Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [26]
Carpenter’s roommate Brian Narelle recalls watching the announcement of Carpenter winning the Oscar for best short film at his apartment, where several classmates lived. The student producer delivered the acceptance speech standing next to the head of the film school, Bernie Kantor. “Right now it really doesn’t matter that I got a B for this picture. But no hard feelings, Dr. Kantor,” he joked. At the commercial break, Narelle walked to the kitchen where, to his surprise, he found Carpenter grabbing a Coke from the refrigerator. What was more startling than the fact that he was home was his cool reaction: “I shook his hand,” Narelle said. “He said ‘Thank you.’ Very calm, cool, and I went back to the bedroom. That’s what he’s like.”
Carpenter was born in Carthage, New York, and moved to Kentucky at age six. He was raised by a whimsical mother who loved movies and a cerebral father who taught him to challenge authority. “You’ve got to start questioning me,” he told his son. “You shouldn’t take everything I say as gospel.” In his discussions about philosophy and music, Carpenter’s father communicated a trust in reason and logic. Everything was fair game. Carpenter loved genre movies since seeing the 1953 adaptation of a Ray Bradbury story, “It Came from Outer Space,” in 3-D. He was five.
Three years later, he borrowed his dad’s 8mm camera and made his first film, Revenge of the Colossal Beasts, the story of giant aliens who land on earth and send mankind into a panic. By the time he was fourteen, he had made several short films with attention-getting titles like Terror from Space, Gorgo vs. Godzilla, and Sorcerer from Outer Space. Carpenter moved to Bowling Green, Kentucky, when his father got a job as a music professor. As a transplant from the East Coast, he felt out of place and sunk himself into his movie obsession, making sure to see the best westerns and monster movies that would show up in theaters. He became increasingly drawn to the manly visions of John Huston, Howard Hawks, and John Ford, who imagined isolated rebels standing stoically against the evil of the world. The rugged all-American image of John Wayne also appealed to him. He wanted to make movies like that. After a year of Western Kentucky University, he transferred to USC.
Young people entering film school had watched the riots on a hot night in Chicago when police clashed with protesters outside of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and they wanted to make movies that could fight back. Fantasy movies were not popular, and horror was hardly discussed at all. “It was viewed as something that nice girls don’t do,” Carpenter recalls, explaining in part why a macabre silent black-and-white film first captured his attention. Bloodbath was Dan O’Bannon’s first movie.
It began with a close-up of a young man’s eyes darting back and forth. Then a series of shots of a bearded melancholy man smoking a cigarette, slumped over a bed, surrounded by beer cans and trash. He mumbles nonsensically, strung out, coughing, tired of the same old routine, like a character out of Beckett. He grouses about his filthy apartment before drinking his mug of coffee, only to have his cigarette dangling from his lips tumble into it. His glance suggests a “What the hell” exasperation that brought laughs from the students in the screening. This was not a dainty man. “My face looks like an armpit,” he said. The voice-over, not the performance, was Dan O’Bannon’s. “My mouth tastes like the inside of a locker room.”
The audience, perhaps nervous at the strange, offhanded style of the film, continued tittering at the Underground Man–style stream-of-consciousness narration. It seemed like a setup to a dark joke.