This past week became the unofficial John Carpenter Appreciation Week at Casa de Lowery. It started with a late-night viewing of They Live, that awesome ode to blue collar revolt against crushing Reaganomics circa 1988. It wasn’t on purpose—I was, in fact, about to go to bed, as it was 11:30 at night and I had work the next morning—but They Live just isn’t the kind of movie you can turn away. (Also, I was chatting on AIM with Sims at the time. So it ended up being sort of a test of machismo to stay up and watch it.)

Next, I hit my favorite website for legally acquiring movies (mininova.org) and hooked myself up with a favorite from my adolescence: In the Mouth of Madness, starring Sam Neill. A couple nights in a row of reacquainting myself with that flawed masterpiece led me to also legally acquire John Carpenter’s Vampires, starring James Woods as a vampire hunter (!), and then Escape from LA, the sequel to Escape from New York, one of Carpenter’s most (in)famous movies (and a Sims recc).

That slice of the man’s career takes us from 1988 to 1998, generally considered to be a much weaker output than his previous critically-lauded work (Halloween, and, er, The Thing, maybe?) and his cult classics (Assault on Precinct 13, Escape from New York, Big Trouble in Little China, and yeah, They Live.) I guess I can see their point; generally speaking, Carpenter’s films are a little on the shabby side, and the seams, weirdnesses, and outright groaners really began to manifest in full force throughout the 90’s. This is even more evident when you line them up against Halloween, the most critically accepted of his works (and probably the only one considered “essential”); compared to the rest of Carpenter’s work—and, indeed, most of American horror output—Halloween is austere, even minimalist. No one’s staking vampires or donning sunglasses to see past the disguises of yuppies.

They’re right, and I don’t care. It was They Live that set me off on this week-long mini-festival; not Halloween, with its oft-analyzed use of silence and the “menace of threat,” but the one where advertisements are revealed to say things like “OBEY” and “REPRODUCE.” The one, need I remind you, that starred a professional wrestler.

Why that one? I’m not sure, but I have some theories. There was Doomsday, seen a few weeks ago and written about so lovingly; the sheer ballsy fun of it likely planted a seed for a revisit to Carpenter’s work. This time of year also marks a bit of a recovery time from the holiday releases. Every November, December, and now January, the studios bombard us with what they consider their best, most award-worthy work, and in their minds “award-worthy” usually translates to “three hours where everyone wants to cry but nobody does.” And hey, sometimes the studios are right. But by the time I hit my birthday in early February, everything I’ve seen for the past 8 to 12 weeks kind of makes me want to die. It’s at those times that I’m most in need of a laugh or two.

These films are shabby, make no mistake. Their intentions are only half-serious, and Vampires has no reason to exist that I can see, other than the (admittedly vast) pleasure in seeing James Woods completely stake the hell out of some vampires and swear like a drunken sailor with Tourette‘s. But there is something at work, even in the clumsiest of the movies, bits and pieces of fascination that have stuck with Carpenter into his latter work for Showtime’s Masters of Horror series.

Consider In the Mouth of Madness. An insurance investigator checks out a claim by a major book publisher; their top writer, a horror scribe named Sutter Cane, has dropped off the face of the earth. The investigator isn’t really into this “horror crap,” but he likes a good challenge, so he’s off to find where this Cane fellow has gone. Cane’s work tends to have an effect on people, though; imagine the paranoia and mental devolution of the protagonist in your average H.P. Lovecraft story and you have the right idea. The concept of Cane and his works borrows quite a lot from Lovecraft, actually, him and a touch of Stephen King. The investigator’s world gets seriously wonky when he stumbles across the town Cane’s written so many stories about: Hobb’s End, a place that’s not meant to be real. It seems Cane has now become so popular that anything he wants to be real becomes real. Or maybe the investigator is just losing his mind.

Or They Live, surely one of the great pulpy movie titles of all time. A blue-collar working man just can’t seem to catch a break. His luck worsens considerably when he stumbles across sunglasses that allow him to see the world as it actually is: trickle-down yuppies are aliens who use Earth as their playground, and consumerist advertising is geared to dumb people down and direct their lives toward reproduction and consumption. There are even new-money Renfields selling out their own kind just to get a leg up with the aliens. What’s a working man to do but chew bubble gum and kick ass?

Or Escape from LA, which features such magical moments as Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell, as if I had to tell you) surfing down Rodeo Drive with Peter Fonda, or descending on a Disneyland proxy on a hang glider next to Pam Grier, assault rifles blazing… all set against the backdrop of a nightmare-future United States run by the kind of president Mike Huckabee would be if he had less guile and a voter’s mandate. The closing minutes give us Carpenter’s most clear judgment on all that humanity has achieved in the past 400 years, but I wouldn’t dare spoil it for anyone who’s not seen it.

And Vampires, as previously stated, features James Woods killing vampires.

Seen back to back like that, and with several years between now and my last viewing of any of these movies, I was able to pinpoint themes and tropes in these works that’ve stuck with me and influenced what I consider to be good or worthy fiction. There’s the hold that art has over audience and creator alike and the postmodern notion that something doesn’t have to be factual to be real or true (In the Mouth of Madness). An instinctive siding with the poor over the rich, and the liberating righteous fury that results (They Live). And the punk rock anti-action hero, a guy who kicks every ass that gets within reach, has seen what the world has to offer him, and thinks you can keep it, thanks (Escape from LA).

The movies hold up. They hold up well, which came as no small relief to the tender ego of my adolescent self. I had a lot of fun, a lot of smiles, a lot of laughs I knew were coming and some that surprised me. The movies are fun, exciting, invigorating, and still able to induce the occasional drop of the jaw. They’re ballsy movies, if only because they so clearly reflect the mentality of their filmmaker; and, unlike most idiosyncratic films, they’re a long way away from wanky. With the one exception, Carpenter generally doesn’t take up screen time unless he has a reason to.

Then the question: Why isn’t this guy making movies anymore? Well, he is, more or less. Cigarette Burns revisits some of In the Mouth of Madness’s territory. The other MoH work I’ve not yet seen. But consider that Carpenter made 8 movies in the 80’s, 6 in the 90’s (if you include the two Body Bags eps), and 3 so far in the 00’s. (IMDB lists two more in the works, but they’re far from a sure thing.) What happened? Age, for one thing; the man is now 60.

Then the next question: Who’s taking his place? Who out there is making genre fiction, setting the trends to be imitated and the dialogue to be re-quoted for years to come?

I couldn’t think of anyone.

Quentin Tarantino? Robert Rodriguez? Those guys are more like pop culture blenders than real creators, content to replicate and remix rather than make something new. Eli Roth? More of the same, with half the wit. Rob Zombie? Now that’s one with promise. If you know of anyone else, a filmmaker with a fiercely defined identity and the chutzpah to make any kind of movie he wants to, I’d dearly love to hear it.