John Carpenter gives B-movie sensibilities a '90s twist in VAMPIRES
By Felicia Feaster
It comes as no great surprise that the device director John Carpenter uses to imitate the sound of death-by-stabbing in his latest film, the bloodsucker-slasher JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES, is a big, giant ham. Notes Carpenter of his high-tech working methods, you "put a bunch of mics real close to it, start with a butcher's knife and just start jamming things into it to get that 'kabunk' sound."
This methodology could describe Carpenter's formula for all his films: Take ham, add stabs. Carpenter has crafted a long, profitable career out of hammy performances and hammy films -- outrageous, violence-addled homages to the B-movies he loved as a boy growing up in Bowling Green, KY. Carpenter has acknowledged his debt to directors past and present, in a remake of the '50s monster movie THE THING and in BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA, an homage to the supernatural, gravity-defying violence of Hong Kong action films.
But Carpenter is also a director who's become famous for his own contributions to others' hackdom with his innovative horror classic HALLOWEEN. The 1978 proto-slasher, which wrote the much-plagiarized book for the slasher cycle that followed, Carpenter's HALLOWEEN has most recently had the dubious honor of inspiring a next generation of bratty, ironic thrill-killers like Wes Craven's SCREAM and its mall-rat progeny.
Speaking from within the glamour-hub of silicon and bottled water, L.A.'s Four Seasons Hotel, Carpenter has the insouciant cool of someone whose career is founded on the uncompromising stance of doing just what he wants... which includes smoking, a crime that could get you disemboweled in some Tinseltown circles. Like his heroes, longtime muse Kurt Russell and most recently James Woods, who stars in VAMPIRES, Carpenter has a similar scruffy, Everyguy demeanor, suggesting a hardscrabble, ropier version of Clint Eastwood, though he writes off any suggestion of his resemblance to his uber-butch characters with a shrugged, "not at all, I'm a skinny kid from Kentucky."
And there's a certain truth in Carpenter's insistence on still seeing himself as that long-gone, horror-mad kid. VAMPIRES continues the director's obsession with the popular, lowbrow movie thrills of his youth with its unrepentantly cheesy, over-the-top tale of a salty vampire hunter, Jack Crow (Woods), whose life's work is rendering the creatures of the night a heap of sizzling charcoal.
Carpenter's impetus in VAMPIRES was to drive his notorious propensity for campy violence even further: "I pushed everything. Pushed the political incorrectness. Pushed the misogyny of Woods. Pushed the violence, pushed the outrageousness."
In keeping with this excessiveness, the film's villain is the DIRTY HARRY-cum-Bauhaus bloodsucker Valek (Thomas Ian Griffith), who slices his victims with razor-sharp nails rather than employing the more traditional, restrained modus operandi of fangs. Carpenter's film reaffirms what has become Carpenter's post-HALLOWEEN style, a schlocky blend of horror and macho action, the kind of film in which a bloody vampire attack in the middle of an orgiastic house party sends women running for cover clutching their bare breasts, jiggling and shrieking with bimbo hysteria. There's a throwaway, idiotic, check-your-brain-at-the-door appeal to the film, wrapped in a tacky leopard hide of drive-in movies and fly-by-night exploitation, its bumbling humor seemingly channeled directly from the B-movie-fired synapses of the director himself.
For a man who indulges his sophmoric side so freely, Carpenter is surprisingly hip to the cineaste-tumble and an admitted fan of Howard Hawks' tough guy cinema (he taught a class on the director at the British Film Institute), vintage westerns and the lurid excessiveness of William Castle horror. The director attributes his obsession with the vampire legend to Castle's definitive blood and broad opuses.
"In 1958 I saw HORROR OF DRACULA with Christopher Lee as Dracula. Well, that blew my mind. First of all, it was in color; there was actually blood." And even more enticing, "beautiful women with low cut dresses."
"Ohhhh," the director sighs at his remembered 10-year-old's ecstasy, "When Dracula came in the bedroom, these girls would open up their nightgowns. And I thought what's going on here? So that's when I first started getting really interested in the vampire legend."
Carpenter seems genuinely enraptured with - and indebted to - movies past, correcting those who see HALLOWEEN as a definitive progenitor of modern horror with, "But all of that was born with a movie called PSYCHO. That's the granddaddy. That's the one that invented this genre. Hitchcock took an 'old dark house' movie, which had been a '30s cliche, and he added a psychopath to it, and really made it terrifying."
Though Carpenter has become something of a cult-hero successor to PSYCHO's slasher legacy, he admits that horror is not the genre that initially drew him into filmmaking. "I got into the business to make Westerns," he affirms. "I wrote a Western for John Wayne right before he died."
But, then again, Carpenter admits, "A paycheck is really appealing." So he won't say no to being pigeon-holed in what can ultimately be a very malleable genre. "I get hired a lot to make these films. I got typecast as a horror director after HALLOWEEN." But, he notes, "within the boundaries of the genre that I work in, I get to do various things. I've done romantic comedy, I've done a kung-fu action picture, I've done a monster movie. I get to play around a little bit."
Though his entree into horror may have been a fluke, Carpenter has carved a place for himself as a director unafraid to admit, or indulge, his love of the movies that programmed the main street theaters in the small towns of America. As tribute to his humble, small-town origin, Carpenter's description of his rise to prominence is a modest alternative to self-promoting Tinseltown spin-doctoring.
"I've just had a great life, a hell of a life. From a kid who grew up in Bowling Green, Ky., going down to the movie theaters and watching movies. To get to play out my dream: It can't be better. There was no chance to get into movies when I was a kid. I knew nobody, I had no background. All I had was a love of it. But I pulled myself up by my bootstraps, came out to California, went to film school, staggered into the movie business. I was very lucky. people in my class at USC, the really talented people, just really brilliant, better than I was, never got a shot. It's all luck. It's being in the right place at the right time."
