It had been a tough shoot. His star Courtney Love was replaced one week before principal photography began, and after writing the script and the music as well as directing, Mr. Carpenter was bone tired. It was right in the middle of a scene when it hit him: “I don’t love her anymore.”
Her is The Movies. Mr. Carpenter, 63, sometimes talks like a character from a western, the genre that might be closest to his heart, even though he’s one of the greatest horror directors of all time, with credits that include “Halloween” (1978) and “The Thing” (1982). That he refers to the movies as a woman is less of a surprise than what he decided to do once he fell out of love. He quit. “I was burnt out,” he says in between puffs of a cigarette, speaking over Skype from his home in Los Angeles. “I had been ridden hard.”
With his new movie, “The Ward,” opening July 8, Mr. Carpenter is finally resuming the affair again. Discussing this long-awaited return, he sounds like a grizzled outlaw who gave up caring only to be drawn back into the game one more time. He’s an irreverent and committed contrarian, willing to criticize Alfred Hitchcock and mounting a defense of product placement: “Everyone puts it down and says, ‘You’re just doing it for the money.’ Maybe. At the same time, it’s the way life looks in America.”
But his provocations are delivered with a sly self-deprecating smile that lets you know he doesn’t take himself too seriously. “I’m just a broken-down old horror film director,” he says, a glint in his eyes.
While Wes Craven often gets credit for introducing a meta sensibility to the horror genre, Mr. Carpenter always made movies that were, in part, about watching movies. He often had movies on televisions in scenes, and he liked inside jokes.
In “The Fog” Jamie Lee Curtis, who was stalked in “Halloween,” exclaims under duress, “Why do things always seem to happen to me?” Mr. Carpenter has been equally self-aware about his own image; one of his refrains over the decades is that he is working in a disreputable genre, which is not as true as it once was.
Mr. Carpenter is arguably more respected than ever. One of the first shots of J. J. Abrams’s new monster movie, “Super 8,” features a poster for “Halloween.” Guillermo Del Toro (“Pan’s Labyrinth”), in an e-mail, called him a “master American filmmaker” whose minimalist movies apply “the same no-nonsense, eminently masculine style that Howard Hawks brought to his films: sort of a two-fisted misanthropic approach to storytelling.”
And while Mr. Carpenter likes to bring up the shellacking he received from critics after his remake of “The Thing” opened in 1982, the film is now regarded as one of the best horror remakes ever. There is also a revival of interest in his Reagan-era alien movie “They Live,” with rumors of a remake and a recent book about it by the novelist Jonathan Lethem, the winner of a MacArthur grant.
This seems to make Mr. Carpenter somewhat uncomfortable. After listening to a passage from Mr. Lethem’s book praising one famously long fight scene involving Keith David and the wrestler Roddy Piper, Mr. Carpenter scoffs. “Dude, he was a wrestler,” he says. “I cast a wrestler. We just wanted to put on a show, because this was a wrestler. I like what this genius writer says.”
Mr. Carpenter stopped making films in part because of a string of flops. Poor reviews and battles with studios wore him down. He says he started to realize that driving himself for more than three decades in the movie business had trade-offs. “You give up a part of yourself to get that career,” he says. “I have a son and a godson and a life, and that was all secondary. So I had to stop.”
He took it easy for a few years, but got the itch to return after working on a few episodes of the 2005-7 television series “Masters of Horror,” which began on Showtime. Each of these hourlong shows were shot in two weeks, at a pace like that of “Halloween” and other low-budget films he made early on. It reminded him of why he liked the job in the first place. So when an offer came to make a small thriller, he decided to try again.
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The Ward,” a period piece set in the 1960s about a woman (Amber Heard) in a mental institution who believes someone is killing patients, is his comeback vehicle. The old-fashioned gothic suspense is a little more gruesome than a typical Victorian ghost story but still draws its scares more from questions about what is real and what is not than from buckets of blood.
In a departure from form Mr. Carpenter did not write the script or the music this time — he calls the movie “an assignment” — but “
The Ward” does have some of his distinctive hallmarks. Early on, there’s a beautiful gliding low tracking shot inside the hallways of the sanitarium. The movie ends with a suspense sequence inside that fertile horror setting the bathroom. What stands out most is a stately pace that is out of fashion in current horror movies.
