John Carpenter returns to the director's chair with true terror anthology 'Suburban Screams'
LOS ANGELES — John Carpenter has a gift for conjuring frights where you least expect them — say like the terror of a masked maniac slicing up teens in suburbia to a hypnotic, dread-inducing synth score — and, at 75, he still wields a wickedly droll sense of humor.
As we turn the corner into his office, the cheekily self-proclaimed "horror master" cackles at the sight that greets all who dare to enter: a life-size cardboard cut-out of "Believe"-era Justin Bieber.
"We have a friend who comes and stays with us," the director explains of the guesthouse decor lurking beside his desk, a smile dancing across his face. "We stick it in there to scare him."
It's fitting that Carpenter keeps his headquarters hidden in plain sight. Just beyond a picturesque white picket fence in a sleepy Los Angeles neighborhood nearly as serene as the South Pasadena locales where Michael Myers hunted Laurie Strode in 1978's seminal "Halloween," mementos from his career-defining films, from 1986's "Big Trouble in Little China" to 1998's "Vampires," fill the walls.
But on a recent afternoon it's the multihyphenate's newer works — stacks of the graphic novels he and producer-wife Sandy King Carpenter publish through their Storm King Comics, and the albums he records with son Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies — taking up every inch," featuring new recordings of his own iconic movie themes.)
