Horror icon John Carpenter’s favorite films are surprisingly not scary

It hardly needs repeating, but director John Carpenter is known for producing numerous horror classics, including Halloween, The Fog, Christine, The Thing, Prince of Darkness, In the Mouth of Madness and more “Vampires.” Although Carpenter doesn’t have a notable, recognizable style or motif in his filmography (aside from recurring actors), he seems to have a subtle, natural mastery of the cinematic craft that immediately impresses all of his films, even the bad ones worth seeing.

Carpenter loves horror, of course, but strangely enough, he’s not a horror guy at heart. When it comes to filmmaking, he has the attitude of an old-fashioned blue-collar worker who just instinctively figures out how to shoot a scene, regardless of genre. Carpenter has given several interviews in which he talks about monster movies and science fiction films that inspired him (he loved Forbidden Planet as a boy as well as Godzilla films), but beyond that, Carpenter talks about the films of John Ford and Howard Hawks, two American filmmakers best known for their high-profile westerns. Carpenter even considers some of his own genre films to be westerns, notably his “Assault on Precinct 13,” a remake of the 1959 western “Rio Bravo.” The man loves some Howard Hawks.

Every ten years the British Film Institute runs the Sight and Sound survey, asking hundreds of well-known critics and filmmakers about their ten favorite films. Carpenter was invited to participate in 2022 and of his ten favorite films, four were directed by Howard Hawks. Two of his top 10 were high-profile westerns starring John Wayne (one directed by John Ford and the other by…Howard Hawks), and exactly zero of them were horror films. Carpenter may be friends with the horror community, but he’s a cinephile extraordinaire who loves Hollywood classics and even a few notable surrealist satires from Europe. Carpenter may have been influenced by monster movies, but if he were to be treated well, he’d rather turn on TCM or the Criterion Channel.