King and Carpenter: A Match Made in Hell?
by Brandon Engel
The most compelling monsters are the ones who illicit our deepest sympathies. John Carpenter’s The Thing, however, elicits sympathy in a surprisingly pathetic way: he got his ass handed to him by E.T.! The fearsome shape-shifter of Carpenter’s misanthropic visions just couldn’t hold his own in the box-office against Hollywood’s favorite doe-eyed, feeble weakling (no, not Spielberg, but the alien).
And it’s really too bad that the film didn’t enjoy a more dignified theatrical run, because a.) it deserved to and b.) the rumor is that if Carpenter’s film hadn’t tanked, he was going to be brought into direct a big-budget film adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter. And it’s really too bad, in a way, because the Firestarter film that ultimately was released was an enormous let down.
It didn’t prevent Carpenter and King from teaming up, however. Not long after the release of The Thing, Carpenter was recruited to direct a feature length adaptation of King’s Christine (1983), which tells the story of a bloodthirsty 1957 Plymouth Fury. This was perhaps, the most appropriate King story for a collaboration between the two men, and I say this for a couple of reasons. For one, King’s stories can become so involved, with so many characters introduced, that, in many situations, it would be impractical and distracting to compress all of them into a single film. One of the things that distinguishes Carpenter’s work on the whole is that he’s capable of telling captivating stories with very few principal actors (think Halloween, Dark Star, Starman, The Thing). Christine is a story with relatively few characters, and with much of the narrative tension borne out of the intensity of a few key relationships. For another thing, Carpenter is versatile in that he has shown a facility for both visually driven narratives (The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, Escape From New York) and narratives that downplay the importance of intense visuals and make economic use of what is not seen (Halloween especially). King has an extremely colorful imagination, and while there are certain images that he evokes successfully through his writing, attempts to translate these images directly to screen have in some instances, fallen short.
One of the things that becomes clear looking at the work of both men, is that Carpenter and King spoke the same language, and had many of the same cultural reference points. Both men drew liberally from the influences of EC Comics. Both men, in fact have spoken in interviews about the significance of those horror comics, and both men have paid tribute to them: King with Creepshow (1983) and Carpenter most directly with John Carpenter’s Body Bags (1993). Both men were also huge admirers of Ray Bradbury, who might have, in some way,s provided the seedling for the idea that would blossom into Christine. Ray Bradbury was a pre-eminent purveyor of cold-war era technophobia. Themes of rapidly evolving technology (amplified by the arms race between the states and the former U.S.S.R.) are prevalent in his work, and King and Carpenter have integrated elements of this into their work also.
While critical response to Christine was mixed up its initial release, the film has aged pretty well in many ways. After all, we live in an age of cars that can drive themselves, and wireless home security monitoring systems that control everything. One of the things that has perhaps kept it relevant to modern audiences is the fact that technology is still creepy. It’s creepier now than it’s ever been.
With Halloween season upon us here again, let’s toast to two masters of menace! And here’s to hoping that King will manage to pull Carpenter out of semi-retirement and provide him with a decent script to work off of (something that Carpenter, sadly, has been lacking for a few decades now)
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Brandon Engel is a Chicago-based blogger with a keen interest in all things horror. Among his favorite Stephen King novels are: Firestarter, Cujo, The Shining, Carrie, Hearts in Atlantis, and Misery. Follow him: @BrandonEngel2
I'd love it if we could retire the fiction that "E.T." is to blame for the box-office failure of "The Thing." And for the box-office failure of "Blade Runner," for that matter. Those movies have nothing to do with one another.
ReplyDeleteOther movies released around the same time were hits; "Star Trek II" did well, as did "Poltergeist" "E.T." hurt neither of them, so why should it get the blame for hurting "The Thing"?
By the way, the likely reason why both "Blade Runner" and "The Thing" failed: they came out the same weekend and cannibalized each other. Plus, both movies were a bit ahead of their time, so audiences didn't know what to make of them.
So, please, pretty please, with a cherry on top: let's stop blaming "E.T." for these movies failing to become hits. It's a severely flawed argument that ought to have been retired 25 years ago.
As for "Christine"... I love that movie! I got to see it on the big screen last October, and I highly recommend seeing it that way if you ever get a chance.
It's a matter of conjecture either way, whether you blame E.T. or absolve E.T., and I'm not blaming as much as I am quipping. What we can perhaps agree on is that Spielberg produced a film that had mass appeal and was palatable to the general public. The Thing failed to enthrall film-goers who weren't already part of the built-in science-fiction fandom. If you listen to what Carpenter says himself in interviews, it sounds to me less like he blames E.T. as much as he aknowledges that it was more palatable to the general public in 1982. And what's more: Star Trek had marquee value and a massive built-in audience. Poltergeist had, not only the warmth and sentimentality that people would expect from a Spielberg production, but Spielberg's name attached to it. It wasn't competing with E.T. - it was cut from the same cloth and by the same tailor.
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