(Credit: Alamy)
Sat 31 January 2026 20:15, UK
It always feels a little unprofessional when a director comes out and publicly blasts another filmmaker’s work or an actor they’ve never worked with, not that John Carpenter cares.
Even though he retired from behind the camera two decades ago and spends most of his free time either dabbling in music or playing video games, the icon responsible for a seminal string of cult classics has been known to pop his head above the parapet and shit on Hollywood’s latest goings on.
The Substance, an Academy Award nominee for ‘Best Picture’, didn’t float his boat, which is putting it lightly. Neither did the multi-billion-dollar cinematic phenomenon that saw Greta Gerwig’s Barbie and Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer going head-to-head, with Carpenter equally ambivalent on both.
The Halloween, The Fog, The Thing, and Assault from Precinct 13 mastermind doesn’t usually have any issues with people remaking his back catalogue, largely because he gets paid out of the deal, apart from the time he blasted Rob Zombie’s reinvention of Michael Myers and called him a “lying piece of shit.”
One of the defining directors of the 1980s, Carpenter turned the entire horror genre upside down when Halloween burst onto the scene, became one of the most profitable films ever made at the time, and, in an instant, gave rise to the slasher boom that would dominate the rest of the decade and beyond.
There were so many blatant rip-offs that many of them fell through the cracks completely, but Friday the 13th didn’t. It’s easily the most famous of the post-Halloween slashers, with Jason Voorhees every bit as renowned as Michael Myers, with far too many sequels ultimately running both into the ground.
“One springs from an organic idea, and has a truly artist’s eye working,” Carpenter mused on the comparisons. “And Friday the 13th, I feel, affects me as very cynical. It’s very cynical movie-making. It just doesn’t rise above its cheapness. I think the reason that all these slasher movies came in the ’80s was a lot of folks said, ‘Look at that Halloween movie. It was made for peanuts, and look at the money it’s made!’”
He’s not wrong, since studio bosses have always been fond of jumping onto a bandwagon. While Halloween also followed the template of knocking out follow-ups and succumbing to the law of diminishing returns, Carpenter had nothing to do with most of them, so he was allowed to blast Friday the 13th for doing the same.
“So they just started making them, cranking them out,” he added. “Most of them were awful.” He’s right, but there’s barely a big-name franchise in history that hasn’t fallen off at some point. In the case of the slasher boom, as much as he may not want to admit it, it was technically his fault for igniting the craze in the first place.
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