‘Everything I know about evil I learned in that small town’: John Carpenter on terrifying the world with Halloween, The Thing and The Fog

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At 78, the king of horror and sci-fi movies is as much of a rebel as ever. He talks about creativity, compromise (he’s not a fan) and how he became addicted to moviemaking In 2024, John Carpenter had a dream that sounds like one of his movies: it involved a portal to the underworld beneath a disused church, monstrous demons and people being turned inside out. “I woke up and thought: wow! What an elaborate story,” he says. “I rarely have cinematic dreams, but this was one of them.” He liked it so much that he has turned it into a graphic novel, Cathedral, with an accompanying soundtrack. “It seemed to fit this heavy metal groove that we were starting on, and it worked out pretty well.” Most people would consider this a nightmare rather than a dream, I suggest. “No. Nightmares, for me, are personal – something that happened to me,” he replies. “Usually my nightmares are, I’m directing a movie and no one will listen to me. No one will follow my directions. Seriously, that’s what I wake up...
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Hugh Hudson: smash-hit pop classic Chariots of Fire director was a hero of British film

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Hudson brought an ad-man’s eye to the brilliant 1981 drama about athletics and bigotry, as well as directing the hilarious Cinzano commercials

As the 1980s dawned, British ad director Hugh Hudson took on his first feature film and made it a legendary hit: an inspirational story which supplied a sugar-rush of patriotism and a swoon of nostalgia which hit the spot both sides of the Atlantic. It somehow brought off the trick of being about the underdog and the victim of bigotry and religious discrimination – and yet also being a resounding endorsement of the status quo which could, on grounds of decency and meritocracy, always accommodate the outsider. This was the era of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, and the ethos of success for the hardworking and the deserving.

The film of course was Chariots of Fire, the true story of the 1924 Olympic runners Harold Abrahams (played by Ben Cross), a Jew who ran to defy prejudice, and Eric Liddell (Ian Charleson), a devout Christian who found a creationist glory in his speed. It was the destiny of so many involved to be forever associated chiefly, or solely, with this smash-hit pop classic: certainly Cross and Charleson never again found roles to match Abrahams and Liddell. And maybe Hudson himself never again had a triumph like it: though he was no one-hit wonder, later directing the Oscar-winning Tarzan drama Greystoke, and later Revolution, an epic about the American revolution starring Al Pacino which was derided but then grew in acclaim, giving his Hudson his own misunderstood masterpiece moment.

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