I’m probably, if one were to measure these things scientifically, one of the world’s biggest John Carpenter fans. He made one of the longest strings of hit genre movies of any director out there, from Halloween to The Fog to Escape from New York to The Thing to They Live. He was unmatched for a good decade or more. Lately, however, his film output has been next to nothing, his last movie, the underwhelming The Ward came out in 2011. So has the master hung up his camera in favor of making dark industrial music? Not hardly!
It seems he’s trying his hand at television, and has several projects in the works. According to an interview with Killer POV Podcast, his wife, Sandy King Carpenter, who also produced many of his films, says her husband is hard at work with no fewer than four TV projects waiting to go to network. “As far as Iâm concerned, weâll do all of them. I mean, theyâre great, and theyâre different from anything thatâs out there, and they again push the boundaries of whatâs horror,” she said in the interview.
King Carpenter went on to say that, should all of them go to series, her husband would direct the pilots and they’d executive produce. She only gave a vague description of them in terms of genre, saying, “Thereâs sci-fi, thereâs horror, thereâs one that I guess would be [a] sci fi-horror futuristic kind of thing.” Coming from a guy who reinvented both sci-fi and horror, it seems unlikely they’d be anything else!
And, true to John Carpenter’s whole film catalog, Sandy says, “I think theyâll fulfill what people expect out of him by also being unpredictable.” If that isn’t a perfect summation of the man’s work, I don’t know what is.
Are you excited for some Johnny C on TV for you and me? Let us know your hopes, fears, and expectations about such projects in the comments below!
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HT: Blastr
Image: Kyle Cassidy
Kyle Anderson is a film and TV critic for Nerdist.com, as well as a Carpenterphile of the highest order. Share his love of movies on Twitter!