Shock Value - Jason Zinoman [27]
Most students saw the turn to violence as a ghoulish shock, a sudden shift from light to dark, but the movie was more twisted than that. The grumbling character cut his wrists by accident, a mistake shaving, then mumbled something about how his veins will just probably close up. Instead he keeps bleeding and bleeding and bleeding until he sits in a bathtub and we see the red liquid swirl down the drain, an echo of the shower scene in Psycho, before shifting into an ominous flashback of a towering shadow figure standing under a clear landscape. In the moments before dying, he almost seems to enjoy the warm feeling of blood dripping down his legs. “Mmmm, sexy,” he says before dying.
“Most people were like ‘How disgusting,’” Winkless recalls. “But for Dan, he meant it as an entertainment and he was amused and befuddled by the reaction.”
Carpenter loved it. He had discussions at school about whether you really need character motivation and personal history at all. He preferred the shorthand of archetypes. “When John Wayne walked on-screen, you didn’t need to know who his parents were or what his motivation was,” he said. “You knew all you needed to know.” This movie achieved its impact through images and a few stray quips. That was enough. In this short film, he saw an artist with a dark point of view who understood the appeal of being scared in the dark. Describing the experience in a magazine interview years later, Carpenter said it was shattering: “I’m telling you, the audience walked out of there shaken, limp.”
Carpenter approached O’Bannon after the screening and told him how much he liked the movie. O’Bannon was flattered. Short, bearded, and as insecure as Carpenter was tall, shaggy-haired, and confident, O’Bannon explained the idea for his movie began with the suspicion that blood splattering on white tile could be a beautiful thing. For O’Bannon, a former art student, the horror began with an image, or an interest in exploring the possibilities of the image.
Once they started talking, Carpenter and O’Bannon discovered that they had much in common. They both loved Howard Hawks’s movie about a bloodthirsty creature discovered in Antarctica, The Thing from Another World, and grew up reading the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft. They each loved Alfred Bester’s futuristic novel The Stars My Destination. Alienated and ambitious fantasy fans, they had read monster magazines and as children shared a common fascination with the wonder of outer space. Carpenter proposed making a movie together.
His model was a low-budget science-fiction movie directed by the star of a previous class: George Lucas. He proved that you didn’t need elaborate special effects and studio money to create a convincing vision of the future. Lucas’s THX 1138, a stylish tale in the style of 2001, employed sleek white backgrounds, an almost abstract visual palette, and a resourceful design that employed household objects to create control panels and vehicles from the future. It won the national Student Film Festival in 1968, and Warner Brothers and Francis Ford Coppola’s company, American Zoetrope, released it theatrically in 1971.
Carpenter had seen Lucas at parties, standing in the corner shyly. He admired how he managed to get the attention of Hollywood for a student work. “John had a nose for power,” said Nick Castle, who cowrote Broncho Billy with him. “He knew he had to have a film coming right out of film school.”
Carpenter had a similar instinct to the one that Robert Evans had with Rosemary’s Baby: take a popular genre and remake it with a counterculture edge. Set in the twenty-second century, Dark Star follows a young space crew flying around the galaxy looking for unstable planets to destroy. Time passes slowly,