famous movies,…