They Live could also be seen as a companion piece to Escape From New York, which introduces perhaps the most cynical action hero in ’80s cinema, the ex-soldier and former convict forced to rescue a corrupt and weasly American President (Donald Pleasence) from New York, which is itself now a giant maximum security prison. The movie was initially written in the wake of the Watergate scandal in the mid-1970s, and it’s easy to see more than a trace of Nixon in Pleasence’s cold-hearted president (just look at his indifferent reaction when Snake asks him about all the people who died in the process of rescuing him).

It’s through characters like Laurie, Nada, Snake, and The Thing’s MacReady that Carpenter casts his wry eye over the world. They’re his ground-level entry point into his worlds of violence and chaos. At first glance, Carpenter’s outright comedy Big Trouble in Little China might not appear to fit this mold, But bear in mind that the star of that movie, Kurt Russell’s hard-drinking trucker Jack Burton, isn’t really the hero at all; in most instances, he’s the least capable character in the entire film. The running joke in Big Trouble in Little China, therefore, is that Burton thinks he’s the hero of the piece, but fails to realize that it’s actually his pal Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) who’s the really smart, capable one…

Re-appropriating Staples from Westerns

This entry’s self-explanatory. John Carpenter, long a devotee of Hollywood auteur Howard Hawks, has infused his love of Westerns into just about every film he’s ever made. Assault on Precinct 13 is often described as an urban Western. Escape From New York’s Snake Plissken is like an old-world gunslinger thrown into a grimy future dystopia. Big Trouble in Little China even began as a period Western before screenwriter W.D. Richter updated it to present day San Francisco. Ghosts of Mars, one of Carpenter’s least satisfying films, is a space western as well as a hark back to Assault on Precinct 13.

It’s a sad fact that the Western’s relative lack of popularity through the ’80s and ’90s meant that Carpenter never got to make a pure entry in that genre; it would have been interesting to have seen him direct, say, Tombstone, which starred his old partner in filmmaking crime Kurt Russell as Wyatt Earp. At any rate, the spirit of classic Westerns runs deep in Carpenter’s filmmaking, as this Crave article explores in wonderful detail. The ten-gallon hats and horses may be missing, but the lone gunslingers, besieged forts, and squinty machismo of the genre are still everywhere to be found.

Economical Storytelling

From his very first feature, Dark Star, Carpenter managed to wring every drop of possibility from small budgets and confined locations. From that debut to his latest output, Carpenter’s films have been largely defined by their narrative economy; whether they’re urban thrillers, slasher horrors or classic ghost stories, like The Fog, the plots in Carpenter movies are pared back to their bare essentials.