Horror master John Carpenter is to receive the 2019 Golden Coach Award (Carrosse d’Or) at the Directors’ Fortnight sidebar of the Cannes Film Festival.

Carpenter, who helmed such classics as “Halloween,” “The Fog,” “Christine” and “Escape From New York” will receive the accolade May 15, on the opening night of the Directors’ Fortnight at Cannes. The French Directors’ Guild, which chooses the recipient of the Golden Coach, called Carpenter “a creative genius of raw, fantastic and spectacular emotions.”

In its letter to Carpenter, the directors’ guild said that each of his films “enhances the irresistible delight of staging. In each of them, the work on space, on what is off-screen, on the visible and on the invisible, is constantly renewed and regenerated in order to redefine fear – a fear that is always prone to trigger emotions in characters and actors who have now become iconic,” including Jamie Lee Curtis, Adrienne Barbeau and Kurt Russell.

The letter also described “Starman,” with Jeff Bridges, as “one of the most moving melodramas of the 1980s.”

Carpenter, 71, also has many composer credits to his name. The directors’ guild said that Carpenter’s “great soundtracks keep inspiring the French electronic music scene.”

Past recipients of the Golden Coach include Martin Scorsese (2018), Werner Herzog (2017), Jia Zhangke (2015), Jane Campion (2013) and Agnes Varda (2010).