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Sun 5 January 2025 3:00, UK
John Carpenter helped pioneer the horror genre when he made Halloween in 1978. Although it wasn’t the first slasher movie, it set the formula for the subgenre and continues to terrify audiences nearly five decades later. He followed it up with the dystopian action movie Escape from New York and the science fiction horror film The Thing. Although he’s been semi-retired from directing feature films since 2010, Carpenter remains a pre-eminent authority on horror.
Carpenter began making movies around the time that Italian giallo filmmaker Dario Argento was near his peak. With his distinctively vivid visual style, cacophonous soundtracks, and extreme violence, Argento was ahead of his time on multiple fronts. Although his films were regularly banned in the UK for their graphic violence and subject matter, his work has become a touchstone for generations of directors and audiences.
Argento’s film Suspiria served as inspiration for Carpenter when he began making Halloween, particularly in its vivid colours and reverberating score from the prog-rock band Goblin. The directors became mutual admirers and friends as well, so when Carpenter made a film in 1994 that bore a striking resemblance to one of the giallo master’s most beloved movies, it seemed reasonable to assume that it was an homage, especially given that the film is one of Carpenter’s favourites.
Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness stars Sam Neill as an insurance investigator who begins to suspect that someone is using the plots of a missing horror novelist’s work as a blueprint for their crimes. It is an undeniably similar story to Argento’s 1982 film Tenebre, in which an American author of horror fiction begins investigating a spate of murders that appear to have been inspired by his books.
When asked if In the Mouth of Madness was his version of the Italian director’s film, however, Carpenter dismissed the idea.
“I love Tenebre,” he told Film Threat in 1995. “What a great movie. But not really.” He pointed out that Argento’s work is very “dream-oriented.” If he has a dream that inspires him, he’ll write a film around it. “He works like Buñuel,” Carpenter explained. “So, it’s so…strange. An unearthly strange. Madness is driven by a totally different engine, it’s a very traditional film of sorts, so I wouldn’t compare them.”
Although he might be underselling his own creativity when he describes any of his films as “traditional,” Carpenter’s comment about Argento’s method of developing stories highlights one of the reasons why he is such a singular auteur. Argento has compared his work to David Lynch, saying that he prefers to work with surrealism and poetry rather than realism.
In describing his writing process, Argento told Vice in 2014 that he ascribes to the technique of écriture automatique, where you simply let your brain wander and write down the results. “Sometimes it’s scary,” he said, “And you don’t understand it yourself until you bring it to the big screen.” In contrast, Carpenter has often talked about the importance of establishing a story and the structure of a screenplay before digging into the details.
The fact that both men work in the realm of slasher horror and yet create such different films is a testament to the breadth of this underappreciated genre. Far from being formulaic, it can be the height of cinema in the hands of filmmakers like Carpenter and Argento.
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