Posted March 5, 2008
By tseigler

Good horror movies do more than deliver the blood and splatter we’ve come to expect. And good horror directors know the difference between gore for gore’s sake and gore that helps to tell the story. Nobody does it better than John Carpenter, in my humble opinion.

But he’s more than just a horror movie director. The same guy that helmed splatter-palooza “The Thing” in 1982 also directed the Chevy Chase vehicle “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” back when Chase’s name above the title helped open a movie. Carpenter’s original take on Michael Myers in 1978 gave birth to the slasher genre, but the first “Halloween” holds up to any and all sequels involving multiple reawakenings of Myers, masks or Rob Zombie.

I recently saw Carpenter’s cult classic “Big Trouble in Little China,” a weird hybrid of action movie, kung-fu, screwball comedy, and special effects on the scale of “The Thing” or “Vampires.” Starring frequent collaborator Kurt Russell, the film manages to display Carpenter’s penchant for injecting humor into even his darkest flicks. The film wasn’t a success when it first opened in the mid-80s, but it’s since become huge with devotees of cult films.

These days, Carpenter is pegged by many as simply a horror movie director. That’s like saying Spielberg only does movies involving dinosaurs. Sure, the guy has made a name with the horror genre, but he’s not just a one-trick pony. That’s something the enfant terribles of the recent gory horror cinema could learn from.