His 'Vampires' puts correctness to the stake. To John Carpenter, there are too many taboos. But not in this film.
By Martin Booe
With VAMPIRES, a Wild West, neo-gothic shoot-'em-up, John Carpenter plays with fire. And we're not just talking about vampire carcasses incinerated by James Woods as an irascible, foul-mouthed wrangler of the undead. Carpenter sets a torch to just about every prevailing tenet of political correctness.
"Everybody's more conservative these days," Carpenter says gloomily, sitting Indian-style on a hotel sofa. "This is a time of unbelievable puritanism and conservatism, and there's a restriction on subject matter. You really see it in the choice of villains. I was watching THE SEARCHERS with my godson, and I told him you couldn't do this movie now because of the way it portrays Native Americans. You can't have black villains, and you can't [put minorities] in subservient roles, especially women. I think everybody in the culture is trying to deal with issues the best they can, and political correctness is part of it."
It's not that Carpenter has a deep need to cast minorities in unflattering roles, but the fact that it's proscribed, he thinks, is an ominous symptom.
"There seem to be a lot of restrictions on cultural creativity right now, so you wind around the best you can." Or in the case of JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES, as the movie that opens tomorrow is formally known, "you bulldoze over them."
In the film world, Woods and his vampire hunters are a rowdy bunch who like to wind down after work with some heavy boozing and lusty frolicking with the sort of gals you wouldn't take home to mother. There's female frontal nudity, jokey erotic content, and lots of gore and violence.
But what's most likely to stir up a brouhaha is the film's dialogue. By his own account, Woods was an open hydrant of spontaneous ribaldry, poking fun in pungent language at gays, women, the Catholic Church, you name it. While pointing out that such ripostes were natural to his not-altogether-likable character, Woods says his ad-libbing was mostly to get a rise out of Carpenter - and he was amazed when the director left it in.
"We went for it," says Carpenter, 50. "We pushed political incorrectness as far as you can go."
This wouldn't be the first time Carpenter's work raised hackles. In 1982, four years after his surprise hit HALLOWEEN, which is widely credited with reviving the moribund horror genre, Carpenter directed a remake of the 1951 classic, THE THING. He was ostracized by Hollywood because of its violence and repellent special effects.
"THE THING got criticized for its overt violence and it's ugliness," Carpenter says. "I lost a job because of it, and I had to go looking for work. It was the first time I was confronted with this... I didn't know what hit me."
He made the genial Jeff Bridges hit STARMAN in 1984 as "an apology for making THE THING," he says. "I think THE THING was a great movie. I was proud of it. But not only was my career in jeopardy, I'd been misunderstood, then ignored... Not that everybody else hasn't gone through this. I'm not special; it was just my time, and it was very public."
Carpenter muffles a hacking cough and reaches for another Marlboro, revealing the pallid, pencil thin arms of someone who apparently gets most of his nutrients from caffeine and nicotine. In conversation, he's gruff but amiable. There's something of the unreconstructed hippie about him, with his droopy moustache, his dry shock of gray hair, and his unvarnished manner. He and his wife, producer Sandy King, have raised two boys, one of them the son of Kinks guitarist Dave Davies, a close friend.
The director, whose motto is "horror is rock-and-roll," believes that pulling off a straight-ahead horror flick is harder now. In the 80's, he says, the conventions of horror were appropriated by the mainstream and used so relentlessly that their power dissipated. There's also the problem of audience cynicism: "They know the hero's going to win... All they care about is the ride."
The self-referential SCREAM series, he says, is an exercise in "postmodern cynicism. It's giving a nod to people who think they are superior to the film. It's 'We've all seen these horror films, haven't we? But we're making one now, aren't we?' I come from a different era. We took what we were seeing seriously."
There were rumors on the set of VAMPIRES that the film would be Carpenter's last, a scenario that horror film buffs found scarier than any monster movie.
"I went up to him after a take and said, 'So, whaddya think?'" says Woods. "He said, 'You think I [care]? This is my last movie. I just want to stay home and read the paper.'"
Upon inquiring when it was that Carpenter first uttered that sentiment, Woods was told it was around the time of HALLOWEEN, the director's 1978 breakthrough.
But Carpenter may be a bit battle weary.
"Sure, I think about quitting," he says glumly. "But there's one simple rule: The love keeps bringing me back to it. I still love it. There's nothing else I could do very well."
He lets out a sigh masquerading as a wheeze. "I guess I could write, but it's too hard. This year is the first year I've taken off." (VAMPIRES was completed last fall. "I've got two projects I'm supposed to be doing, just three-page outlines, but I just keep watching TV."
Carpenter was born in Carthage, N.Y., but grew up - in a replica of Abe Lincoln's log-cabin birthplace, no less - in Bowling Green, Ky., where his father was a music professor. (Carpenter composes the scores for all of his films.)
"We were Northerners, and Dad was an intellectual, so we were completely out of step with the culture," he says. "There were racists, fundamentalists, and all these country boys always beating the [heck] out of me because I was differrent." This, he says, probably inspired the moods of seige and isolation that pervade his films. His works are also frequently marked by ambiguous endings, which he says reflects "my opinion about life. Hey, guess what: The bad sleep well!"
He admits to having been frustrated in earlier days. "I got into this business to make Westerns," he growls. "I didn't get into it to make horror movies. I got typecast. But once I got over that, I realized it's like John Wayne. I wrote one script for him back in the '70s. He always wanted to play heavies. He was tired of playing the good guy, but he said, 'Oh, they like me that way.' I'm like a good whore; I go where I'm pushed."
But Carpenter quickly brightens. "Look, the chances of anyone becoming a movie director are nearly zero. And secondly, becoming a movie director with his name over the title? The odds against that happening are overwhelming. The odds of anyone knowing who you are as a director and knowing your work is reserved for very few people. What are the chances of a skinny kid growing up in Kentucky, falling in love with cinema, and becoming a film director? I've been the luckiest man in the world, and I'm just happy that it happened to me."
