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.

Warning: this will make absolutely no sense if you haven’t seen either Alien or The Thing. And if you haven’t, you should. As soon as possible.

What a lucky boy I am: this week I got to see both Alien and The Thing (the prequel). It was an emotional experience, bringing up a lot of repressed memories from my childhood. Both movies are “pretty cewl” (©South Park) on a dramatic level, but they also play to themes of physical decay that mean a lot to me. Every time I see the alien pop out of John Hurt’s chest I think, “Brother, I’ve been there.”

It wasn’t until I re-watched Alien on Friday night, with chamomile tea and a pizza, that I realized quite how much it’s about sex. The sets are pure fetish. The Nostromo looks like Roger Vadim designed a womb: soft tan furnishings, gently throbbing lights, and lots and lots of hexagonals. In contrast, the spaceship that our heroes find crashed on a windswept planet is a Freudian nightmare. They enter it through an open orifice and descend through a small gooey hole into a misty pit full of eggs. John Hurt then stumbles upon a monster that latches onto his face and lays its fetus inside his stomach. One might accuse the alien of pushing his luck, but then he did pay for dinner…

When the little brute burrows its way out of Hurt’s chest, it becomes a metaphor for the nightmare of physical change. When he first reviewed the movie, Roger Ebert hypothesized that its cast is middle aged in order to emphasize that they are a group of ordinary people doing a job, not action heroes. I disagree. I suspect the director (consciously or unconsciously) cast older actors because people over 30 are more vulnerable to physical change than adolescents are. As a young adult, the things that happen to us are unnerving but healthy: they are the body evolving towards its zenith of intellectual and physical capability. After 30-or so, what was once growth becomes decay. The hair falls off one’s head and sprouts elsewhere. Muscle becomes fat; dull aches become “warning signs”. The infinite sexual possibilities of youth become desperate and less probable: one must breed ASAP, before everything dies up or falls off. Romance is dead and man is a walking advert for entropy.

When the body starts doing things that you don’t want it to, it becomes a separate personality from oneself. That theme is picked up in The Thing, which has just hit cinemas. It’s a prequel to John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982). Predictably, it’s an inferior movie. But by dint of the excellent premise, it’s okay. In this movie, the alien is a virus that replicates or consumes its victim, hides in the body, and then attacks others. We never entirely understand the nature of the thing, but it is hinted that its victims don’t know they’ve been taken over. The monster only bursts forth (with several arms, a dog’s head, and a scorpion tail) when threatened. The metaphor for the loss of control of one’s body is striking.

A chronic illness is like undergoing a personal alien invasion. The tumor that was recently discovered in my father’s throat could be the seedling of a malevolent entity. It consumes half the calories that he puts into his body, growing stronger as he grows weaker. This, combined with a nervous disorder, has left him bowlegged and tiny. Every time I see him, I recognize him less; the changes in his character suggest possession. This process is tragic, but entirely natural. Cancer is the body’s way of placing time limits on our mind’s habitation. If we all lived to 150, we would be a walking mass of tumors not unlike the creature that slithers into shot in the last reel of The Thing.

For others, the horrors of Alien and The Thing provoke a subconscious response. For me they are a trip down memory lane. When I was thirteen, I contracted an appalling case of eczema that required hospital treatment and lasted for five years. Isolated with my own carcass, I found the most bizarre and terrifying things taking place. I discovered that the skin can bleed without breaking, that sores can blister and hatch, that it is possible to scratch to the bone. Doctor after doctor unwrapped my bandages and recoiled in horror, without a clue what to do. My legs were encased in cotton wool and I began every morning with a bath of antibiotics and salt. O, how I spent so much time rubbing salt into my body – desperately trying to dry up and dust off the ooze. I was a “thing” all right: a larva jammed in metamorphosis. Oddly, the disease never touched my face. I suspect it understood that if it did, I might elicit sympathy from other human beings and someone might actually try to help. Hidden beneath the neck line, it was free to feed uninterrupted.

I am sure that it is significant that this condition arose during puberty. It convinced me that sex and physical decay are intrinsically linked. It left me with a profound revulsion for the human form – perhaps because the hours spent mapping it in hospital made me aware of its every imperfection, its every potential for disaster. Today, I am a physical Dualist. I earnestly believe that the body and soul are not only separate, but at war with one another. The soul’s quest for transcendence is constantly disrupted by the body’s sensual needs. The only way to achieve salvation is to starve the body and free the mind. Of course, living as we do in a material reality, that is impossible. So, unable to completely liberate myself, I live a dual existence between mental exercise and physical degradation. Once in a while I give my body free reign and permit it excess. When it is done “wandering the world seeking the ruin of souls”, I punish it with purgation. The best cure for a hangover is prayer and green tea.

I am a survivor of eczema. Around 18, it suddenly went away. Incredibly, I have no scars and haven’t suffered with it since. Always, there is the lingering fear that it will return; every small itch could be the beginning of a long campaign. But the experience has taught me that the body is intrinsically treacherous. Treacherous, but still a part of me: something to be negotiated with, or placated.

Watching The Alien, I was struck by the conviction that me and the “toothy one”, if given a chance, could get on rather well. I’m sure it wouldn’t want to eat me (I’m all skin and bone) and I’d make a terrible father for its little facehugger (I’d always be out with my mates getting drunk). So, instead it might tolerate me as the chronicler of its exploits. By writing about the beast, maybe I could pacify it and even own it – just as I have done on this blog post by writing about my eczema. I can imagine myself crossed-legged on its icky nest floor; one hand tapping away at the keyboard, the other tickling the gelatinous space between its numerous chins. Sci-fi yin and yang.