Every John Carpenter Movie, Ranked Worst To Best

When Halloween season rolls around, movie lovers everywhere start their personally curated horror movie marathons in earnest. Whether they're watching various scary movies for the first time or returning to old favorites, John Carpenter is almost always going to come up as part of the Halloween viewing conversation. After all, this is the man who made Halloween, a film that warps the spooky fun holiday into a babysitter's worst nightmare. He also directed numerous other classics — including The Thing, Christine, The Fog, and Prince of Darkness — in the horror genre. John Carpenter's name is so synonymous with horror films that, when he joined Twitter, he took the handle "@TheHorrorMaster."

John Carpenter and horror films go together like Michael Myers and big kitchen knife, but if you really want to dive deep into his filmography, you'll find a surprisingly eclectic body of work. Yes, the horror masterpieces are all there, but so are sci-fi comedies, space voyage parodies, alien romances, and even a musical biopic. In a career spanning five decades and nearly two dozen feature films, Carpenter's told a lot of stories, and we're here to talk about them all. This is every John Carpenter movie, ranked worst to best.

Ghosts of Mars, one of Carpenter's last directorial efforts to date, is the story of a group of police officers on Mars in a future where humanity has terraformed the Red Planet and set up a society there. The cops are just supposed to be picking up a notorious prisoner for transport, but when they arrive at their destination, they find that ancient Martian spirits have emerged to possess every human in sight, and they have no choice but to fight their way out. 

It's basically Assault on Precinct 13 with space ghosts, and while that's fun in some form no matter how you slice it, Ghosts of Mars is never quite as fun as it seems to think it is. Carpenter was aiming for deliberate sci-if action camp with this film, and he definitely hits his mark more often than not. The trouble is that the campy tropes often repeat themselves, the film's visual effects can't rise to the occasion, and even the intentionally over-the-top stuff doesn't always register that way. The result is an uneven but fun little sci-fi thriller that, while far from Carpenter's best, is still worth seeing for the frequent appearances of Martian ghosts who seem to be followed by heavy metal guitars everywhere they go.

Between Halloween and The Fog, Carpenter took a couple of gigs as a TV movie director, and of those two, Elvis is the most ambitious. Released less than two years after the King of Rock 'n' Roll's death, the film is an epic look (clocking in at two and a half hours) at Elvis Presley's life from his childhood up until the beginning of his Las Vegas era. Starring in the title role is Kurt Russell, marking the beginning of his long collaboration with Carpenter. 

Though it perhaps feels out of place amid his most famous films, Carpenter is no less gifted when it comes to telling the story of Elvis Presley, and it certainly helped matters that he had someone as charismatic as Russell leading the way. Elvis works as what it is, which is a very straightforward made-for-TV biopic with a few kinks (including some issues with the sound mixing and syncing) that are never quite ironed out. These days it might only be sought out by Elvis superfans and Carpenter completionists, but the director did his job and he did it well.

There aren't a lot of sequels in John Carpenter's filmography, perhaps because of his bad experience with trying to deliver follow-ups to Halloween back in the late 1970s and early '80s, but 15 years after Escape from New York hit theaters, Carpenter decided to return to that post-apocalyptic world and its eyepatch-clad hero, Snake Plissken (Kurt Russell). 

Escape from L.A. is set 16 years after the original, and follows Snake as he is once again offered a shot at freedom if he's willing to help the United States government by completing a near-impossible mission with a ticking clock. This time around he's sent into Los Angeles, which has become an island thanks to an earthquake years earlier and which has been transformed into another prison wasteland thanks to a new president who has ushered in a theocracy. 

The film works best when Carpenter is playing in the new sandbox of ambitious dystopian ideas he's built for himself, but the film never quite coalesces in the way that its predecessor did. There are a lot of interesting things happening in this movie, and Russell is charismatic as ever, but it suffers by virtue of being a sequel to one of the great cult sci-fi films.

Carpenter's first feature film is this strange sci-fi spoof from 1974, which began as a student film and later evolved into a theatrically-released effort that remains impressive in its ingenuity and comedic sensibility. Co-written by Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon (who also stars, and would go on to write a little movie called Alien a few years later), Dark Star follows the crew of the titular spaceship on a long-term mission into deep space where everything seems to be going wrong. 

Dark Star is a parody of ponderous science fiction fare like 2001: A Space Odyssey. As a result, plot points include everything from a commander in cryogenic stasis as the result of an accident to an artificially intelligent bomb that keeps trying to drop itself out of the ship and detonate due to an error. It drags in places and certainly plays as amateurish and others, but you can see the talent at work here. It's not just "good for a student film" — it's genuinely fun, inventive, and subversive.

John Carpenter is at his best when he's working with a killer conceptual hook, and Vampires is another example of that. It's far from his best high-concept genre flick, but when this mean little movie — about vampire hunters and a master blood drinker intent on ending the world — is really cooking, it's among Carpenter's most fun outings. 

