John Carpenter is a American film director, producer, screenwriter, editor and composer.
He is mostly known for his well known horror film Halloween (1978) His film Halloween was a smash hit and helped to create the slasher film genre. For this film Carpenter worked with a very low budget of $320,000 and the film grossed over $65 million which made it one of the most successful independent films of all time. Carpenter made Halloween more scary than gory like you see in newer horror films as it made the audience more afraid of the main character, Michael Myers. It is a film full of cheap tricks but this is why this made it such a successful horror.
The next horror film he created was The Fog (1980) which was a ghostly revenge tale that was inspired by horror comics. Carpenter found The fog to be very difficult and with the rough cut he was dissatisfied. He decided that it didn't meet his standards and decided to film more footage and approximately one third of the final film is newer footage. It had many problems and negative feedback but it still created gross of over $21,000,000 in the United States when the budget was only £1,000,000.
His next film was The Thing (1982) which is known for its high production values. It was made with a budget of $15,000,000, the largest amount John Carpenter had worked with up until that point and it was distributed by universal pictures. However, this film was called a box-office disappointment but once it was out on video it became very successful and is know known as one of the best horror films ever made.
In the late 80's many of Carpenters films starting becoming let downs and this caused him trouble as he was finding it harder to get financed for a film. This led him to create more lower budget films again such as Prince Of Darkness (1987)
His career became even worse in the 1990's as it was full of box office disappointments. In the 2000's he still made a couple of films and in 2007 Rob Zombie created a re-imagining of Carpenters Halloween and then two years later created a sequel.
In 2011 Carpenter said that he was working on a new gothic western movie, but didn't see it working out as western movies are not selling so well anymore.
From his Career John Carpenter has had many ups and downs, Seeing some failed movies and some great success. However, I think he will really only be known for being the creator of Halloween as this was his most successful and most known movie.
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