John Carpenter’s Favorite Movies: 10 Films the Horror Master Wants You to See

Wilson Chapman
·3 min read
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He may be the greatest horror director of all time (just ask Jordan Peele), but John Carpenter’s film taste skews farther away from the genre than you might expect.

Born in 1948 in Carthage, New York, Carpenter grew up with a love of cinema, watching Howard Hawks westerns an early age, and started making short films with an 8mm camera before he started high school. He studied at Western Kentucky University and University of Southern California, before dropping out of the latter after a short he made, “The Resurrection of Broncho Billy,” won an Oscar.

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Now with a sudden amount of prestige, Carpenter made two little seen projects “Dark Star” and “Assault on Precinct 13,” both now critically acclaimed, before really breaking out with 1978’s “Halloween.” Starring a young Jamie Lee Curtis, the independent film became a massive hit, grossing $70 million, turning main villain Michael Myers into a horror icon, and establishing the basic tropes of the slasher genre that all future movies would copy.

The success of “Halloween” gave Carpenter a blank check to do what he wanted, and he spent the ’80s cashing it with a series of acclaimed or cult films, ranging from horror projects (“The Fog,” “Christine,” “Prince of Darkness,” “They Live,”) action flicks (“Escape from New York” and “Big Trouble in Little China,” both starring his frequent muse Kurt Russell), and even a lovely sci-fi romance (“Starman”). The ’90s was less fruitful, though he still produced several underrated gems like “In the Mouth of Madness” and “Vampires.” His output continued to slow in the 2000s, and he eventually retired almost completely as a director in 2010 with “The Ward.” He has yet to get behind the camera for a new feature film, although he did return to directing this year for an episode of the Peacock horror anthology “Suburban Screams.”

Given how strongly associated his name is with horror or grizzly ’80s action movies, it may come as a surprise that when Carpenter contributed a ballot of what he believed to be the 10 greatest films to the 2022 Sight and Sound Directors Poll, absolutely zero of the movies he selected were either genre. Instead, Carpenter went heavy on his first filmmaking icon, selecting four movies Howard Hawks directed, including a screwball comedy (“Bringing Up Baby”), romantic drama (“Only Angels Have Wings,”), a Western (“Rio Bravo”), and a gangster movie (“Scarface”). He also included a pair of movies from Spanish satirist Luis Buñel, along with four other canonical classics. The result is a list that might not necessarily be the spookiest, but nonetheless contains some all-time great and intriguing picks for the greatest films.

In honor of Halloween, IndieWire rounded up the films that Carpenter has shouted out as his favorites. Read below for the master of horror’s 10 favorite movies, listed in no particular order.

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