Now he has a movie theater and a major Dallas thoroughfare that share his name, kind of.
The Alamo Drafthouse movie theater in Las Colinas is on John Carpenter Freeway. It's named for the John William Carpenter who brought industries and agricultural advances in the early 20th century and helped the state of Texas establish its first national park, Big Bend. However, that didn't stop the DFW movie theater chain owner Bill DiGaetano from making his new theater an unofficial shrine to the horror movie director John Carpenter. The theater opened in 2018 next to the Toyota Music Factory with a huge "Big Trouble in Las Colinas" mural in its lobby and posters of Carpenter's most famous films lining the hallways of the theater.
"We knew we wanted to be here," DiGaetano said in 2018. "Being in Las Colinas off John Carpenter Freeway is so central to the metroplex. I live in Tarrant County, and I have so many friends who live in Dallas County, and this is where you can meet in the middle."
Now, the Alamo Drafthouse theater has made its John Carpenter Freeway location a shrine to the horror movie director John Carpenter. The theater held a commemoration of the new John Carpenter Cinema with the man himself (not the other John William Carpenter, since he died in 1959), complete with an appropriate orange ribbon-cutting in honor of his Halloween franchise — which he cut with a razor-sharp kitchen knife provided by Michael Myers, the William-Shatner-masked slasher who started terrorizing the babysitters of Haddonfield, Illinois, in 1978.
The dedication of the movie theater happened the day before Carpenter's appearance as the annual Texas Frightmare Weekend horror convention, which called the occasion and name change "great."
Carpenter says he knew he wanted to be a director when he was a little kid thanks to one movie: Forbidden Planet, the 1956 sci-fi space drama directed by Fred M. Wilcox about a crew of 23rd-century astronauts who land on an isolated planet that's harboring a big and dangerous secret.
He started his film career at the University of Southern California's School of Cinema, where he made his first film, a sci-fi comedy short called Dark Star, which he later expanded into a feature-length film. He followed it with the crime drama Assault on Precinct 13 as an homage to Western film legend Howard Hawks, who made the original Scarface in 1932 and is best remembered for Rio Bravo in 1959.
Carpenter struck gold with a butcher knife in 1978 with the release of the first Halloween film, a groundbreaking slasher horror starring Jamie Lee Curtis in which a masked escaped mental patient named Michael Myers goes on a killing spree in a small suburban town on Halloween night. The first Halloween became the biggest independent film hit of its time and made millions on a $300,000 budget. The film spawned numerous sequels and two franchise reboots, the most recent of which ended last year with Halloween Kills.
Carpenter's work has graced the big screen for more than four decades with classics such as his reimagining of The Thing From Another World, which he simply shortened to The Thing. It starred Kurt Russell, whose character in an isolated Antarctic outpost fought a mysterious alien creature that could conform its shape into identical living creatures in gory and frightening ways. The Thing had a hard start when it was released in 1982, but it's since become a seminal classic, from its story to its use of practical effects to create the slimy, entrail-laden monster that can create palpable paranoia in the characters of the doomed Outpost 31.
"The Thing, when it came out, it was hated," Carpenter said in a fan Q&A at the movie theater on Thursday. "The fans hated it. I can't tell you what that felt like. It was incredible, but over the years, it's somehow hung in there."
Director John Carpenter cuts the orange ribbon commemorating the renaming of the Alamo Drafthouse theater's Las Colinas location as the John Carpenter Cinema.
Laura Wimbles
Carpenter also writes and records the musical scores for his films — including the iconic piano ballad that serves as the warning signal for Michael Myers' mayhem in all the Halloween films. He also wrote the score for the most recent Halloween trilogy that brought back Curtis as Myers' arch-nemesis Laurie Strode, as well as the 2022 remake of Stephen King's Firestarter. He's released and toured with all-new, original electronic music in an album series called Lost Themes, from Sacred Bones Records, that has received wide acclaim and play in the U.S. and the U.K. He's even branched out into video games by co-writing the script for Warner Bros. Interactive's first-person horror shooter F.E.A.R. 3. Carpenter said during his fan Q&A that he's writing a score for another video game, the title of which has yet to be announced.
The renaming came with a special plaque on the theater's building recognizing Carpenter's unique style and artistic achievements. It recalls creepy creatures "from babysitter slashers to pirate ghosts to shapeshifting monsters to subliminal aliens" and cites his "incalculable influence on cinema."
"John is probably one of the last legendary horror filmmakers," says Loyd Cryer, the founder of Texas Frightmare Weekend. "We've lost [filmmakers George] Romero, Tobe Hooper and others. We wanted to make sure we got John back out here because his catalog is amazing. If you look at his film library, it's just hit after hit of horror films."
Cryer says it's been over a decade since Carpenter made an appearance at the horror convention because of his busy schedule and his love for basketball, which eats up pretty much all of his time during March Madness. Fans have been clamoring for Carpenter's return ever since, and the ticket sales show he's a huge draw for horror lovers.
"Plus there's so many movies like Christine and Halloween, so you can bring in guests like that," Cryer says. "Any Carpenter movie is considered a classic for a lot of horror film fans."
