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He originally wanted to make Westerns. As a 21 year old film school prodigy he won an Academy Award for Best Live Action Short Subject in 1970 with The Resurrection of Bronco Billy, the story of a lonely city boy who dreams of becoming a cowboy. When the genre fell out of favor following the glut of television Westerns in the 1950s and 60s, he turned his formidable gifts for writing, shooting, editing and composing elsewhere. John Carpenter worked in science fiction, the supernatural, action-adventure, but became, above all, according to the New York Times, "One of the greatest horror directors of all time."1
Though he doesn't entirely agree and there are crucial differences, comparisons with Carpenter and the work of Edgar Allan Poe and Alfred Hitchcock are not without merit. Much like these masters, Carpenter, at his best, invokes fear, anxiety, even panic through a creative principle which is their opposite: detached precision and fastidious control over his medium. Poe, for example, described one of his works as "proceeding step by step, to its completion, with the preciseness and rigid consequences of a mathematical problem."2 Hitchcock remarked of one of his rigorously predesigned films, which he also likened to a musical score, that "the construction was what caused audiences to become emotional."3 Carpenter contends that "film is a medium that works emotionally" but must be cut "frame by frame" and that each frame is "a mathematical unit."
In Halloween (1979), the story of an escaped psychopath on a vengeful rampage in a small downstate Illinois town, Carpenter orchestrates tension (with little graphic violence) to such an unbearable degree that it becomes a veritable text in counter- Pavlovian audio-visual strategies.4 "An absolutely merciless thriller," wrote the late renown critic Roger Ebert of Halloween. "We aren't seeing the movie, we're having it happen to us."5 Confinement to an inner city police station during the Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) by unseen assailants becomes a grueling study in claustrophobia.6 The jammed, open portal of the interstellar space craftin Dark Star (1974) is a menacing black passage to the immeasurable beyond.
Enclosure and limitlessness become paradoxically synonymous in many of Car- penter's works. "Right, they're the same thing," he says. "That's how I view them."7 An initially...