John Carpenter Archives | Deep Focus Review

Christine

Brian Eggert — Sat, 21 Jun 2025 15:04:44 +0000

Few names deserve a place over the title of a Stephen King adaptation. John Carpenter’s is one of them. The director made Christine in 1983 from the source novel published earlier that year, and the resulting film balances both creative voices. The adaptation reflects some of King’s signature themes: horror rooted in high school trauma, possession (hotels, animals, and inanimate objects), and the entrenched psychology of his characters. But Carpenter’s production reimagines the book for the screen, transforming the titular killer car from a vessel for a maligned spirit into a faceless, unknowable threat—an abyss of evil that reflects and distorts its driver. When an engine revs over the opening credits, unaccompanied by music, it distills Carpenter’s ambiguous intent. The filmmaker embraces the terror of the unknown and the implication of evil, relying less on exposition than powerful images to tell his story. More than the particulars of the screenplay’s adaptation, Carpenter knows the classic car’s presence is powerful and can instill terror because it warps a familiar image from Americana into something unknowable and twisted. Blending Carpenter’s and King’s sensibilities, Christine idles at the crossroads where two horror masters converge. The full review is currently exclusive to Patreon subscribers. […]

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Halloween

Brian Eggert — Mon, 15 Oct 2018 03:30:23 +0000

Halloween is John Carpenter’s most analyzed work. Spectators have drawn sundry conclusions about its meaning and symbolism since its initial release, and the obsession has lingered for decades. Horror fans and scholars alike have presented elaborate theories that assign every detail in the film a meaning according to their interpretation of its terror. Something about Michael Myers, behind the void of his expressionless white mask, allows viewers to access their deepest fears and project them upon that face. And yet, the simplicity and straightforwardness of the filmmaking, from Dean Cundey’s widescreen cinematography to the natural characterizations, from Carpenter’s memorable score to the screenplay’s efficiency, amount to a terrifically crafted motion picture. But the movie reaches beyond its confident technical execution and grabs at the audience, putting viewers through a troubled nightmare of suspense and uncertain dread. It reaches into our deepest, most primitive anxieties of the unknown and then exploits them. Halloween is a cipher that moviegoers, critics, and film scholars have filled in with countless readings, some of which will be explored in the ensuing paragraphs. What remains after the movie’s deceptive simplicity and superb form is its haunting ability to mean whatever we need it to mean, and […]

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Memoirs of an Invisible Man

Brian Eggert — Tue, 24 Jul 2018 15:00:11 +0000

Memoirs of an Invisible Man fulfills neither the promise of a Chevy Chase vehicle nor becomes what audiences envision when they think of a film by director John Carpenter. An unlikely blend of existential metaphors, romance on the run, noirish voiceover punctuated with dry humor, science-fiction concepts backed by impressive special FX, and a playful high-stakes yarn reminiscent in tone of North by Northwest or To Catch a Thief, the film is something altogether unique. However, it’s not what one expects from either Chase or Carpenter; it’s a spy-thriller in Alfred Hitchcock’s lighter, 1950s style. Berated by critics and shrugged off by fans of both the actor and director upon its release in 1992, the film defies the contract signed between Hollywood and moviegoers—a contract that details how the starring talent is supposed to behave, how the director’s films are supposed to look, and how such talent is supposed to make us feel. Despite being a commercial release from Warner Bros., Memoirs of an Invisible Man resists conventionality, even while being entirely accessible and entertaining. The film was based on the darkly comic novel by H.F. Saint, published in 1987. Saint used the familiar veneer of H.G. Wells’ classic text The Invisible Man, and further, James Whales’ 1933 adaptation for […]

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They Live

Brian Eggert — Tue, 04 Jul 2017 05:31:42 +0000

“It figures it would be somethin’ like this,” says the hero of John Carpenter’s They Live. Nada, a homeless man named after the Spanish word for “nothing,” has just discovered an alien conspiracy. When he looks through special sunglasses, he sees in black-and-white that a ruling class of alien politicians, entertainers, and super-rich have subjugated American society, turning the sleeping middle-class into a culture of enslaved consumer drones. In part a rousing act of filmic rebellion against Reagan-era and capitalist ideologies, in part a pastiche of classic science-fiction and Western tropes, They Live is pure Carpenter and a quintessential cult classic. The title alone suggests an Us versus Them theme for the viewer, creating an association that links our alien overlords with a class of capitalists, politicians, mass media institutions, and popular culture—and by association, strengthens the countercultural ambitions of the film. Indeed, They Live contains all the requisite traits of a cult classic, beginning with its overriding sense of defiance, directed in large part toward systems of authority. But then, the film’s cultisms extend to the film’s cheesy dialogue; excessive violence; grisly alien flesh that looks like a skinned human; inter-dimensional travel; classic genre film nostalgia; omnipresent B-movie badness; […]

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Escape from New York

Brian Eggert — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 00:00:52 +0000

In 1981, New York City was not the beacon of hope and American unity post-9/11 society has raised it up to be; rather, violent urban dramas such as Death Wish (1974) and Taxi Driver (1976) reflected the city’s turbulence. Mob violence, street gangs, prostitution, rape, and drugs overwhelmed the troubled metropolis. Murder rates grew with each passing year. More than 120,000 robberies were committed that year, and over 2,100 murders. By comparison, there were only 328 murders in 2014. A mob-related trash strike left rotting waste on the streets, leaving refuse to fester and stink. During this year, John Carpenter released Escape from New York, an urban Western in which the island of Manhattan has been transformed into a maximum-security prison surrounded by 50-foot walls and mined bridges. New York City has always subsisted as a world unto itself, but Carpenter extends that idea into a frightening science-fiction concept. His film comments on how the New York of 1981 has isolated itself to such an extreme that walls, both metaphoric or literal, enclose its inhabitants within the crime-ridden sprawl, itself a symbol for all of America. In a bleak and nihilistic future, Carpenter explores a world in which the American Dream has […]

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Escape from L.A.

