Vampires (1998)
John Carpenter turns vampire hunting into blue-collar work and James Woods carries the whole film. Not a calling, not a tragic destiny, not a brooding romance with the dark.
Director: John Carpenter
John Carpenter directed, wrote and scored most of his own films, and the economy of that arrangement shows in every frame. He shoots in widescreen with a locked-off camera and lets things enter the frame instead of cutting to them, which is why Halloween is frightening without showing anything. The threat is usually already in the shot, standing still, and the audience finds it a moment before the character does.
His run from 1976 to 1988 is one of the strongest in American genre filmmaking: Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, Starman, Big Trouble in Little China and They Live. Almost all of them failed or underperformed on release and almost all of them are now standard references. The Thing in particular was savaged in 1982 and is now routinely named among the best horror films ever made.
The politics are more overt than the reputation suggests. They Live is an anti-Reagan satire that barely bothers to disguise itself, Escape from New York is about state abandonment, and Assault on Precinct 13 is a siege picture where the institution cannot protect anyone. Carpenter has always described himself as working in the tradition of Howard Hawks, and the professionals-under-pressure structure comes straight from there.
His synthesizer scores, minimal and repetitive and made cheaply because he could not afford an orchestra, became as influential as the films. For a writer the lesson is in the restraint. Carpenter’s monsters work because the camera treats them as ordinary parts of the world instead of as revelations, and a thing presented without emphasis is more unsettling than a thing announced.
