John Carpenter

In 1978, director John Carpenter made Halloween, a low-budget horror thriller which spawned a host of sequels and pale imitators.

Newcomers who thought Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Scream were original then think again - they all owe a debt to this 21 year old shocker.

Carpenter has often been at the forefront of horror and fantasy. His 1974 offering Dark Star was unofficially remade as the big budget Alien; Escape From New York inspired a host of comic book heroes and The Thing was ruthlessly pilfered for games such as Resident Evil and recent video smash, The Faculty.

He's had a roller coaster ride of a career and still remains one of the world's most inventive film-makers. Together with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Carpenter is one of a generation of movie brats, weaned on low-budget thrillers and serials of the Forties and Fifties.

Since his early days in Hollywood, the writer/director and composer has always worked on the fringes of the mainstream, with Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13 and Halloween all dabbling with different genres (sci-fi, urban Western and horror) with huge amounts of critical success.

His work is not without its ups and downs. The 1982 remake of personal favourite The Thing reached new highs in shock horror while his ultra low-budget Prince of Darkness plumbed new depths in boredom. However, regardless of the quality, Carpenter's self-penned screenplays always provide food for thought.

"I am a writer, and a director, and let me tell you something, a screenplay is not a movie, it's a bunch of words,Ó he remarks. "The director makes the movie. All this other stuff can just go away..."

For the uninitiated, Halloween centres on Michael Myers, and no, he isn't the star of Austin Powers. Myers was actually a British producer who helped Carpenter on the road to directorial stardom. As a tribute, his namesake became one of the most famous killers in cinema history. It was rather handy that The Shape, as he became known, wore a face mask, ideal for hiding the identity of both stuntmen and actors who got paid a pittance by not speaking.

The law of diminishing returns is usually painfully obvious in the horror genre. While part one was a terrifying thriller, Halloween II was a bloody rehash, part three a non-related thriller with an irritating jingle. Five years later and Myers came back from the dead to haunt a new generation. Alas, the new breed of killer was more prone to invoking boredom than terror as he stalked rather stupid victims around a series of corridors.

Last year, things came full circle as Jamie Lee Curtis was brought back on board for the wittily titled Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later. Tagline: Blood is Thicker than Water.

With a script polish by Kevin ÔScreamÕ Williamson, it pumped new blood back into an anaemic franchise and won praise from the die-hard fans who had grown jaded by 20 years of inferior copies.

Latest rumour has it that Carpenter is now hard at work trying to get financing for Ghosts of Mars, a sci-fi epic which is set 200 years from now.

By which time Halloween 500 should be released.

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