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ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: What is it about that vampire myth that makes it so uniquely appealing?
JOHN CARPENTER: Because we know people in real life who are sort of mental or emotional vampires. We sense that there's a truth to it, somebody using someone else, using their blood to refresh themselves. That kind of feels familiar to us as a people. It's an expansion on the truth. Monsters in movies are us, always us, one way or the other. They're us with hats on. The zombies in George Romero's movies are us. They're hungry. Monsters are us, the dangerous parts of us. The part that wants to destroy. The part of us with the reptile brain. The part of us that's vicious and cruel. We express these in our stories as these monsters out there.
And I suppose you could flip it and say that those movies are a depiction of us being paranoid of the thing or the person out in the dark trying to get us.
That's right. There ya go. And then you look in some of the new torture films and you see these foreigners torturing Americans. Well, what do you think about that? Let's flip that. Americans torture foreigners. Ah, let's invert it. It's the times, dude.
What do you think of those torture movies? Do you think it's a new genre?
I dunno. I mean, I'm a big fan of the Saw movies. I think they're hilarious.
You think they're funny?
Yeah, they're hilarious. If you don't think that's funny, then you have no sense of humor. They're ridiculous. They're absurd. I mean, it's so over the top, and it's great. Hilariously funny. It's always fun. You always go expecting to see some people trying to survive, and most of them don't. It's a lot of fun. But you see, I'm a guy who thinks The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, the original movie, is comedy.
Hmm. Tell me where you see the humor in it.
It's all over it. This bitching guy in a wheelchair. Oh God...
One thing I learned from the documentary was how Mexican vampire movies, or even Mexican versions of American vampire movies, kind of pushed the sexuality, having the women wear lower-cut shirts and such, and how that sort of brought some of the sex into the American movies.
Have you ever seen a Mexican horror movie?
No.
Oh God, they are fabulous. They do insane things. For instance, there'll be a professional wrestling match with masked wrestlers, and one wrestler will pull off the mask and there's a werewolf underneath. It's unbelievably crazy s--- with blood and naked women — aw, it's the greatest. It's crazy.
I'm a fan of Quentin Tarrantino and Robert Rodriguez's Dusk 'Til Dawn, but I had no idea that's where it came from. It connected the dots for me, with those two guys being fans of the old B-movie horror, and then with the Mexican vampire tradition, here they setting their vampire movie in Mexico with the same old-school B-movie gore vibe.
Yeah, except they didn't shoot that movie in Mexico, man. They shot it right up the road here in California.
Then there's the '80s rock star vampire movies, like Lost Boys, with the eyeliner and the big hair. They were kind of campy, too. You think they opened the door to the horror parody stuff like Scream?
I don't know about that. I think all the Scream films and comedies all come from one source: Airplane. It's all recycling, my friend.
Speaking of recycling, have you seen the Rob Zombie Halloween movie yet?
I have not yet, no.
Well, all this talk about mythology, Zombie took one of your films, a classic horror movie, and used a lot of the mythology and back story from that for his movie. It's kind of like your story has become mythology in and of itself.
Well, God bless him. I can't really comment on it, and if I do see it, I won't comment on it, because that's his film. Rob's a friend, and I wouldn't diss him.
