page_title: John Carpenter
section_title: 2000s: Semi-retirement
hierarchical_section_title: John Carpenter / Career / 2000s: Semi-retirement
caption_attribution_description: John Carpenter in 2001
context_page_description: John Howard Carpenter is an American filmmaker, screenwriter, and composer. Although Carpenter has worked with various film genres, he is associated most commonly with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s.
  Most films of Carpenter's career were initially commercial and critical failures, with the notable exceptions of Halloween, The Fog, Escape from New York, and Starman. However, many of Carpenter's films from the 1970s and the 1980s have come to be considered as cult classics, and he has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker. The cult classics that Carpenter has directed include Dark Star, Assault on Precinct 13, The Thing, Christine, Big Trouble in Little China, Prince of Darkness, They Live, and In the Mouth of Madness. He returned to the Halloween franchise as both composer and executive producer for the horror sequel Halloween.
  Carpenter composed or co-composed most of his films' music. He won a Saturn Award for Best Music for the film Vampires. Carpenter has released three studio albums, titled Lost Themes, Lost Themes II, and Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998.
context_section_description: In 2001, the film Ghosts of Mars was released. During 2005, there were remakes of Assault on Precinct 13 and The Fog, the latter being produced by Carpenter himself, though in an interview he defined his involvement as, "I come in and say hello to everybody. Go home."
  During 2007, Rob Zombie produced and directed Halloween, a re-imagining of Carpenter's 1978 film that resulted in a sequel two years later.
  Carpenter worked as director during 2005 for an episode of Showtime's Masters of Horror television series as one of the thirteen filmmakers involved in the first season. His episode, "Cigarette Burns", received generally positive reviews, and positive reactions from Carpenter fans, many of whom regard it as on par with his earlier horror classics. He has since contributed another original episode for the show's second season entitled "Pro-Life", about a young girl who is raped and impregnated by a demon and wants to have an abortion, but whose efforts are halted by her religious fanatic, gun-toting father and her three brothers.
caption: Carpenter in September 2001
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