American - Director | January 16, 1948 -
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.
John Carpenter
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In England, I'm a horror movie director. In Germany, I'm a filmmaker. In the US, I'm a bum.
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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.
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To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
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I don't want to be a part of the demographics. I want to be an individual. I wear each of my films as a badge of pride. That's why I cherish all my bad reviews. If the critics start liking my movies, then I'm in deep trouble.
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I made a decision back in 1978 that, in a trade off for money when I directed Halloween, I would have my name above the title in order to basically brand these movies my own.
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Well, 'They Live' was a primal scream against Reaganism of the '80s. And the '80s never went away. They're still with us. That's what makes 'They Live' look so fresh - it's a document of greed and insanity. It's about life in the United States then and now. If anything, things have gotten worse.
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When somebody who makes movies for a living - either as an actor, writer, producer or director - lives to be a certain age, you have to admire them. It is an act of courage to make a film - a courage for which you are not prepared in the rest of life. It is very hard and very destructive. But we do it because we love it.
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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.
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Evil hiding among us is an ancient theme.
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I have two different categories of favorite films. One is the emotional favorites, which means these are generally films that I saw when I was a kid; anything you see in your formative years is more powerful, because it really stays with you forever. The second category is films that I saw while I was learning the craft of motion pictures.
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In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee's character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities.
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