A biography for John Carpenterhasn’t been written yet.
“In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum.”
“When I was a kid, I loved 'The Curse of Frankenstein,' 'The Creeping Unknown,' 'X: The Unknown.' I love 'Forbidden Planet,' 'The Thing from Another World.' They were science fiction/horror movies, generally.”
“Way back in the '70s, I was approached to talk about the story I'd write for a Spider-Man movie. They also talked to me about Batman. I had to think about it, but that was way, way back when.”
“There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.”
“What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.”
“To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.”
“Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They’re us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero’s movies are us. They’re hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that’s vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.”
“One of my heroes is a composer named James Bernard, and oh my God... I can still listen to his music today and be stirred and moved by it. But I think that you fall in love with... Well, again, when you're young, it really is more powerful. Much more terrifying.”
“I never got in this business, in cinema, to make horror movies. They arrived on my doorstep and I got typecast. Which was fine, I enjoy it, but I got into this business to make westerns. And the kind of westerns I used to see, they died. So that didn't work out.”
“I can play just about any keyboard but I can't read or write a note.”
“I stopped directing in 2001 for four or five years, until I did the TV series 'Masters Of Horror.' I had been working steadily as a director since 1970. That's a long time. I was burned out.”