[1] At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the French Directors' Guild gave him the Golden Coach Award and lauded him as "a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions".

[2][3] Carpenter's early films included critical and commercial successes such as Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Starman (1984).

[12] He graduated from College High School, then enrolled at Western Kentucky University for two years as an English major and History minor.

[13] With a desire to study filmmaking, which no university in Kentucky offered at the time, he moved to California upon transferring to the USC School of Cinematic Arts in 1968.

The two main actors were Austin Stoker, who had appeared previously in science fiction, disaster, and blaxploitation films, and Darwin Joston, who had worked primarily for television and had once been Carpenter's next-door neighbor.

Eyes of Laura Mars, a 1978 thriller featuring Faye Dunaway and Tommy Lee Jones and directed by Irvin Kershner, was adapted (in collaboration with David Zelag Goodman) from a spec script titled Eyes, written by Carpenter, and would become Carpenter's first major studio film of his career.

I decided to make a film I would love to have seen as a kid, full of cheap tricks like a haunted house at a fair where you walk down the corridor and things jump out at you".

as an allegory on the virtue of sexual purity and the danger of casual sex, although Carpenter has explained that this was not his intent: "It has been suggested that I was making some kind of moral statement.

Featuring several actors that Carpenter had collaborated with (Kurt Russell, Donald Pleasence, Adrienne Barbeau, Tom Atkins, Charles Cyphers, and Frank Doubleday) or would collaborate with again (Harry Dean Stanton), as well as several notable actors (Lee Van Cleef and Ernest Borgnine), it became both commercially successful (grossing more than $25 million) and critically acclaimed (with an 85% on Rotten Tomatoes).

[31] His next film, The Thing (1982), is notable for its high production values, including innovative special effects by Rob Bottin, special visual effects by matte artist Albert Whitlock, a score by Ennio Morricone and a cast including Russell and respected character actors such as Wilford Brimley, Richard Dysart, Charles Hallahan, Keith David, and Richard Masur.

Being a graphic, sinister horror film,[32] In a 1999 interview, Carpenter said audiences rejected The Thing for its nihilistic, depressing viewpoint at a time when the United States was in the midst of a recession.

[34][35][36] The impact on Carpenter was immediate – he lost the job of directing the 1984 science fiction horror film Firestarter because of The Thing's poor performance.

[38] He continued making films afterward but lost confidence, and did not openly talk about The Thing's failure until a 1985 interview with Starlog, where he said, "I was called 'a pornographer of violence' ...

[43][44][45] John Kenneth Muir called it "Carpenter's most accomplished and underrated directorial effort",[46] and critic Matt Zoller Seitz said it "is one of the greatest and most elegantly constructed B-movies ever made".

[47] Trace Thurman described it as one of the best films ever,[48] and in 2008, Empire magazine selected it as one of The 500 Greatest Movies of All Time,[49] at number 289, calling it "a peerless masterpiece of relentless suspense, retina-wrecking visual excess and outright, nihilistic terror".

The story concerns a high-school nerd named Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) who buys a junked 1958 Plymouth Fury which turns out to have supernatural powers.

Carpenter's 1990s career is characterized by a number of notable failures including Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992) and Village of the Damned (1995).

Carpenter worked as director during 2005 for an episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror television series as one of the thirteen filmmakers involved in the first season.

With some exceptions,[b] all of his films were shot in Panavision anamorphic format with a 2.39:1 aspect ratio, generally favoring wider focal lengths.

[79] This interest was to play a major role in his later career: he composed the music to most of his films, and the soundtrack to many of those became "cult" items for record collectors.

His soundtracks went on to influence electronic artists who followed,[81][82] but Carpenter himself admitted he had no particular interest in synthesizers other than that they provided a means to "sound big with just a keyboard".

[79] The renewed interest in John Carpenter's music thanks to the Death Waltz reissues and Lost Themes albums prompted him to, for the first time ever, tour as a musician.

[85][86] The retro-1980s synthwave band Gunship are featured in the film; Carpenter narrated the opening to their track entitled "Tech Noir".

[87] Carpenter is featured on the track "Destructive Field" on his godson Daniel Davies' album Signals, released February 28, 2020.

[90][91] In August 2023, a fifth collaboration with Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies was announced for Sacred Bones Records, titled Anthology II: Movie Themes 1976–1988, and was released on October 6, 2023.

She was earlier the script supervisor for Starman, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, and They Live, as well as an associate producer of the latter.

Examples of such are: the collector's editions of Halloween, Escape from New York, Christine, The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, Big Trouble In Little China, and The Fog.

Moreover, during 2006, the United States Library of Congress deemed Halloween to be "culturally significant" and selected it for preservation in the National Film Registry.

[109] During 2010, writer and actor Mark Gatiss interviewed Carpenter about his career and films for his BBC documentary series A History of Horror.

Filmmakers that have been influenced by Carpenter include: James Cameron,[111] Quentin Tarantino,[112][113] Guillermo del Toro,[114] Robert Rodriguez,[115][116] James Wan,[117] Edgar Wright,[118][119][120] Danny Boyle,[121] Nicolas Winding Refn,[122][123][124][125] Adam Wingard,[126][127][128] Neil Marshall,[129][130] Michael Dougherty,[131][132] Ben Wheatley,[133] Jeff Nichols,[134][135] Bong Joon-ho,[136][137][138][139] James Gunn,[140] Mike Flanagan,[141] David Robert Mitchell,[142][143] The Duffer Brothers,[144][145] Jeremy Saulnier,[126][146][147] Trey Edward Shults,[148][149] Drew Goddard,[150][151] David F. Sandberg,[152] James DeMonaco,[126] Adam Green,[153] Ted Geoghegan,[154][155] Keith Gordon,[156][157] Brian Patrick Butler,[158][159] Jack Thomas Smith,[160] and Marvin Kren.