Writer: John Carpenter

John Carpenter wrote most of his own films and the structures are consistently Hawksian: a small group of professionals in a confined position, holding against something outside, with the internal argument about how to hold being the actual drama.

Assault on Precinct 13 is Rio Bravo restaged in a closing police station, and he has said so. The Thing turns the same structure inward by making the threat one of the group.

They Live puts its politics in the text with no disguise at all, and the six-minute fight over putting on a pair of sunglasses is a joke about how hard it is to make anyone look. He wrote it under the pseudonym Frank Armitage, a name from Lovecraft.