John Carpenter is a man of diminishing talent. In the late 1970s and early 1980s he made some truly great movies: Assault on Precinct 13 (LA gangs make life Hell for a guy just trying to find a smoke), Halloween (chap in a William Shatner mask kills teenagers who largely have it coming), Escape from New York (eye-patched bandit rescues Donald Pleasance from Manhattan hospitality), and The Thing (big blop of goo does what we do every night and tries to take over the world). But by the late 1980s, Carpenter’s abilities were fading. Memoirs of an Invisible Man was so bad it starred Chevy Chase, and Ghosts of Mars made the cardinal error of telling you the end at the beginning (zombies take over Mars, but the good guys shoot their way out). The world waited with bated breath for his 2010 feature The Ward, which promised to be a return to form. Alas the story of a girl being chased by demons in a mental hospital was about as frightening as an episode of Grey’s Anatomy.

What went wrong? It’s probably not a case of choosing bad scripts – Carpenter’s early efforts were just as silly as his later ones. Nor was there a shift in theme, because all of Carpenter’s movies are about a cool dude getting harassed by some bad asses (leading to tons of gore and violence).

What did alter from 1980 to 2000 was Carpenter’s once consistent and personalized style of production. He lost his small gang of loyal actors, along with their 80s haunted eyes and sexless bodies (for an example of which, see the scarily beautiful Meg Foster). For example, no one is going to claim that Kurt Russell is sexy or believable in anything. But in Escape From New York, he embodies the classic Carpenter antihero: someone who doesn’t want to do what they have to do, but does it anyway and entirely on their own terms. No one is good or evil in early Carpenter, just trying to survive. 

Carpenter’s amoral dynamics were completed by minimalist electronic music and the use of soft, dark light. These gave every scene the aura of dusk, the moment when bad stuff starts to happen. Dirty, grainy film combined with stylized acting and sound created an image that is, perversely, naturalistic. Because that’s what the West was like in the 1980s – a world trying to define itself between the pressures of 1950s conformity and postmodern liberation. Substance matched style. Hence, Halloween is set among the middle-classes in the middle of America (Illinois) in a neighborhood that has only every known peace and plenty. It is shattered by the faceless, mad terror of urban violence (killer Michael Myers) as he senselessly chops up the local teens. If Carpenter couldn’t replicate the complete vision of Halloween in the 21st century, then it’s because it’s a movie that could only be made and appreciated by an audience living in the late 20th. 

The same is not true of the film that might prove to be the most culturally significant one made by Carpenter (although it’s artistically inferior to much else). They Live (1988) is a dystopian romp which postulates that the world is controlled by aliens whose true identity is disguised by a powerful satellite signal. When our hero (yet another gritty guy just trying to do his thing) picks up a pair of magic sunglasses, he’s suddenly able to see the world as it really is. Adverts contain subliminal messages such as “Consume” and “Don’t Think.” Around one-in-ten people are exposed as alien monsters, all the more repulsive for the fact that they dress and behave much like humans. At one point a human is making love to her boyfriend when his true likeness is suddenly revealed in ugly Technocolor. The monster – unaware that he has been unmasked – innocently asks, “What’s the matter, baby?”

The movie has cult appeal for two reasons. One is its abominable script, which feels like it was written by a teenager trying to imitate Raymond Chandler. Hence: “Life's a bitch... and she's back in heat,” “The world needs a wakeup call, gentlemen. We're gonna phone it in,” and my personal favorite, “I ain't Daddy's little boy no more” (cue the pounding of a shotgun). Throw in the longest fight scene in history and you’ve got a good movie to get drunk by. My theory with the fight is that it started out scripted but then got real about five minutes in, and Carpenter kept the camera rolling. It turns nasty about the time that the white guy elbows the black guy in the groin, and the black guy cries out, “You dirty motherfucker!” Watched at two in the morning with a crate of Corona, it sounds like Shakespeare.

But the movie also touches upon a lot of late 1980s paranoia that’s still relevant today. The US economy started a post-Reagan dip towards the end of the decade that was most pronounced in manufacturing. Our meathead hero used to work in a steel mill but, like thousands of others, is driven into the cities in search of casual labor. As the Cold War ended, conspiracy theorists graduated from blaming everything on communists to blaming everything on the emergent New World Order. They Live was a little ahead of the curve – the movie makes no mention of international bankers, secret societies or the NWO. But the idea that both the government and the free market are controlled by an elite (whose orders are carried out by greedy quislings) feels very current. At one point the protagonist channels Ron Paul when he quotes, “The Golden Rule: He who has the gold, makes the rules.”

They Live doesn’t belong in the ghetto of conspiracy movies – as do Red Dawn or The Ninth Gate – partly because it’s so self-consciously funny that it defies being taken too seriously by the usual crowd of numerologists and alien abductees. But the movie also encompasses every partisan obsession, to the point that its politics are universally batty. On the one hand the subliminal messages tell everyone to consume (surely a Left-wing critique), and on the other hand the movie is concerned with both state power and the decline of the American middle-class (a Right-wing obsession). Everyone is ordered to conform, yet they are also told to put themselves first. The aliens simultaneously encourage monogamy and polyamory. The movie attacks the capitalist class in theme, but its style is redolent of the 1950s B-movies that warned of Reds under the bed. In short, The Live is open to a myriad of interpretations, which gives it a much longer shelf life than its production values really deserve.