The film follows master vampire hunter Jack Crow (James Woods) and his crew of Vatican-sanctioned slayers as they try to root out a master vampire (Thomas Ian Griffith) who's angling to perform an ancient ritual that will blot out the sun forever, turning Earth into a vampire's paradise. The film kicks off as Crow and his team are raiding a vampire nest, establishing the rules of the game, and then we get to watch as Carpenter methodically dismantles everything we think we know about how this game is played. It's part horror film and part Western showdown, and while it doesn't pack the same level of tension and emotional investment as his best work, Vampires is still a blast to watch.

Carpenter's second feature film is also the first of several of his movies to ultimately get the remake treatment, as well as the film that earned him the kind of attention that later led to Halloween. It's also a cult masterclass in how to do low-budget suspense right. 

Assault on Precinct 13 is set almost entirely in the titular police precinct, where a pair of cops and a pair of administrative workers are preparing to close up the facility entirely so the precinct can move to a new location. Before they can do that, though, a traumatized man runs in looking for help after killing a member of a local street gang. The gang, already angered by a recent massacre of their people by the LAPD, declare all-out war, and the people inside the precinct prepare to try and survive the night as bloodthirsty criminals close in on them. 

Stripped down, tightly plotted and full of tense moments, Assault on Precinct 13 is Carpenter's first showcase of his gift for suspense and inventively staged action. All the great stuff we'd later see in films like The Thing and The Fog exists in an early form here, and it still holds up more than 40 years later.

Carpenter followed up Starman in 1986 with Big Trouble in Little China, another film he didn't write but hoped to use as a platform to prove that he was more than just the horror guy. This time, Carpenter hoped to translate his love of kung fu movies into his own work, and the result is a film that's both very different from the surrounding movies in his filmography, and also indicative of the same kind of swagger he displayed with They Live and Escape from New York. 

Of course, if you want to make a film with swagger, having Kurt Russell along for the ride never hurts. In his fourth collaboration with Carpenter, Russell shines as Jack Burton, a trucker who's roped into an unexpected supernatural conflict among two very old Chinese factions. Russell's in-over-his-head action hero style is what anchors the film, but Carpenter's also clearly having a blast through the various scenes of magical martial arts mayhem. There's a reason Big Trouble in Little China continues to find new audiences. It might contain more pure popcorn fun than any other Carpenter flick.

Though he's mostly thought of as a horror master, Carpenter's made almost as many classic films in the realm of science fiction as he has in that of pure scares, often overlapping the two to great effect. They Live is more sci-fi than horror, but Carpenter also turned all of his creature feature powers on for this story of an everyman wanderer (Roddy Piper) who comes upon a pair of sunglasses that reveal to him the terrible truth about the world: that humanity is being subliminally controlled by a horrific aliens in human disguises. 

Piper, best known at the time as a wrestler, is fantastic in the leading role of Nada, and watching him go toe-to-toe with Keith David's Frank throughout the film is great fun. The alien "ghouls" at the center of the conspiracy in the film are at various points terrifying and hilarious, sometimes walking the line between those extremes to great effect. What really sets They Live apart as a cult classic, though, is that it's Carpenter's most finely-tuned piece of social commentary. The anti-consumerist allegories he's working with are not subtle, but he hits every note with savage perfection. It's a wickedly gleeful gem of a movie.

Christine is, to date, the only time that John Carpenter's storytelling sensibilities have met up with Stephen King's, and the result is a horror classic. Christine is, as fans will know, the name of a car that a young man named Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) buys against the advice of everyone in his life. As Arnie begins to fix up the car, he becomes obsessed with it, and Christine starts to take on a mind of her own. 

So, Christine is the haunted car movie, which means the movie doesn't work if you can't create a world in which the car is truly scary. Carpenter pulls it off through late night scenes of the driverless Christine ripping through the streets to run down her victims, and through some unforgettable visual effects which further drive home the supernatural prowess of this beautiful and deadly machine. Christine is a slasher movie on wheels, and in a world where so many high concepts that work on paper fail on the big screen, this time that's actually as good as it sounds.

Halloween is the stuff of indie filmmaking legend. Made with just $300,000 on a very short schedule and starring a then relatively untested Jamie Lee Curtis, the film ultimately become one of the most profitable movies ever made, and launched a franchise that's still kicking more than 40 years later. It also reshaped the horror genre for decades to come. 

Though there are certain elements of its DIY production style that can still be nitpicked today (note the palm trees in the background of what is ostensibly Illinois in October), Halloween is that rare horror film that actually lives up to all the hype, even if you're watching it for the first time decades after it was first released. Carpenter and co-writer/producer Debra Hill do so much with so little, crafting a spooky little world in Haddonfield Illinois and then filling it with characters we truly like, only to wrap the knots of tension around their necks and tighten them until they snap. From the opening Steadicam shot to those final, ominous moments, Halloween remains a landmark film that's often imitated but very, very rarely matched.