Back to the Bone

"The Air Is Known, Assault on Precinct 13: Revenge of the Minorities ethnic. The Fog: Against America that represses its shameful History. New York 1997: Against America's Security. Halloween: Against America's Security bigoted suburbs. They Live: Against Reagan's America. The Thing: Against the paranoid America of the Cold War and AIDS years… All of this is true, irrefutable, and Carpenter himself encouraged these readings, sometimes overplaying the role of the insurgent in his own country when promoting his films, so much had he understood that this critical posture was valid for us pass. But by reducing his films to simple political fables without comparing them with their blind spot (is there not another Evil than societal ills?), we miss what constitutes, I believe, the beating heart of his films, and what gives them their profound originality within the Hollywood ecosystem of the 1970s and 1980s, and in particular cinema said "horror" to which he was ideologically against the grain. Because whatever one thinks, whatever Carpenter himself says, his belief in the existence of Evil in its pure state belongs to a religious, even puritanical, imagination, a priori incompatible with the image of an agnostic filmmaker that he was trying to create at the time of his return to grace, from the end of the 1990s. However, everything John Carpenter is in this ambivalence, in this conservatism criticism that must be accepted to be taken in volume, from all sides at the same time time: the puritan angle and the metaphysical angle, the angle reactionary and critical angle, ontological angle and political angle.” JBT Jean-Baptiste Thoret began his work as an author by devoting to the filmmaker his first monograph in 1998 (with Luc Lagier): “Myths and Masks " 27 years and fifteen books later, the director of "We Blew it", figures essential part of contemporary cinephilia, returns to one of the totems of its youth: John Carpenter, a founding passion and a subject that continues alive. How can we see again, in 2025, the films of a filmmaker we loved so much? Y do we discover something other than what we had already seen? And if the films themselves change as our outlook changes? In this essay, the author of "How Green Was My Valley" returns to the origin of his cinephilia and explores the filmography of a timeless creator of myths; inviting us to see and re-see differently a filmmaker whose legacy has not finished shining on the history of forms.