Then again, maybe that speaks to the eternal desire to find answers to complex problems in diabolic plots. Sometimes life is so confusing and weird that the only way to order it is to imagine a conspiracy. The reason why They Live feels more contemporary than any other movie by John Carpenter is that it is the only one with a socio-political theme that extends beyond its years. It shifts the blame from humans to monsters; which is foolish, because the only real monsters in this world are human beings.

I’ve never understood the opposition of so many priests and pastors to Halloween. Growing up a Baptist, I was solemnly warned that it was tantamount to devil worship. Now that I’m a Catholic, I’m told that the festival has stolen the thunder of All Saints Day, which venerates those who have made it to Heaven. It’s all politics, of course: the Day of the Dead and Halloween are often proxies for pagan festivals that we did our damnedest to suppress. The Catholic Church is right to push its line for the sake of orthodoxy, but one senses a touch of jealousy when millions of Mexicans gather around their private altars to offer marigolds, tasty snacks, and sugar skulls to their dearly departed.

The mainline churches miss a trick when they denounce Halloween. In a culture which is so unashamedly materialist, it’s nice that we take a moment to contemplate the supernatural – even if it is by dressing up as Freddy Krueger and hitting on Janet from marketing. Christians should surely have no fear of this devil fancying. In a recent editorial for Fox News, the author of The Exorcist, William Peter Blatty, writes that he never grasped why people found his book so scary. He intended it to be, “a novel of faith in the popular dress of a thrilling and suspenseful detective story – in other words, a sermon that no one could possibly sleep through.” He was inspired by the possession of a boy that occurred while Blatty was at Georgetown University in 1949. He explains, “I remember thinking, ‘Someday, somebody’s got to write about this, because if an investigation were to prove that possession is real, what a help it would be to the struggling faith of possibly millions, for if there were demons, I reasoned, then why not angels? Why not God?’”

Blatty makes an excellent point. Acknowledging the existence of the Devil is a first (albeit tortuous) step towards acknowledging the existence of God, for one is proof positive of the other. For this reason, genuine Satanists (and a few probably exist) have bet on the wrong team and are nothing to be afraid of. To accept the Devil is to accept God is to accept the Biblical narrative of their conflict. And the Biblical narrative ends with the Devil’s defeat and God’s victory. QED, Goths, Wiccans, Satanists, and Ozzy Osbourne are all witnesses to the eventual triumph of Yahweh over everything. They are Bible bashers in every sense.

I grew up in an odd age in Britain in which there were still only four TV channels, but we suddenly had VHS – which meant you could theoretically watch everything that was on them. As a kid, that opened up Halloween for me. Year after year, there’d be a slew of movies shown around midnight that I could record and watch the next day, while skipping school. Even during my malevolent teens, I was struck by how moral most horror movies are. That might just be a product of form: getting the audience on side requires pitting identifiable good against tangible evil (Van Helsing vs. Dracula). But creakiness of the movies helped, too: for every shudder at a bitten neck, there was a giggle at a pair of plastic fangs. The fact that I could see the wires holding up the bats, or occasionally hear someone shouting “action”, proved that it was pure artifice. The Devil/Frankenstein/Mummy/Dracula was being set up for a fall, much as you could guarantee seeing Christopher Lee fall on his backside in the final reel (and then try to act like it was in the script). I suspect that our exposure to crappy late night movies explains a lot of the cynicism of my generation.

I’ve been impressed with Los Angeles’ preparations for Halloween. One house two doors down has covered the shrubbery in sugar cobwebs and planted tombstones in the lawn. Another building has a skeleton hanging from a tree that moans. There will be a street parade soon and roads are already being blocked off. In an unrelated incident, a drunken girl dressed as Wonder Woman sat on my apartment block lawn last night and shouted obscenities at the moon. Several residents shouted back and the foul language reached a fascinating crescendo around 11pm, when the cops finally arrived. The lady, who was struggling with that ancient conundrum of which breast to try to keep inside one’s costume when there just ain’t room enough for two, told the officers, “I’ve had a bit to drink.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” came a cry from the apartment next to mine.

The writer Charles Coulombe has a nice summary of the various things one can do in Los Angeles this weekend, and he notes that part of the fun is the naysayers. “From his desert stronghold, evangelist Jack Chick annually unleashes his horde of comic-book tracts upon unwary trick-or-treaters. Numerous other evangelical preachers vociferate against the proceedings’ evil nature, allowing various atheists to prattle on about how stupid the Christians are. Each side is thus able to enjoy Halloween in their own way. It is truly a festival for everyone.” In the sense that it gets us all talking about the supernatural in one form or another, it’s all probably good for the soul.