And while Mr. Carpenter likes to bring up the shellacking he received from critics after his remake of “The Thing” opened in 1982, the film is now regarded as one of the best horror remakes ever. There is also a revival of interest in his Reagan-era alien movie “They Live,” with rumors of a remake and a recent book about it by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, the winner of a MacArthur grant.

This seems to make Mr. Carpenter somewhat uncomfortable. After listening to a passage from Mr. Lethem’s book praising one famously long fight scene involving Keith David and the wrestler Roddy Piper, Mr. Carpenter scoffs. “Dude, he was a wrestler,” he says. “I cast a wrestler. We just wanted to put on a show, because this was a wrestler. I like what this genius writer says.”

Mr. Carpenter stopped making films in part because of a string of flops. Poor reviews and battles with studios wore him down. He says he started to realize that driving himself for more than three decades in the movie business had trade-offs. “You give up a part of yourself to get that career,” he says. “I have a son and a godson and a life, and that was all secondary. So I had to stop.”

He took it easy for a few years, but got the itch to return after working on a few episodes of the 2005-7 television series “Masters of Horror,” which began on Showtime. Each of these hourlong shows were shot in two weeks, at a pace like that of “Halloween” and other low-budget films he made early on. It reminded him of why he liked the job in the first place. So when an offer came to make a small thriller, he decided to try again.