Brian Eggert — Sun, 02 Aug 2015 05:00:03 +0000

After years of commercial failures and lost creative battles against various studios, John Carpenter delivered his most acerbic blow against Hollywood with Escape from L.A., his pseudo-sequel to 1981’s cult classic Escape from New York. More a vague remake than a true sequel, the 1996 release represents the famously cynical director’s most contemptuous film, where he lashes out against everyone from studio execs to Disneyland, from the American President to the plastic surgery-addicted culture of Los Angeles. Unfortunately, the film forgoes any grand attempts at narrative originality or technical precision in favor of its message, which is delivered in a number of harsh episodes and encounters involving legendary eye-patched anti-hero Snake Plissken, played to badass perfection by Kurt Russell. Escape from L.A. marks an angry, campy, and over-ambitious project, reminiscent, at least in its intent, of so much cult fare from yesteryear where a social commentary is trapped inside a B-movie presentation (think The Stuff). Even on those terms, Escape from L.A. remains troublesome because of its unclear relationship with its predecessor, if not an admirable effort for its fleeting entertainment value and palpable anger. The key to enjoying the film is setting aside the presentation and dwelling on what […]

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Ghosts of Mars

Brian Eggert — Thu, 11 Aug 2011 05:00:59 +0000

Even among ‘Master of Horror’ John Carpenter’s most devoted followers, Ghosts of Mars has a sour reputation. The director’s fans customarily rank his 2001 effort alongside Vampires and Village of the Damned as one of his very worst. And yet, the movie combines attributes spanning Carpenter’s entire career to deliver a satisfying concoction on a level of auteurist investigation, as well as basic genre entertainment value. Part Western, part sci-fi actioner, part grisly horror, the release has no pretenses about its own B-movie status. Aside from two or three titles with political implications, the movie’s goals are no loftier than the majority of Carpenter’s works, which is to say it merely wants to amuse those of us interested in the kind of movie where Ice Cube fights punked-out zombie aliens on Mars. For a period in the early 2000s, before NASA announced the ending of the space program and Mars was the next viable goal for space exploration, Hollywood related America’s fascination with Mars through a trio of science-fiction movies about our sister planet—not unlike the duo of killer meteorite movies in the ‘90s (Armageddon and Deep Impact). First came Brian De Palma’s grossly underwhelming Mission to Mars (2000), a […]

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The Ward

Brian Eggert — Thu, 07 Jul 2011 00:00:24 +0000

After a ten-year hiatus from the director’s chair, John Carpenter makes his much-anticipated return with The Ward, a spookhouse chiller set in a haunted 1960s-era mental institution. Low-budget and thankfully devoid of any cheap CGI effects, the film showcases Carpenter’s craft and clarity as a filmmaker, offering one or two satisfying jolts and some eerie set design. But evident here is Carpenter’s unfortunate habit of signing to lousy scripts in the “could’ve-been-great” horror category. As a result, patient fans eagerly awaiting a monumental comeback for the “Master of Horror” will have to keep waiting, since the outcome remains a far cry from Carpenter’s glory days with Escape from New York, Halloween, and The Thing. As the opening titles suggest, Carpenter knows the potential of his setting: Woodcuts and photographs of archaic madhouse practices are shown over the credits, suggesting we’re in for a disturbing ride. Then the images shatter and fragment like glass and move across the screen in slow motion. But such imagery (though hackneyed) is full of promises the screenplay cannot keep. B-movie vixen Amber Heard (Drive Angry 3D and The Stepfather) requested Carpenter take the project, in which she stars as Kristen, a troubled heroine who, in […]

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The Thing

Brian Eggert — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 00:00:27 +0000

In the darkness loom horrible unknowns from our nightmares or from the blackest regions of our imagination, and in such unthinkable obscurity is where horror derives its greatest power. These fears retain their authority because as much as we try to comprehend what hides in the dark, we can never fully understand their form, those monsters and demons and things from beyond. Their veiled state preserves our fear by retaining anonymity; their presence is felt but exists within a vast and unknowable abyss. Frightening as these hidden creatures and trepidations may be, they never emerge, allowing their singular power over us to be fear, perhaps the most ultimate power of them all. And while we remain safe with their refusal to emerge, threatened only by these things as a concept, an idea, should those creatures burst into the light, our illusion of safety would disappear, and we would become susceptible not only to our own fear but to a reality so terrifying that our imaginations could not grasp its fantastical, horrifying truth. Testing the limitations of the horror genre, John Carpenter’s The Thing inhabits those shadowy places inside the human psyche and also emerges into frightening actuality. Carpenter’s film was […]

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