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John Carpenter is the legendary director behind classics likeAssault on Precinct 13,Halloween,Escape from New York, andThey Live, to name but a few. His diverse career shows he is adept at tackling a mix of genres, but he is perhaps best known to many as one of the masters of horror.
His extensive and celebrated work in thehorrorgenre is undoubtedly a big part of why he was honored with astar on the Hollywood Walk of Famein recognition of his illustrious career. He practically invented the slasher genre withHalloweenand tackled virtually every type of horror movie there is, trying his hand at everything from vampire movies to possession flicks to Lovecraftian horror films. But one thing conspicuously absent from his resume is a zombie movie. Yes, the master of horror never made a zombie picture. But it seems maybe he always yearned to.
IsAssault on Precinct 13Secretly Just A Zombie Movie?
Deconstruct some of Carpenter’s films, and there is an argument to be made that he did, in fact, secretly make a couple of classic zombie movies. The only thing missing from them was… the zombies. This isn’t as strange as it might first sound. To explain it, you need only break down the basic plot elements ofAssault on Precinct 13.
Here, we have a group of unlikely allies (police and criminals) trapped in a remote location (a soon-to-be-closed police precinct), trying to survive the relentless onslaught of a seemingly endless horde of mindless, inhuman killers (an almost absurdly brutal street gang hellbent on destruction). This could very well be a remake ofsomething likeNight of the Living Deadbut for the lack of zombies. The absence of zombies from a zombie movie might seem like a pretty glaring omission at first, but the gang inAssault on Precinct 13serves the exact same narrative function.
They have no real characterization; they are more a maleficent force of nature. Time is taken in the movie to establish them as mindless killers with no apparent motivation. There is no reasoning with them; it is kill or be killed, and our protagonistsfight to simply survivewave after wave of their attacks. They are zombies in everything but name (and brain-eating). This exact premise is something Carpenter came back to again in one of his later, and far less celebrated, films.
Ghosts Of MarsIsAssault on Precinct 13… In Space
John Carpenter’sGhosts of Marsonce again sees cops and criminals have to join forces to fend off hordes of monsters. Despite the film being set on Mars, there does seem to be a surprising number of parallels toAssault on Precinct 13. Carpenter appears to have borrowed a fair bit from his earlier work for this movie, including having an antagonistic force that is basically a zombie stand-in.
WithGhosts of Mars, there is even a step into more classic,supernatural horror territory. The force the main characters fight against this time isn’t simply human gang members looking to cause chaos, but — as you probably guessed from the film’s name — ghosts. Specifically, the ghosts of an ancient Martian civilization have possessed the bodies of the residents of a human mining colony, turning them into feral (some might say zombie-like) creatures.
So, those seem to be two of Carpenter’s movies that are basically zombie movies but with an asterisk.Ghosts of Marscrept closer to zombies with zombie-adjacent ghost possession, but why did he never just bite the bullet and make a full-on zombie movie?
John Carpenter Is Not The Only Beloved Master of Horror
There could be a very simple reason, and it could be precisely because of Carpenter’s inexorable link with the horror genre that he didn’t want to touch this particular corner of it. Zombies as we know them in modern cinema owe their existence to George A. Romero’s iconicDeadmovies. Where Bram Stoker invented the pop-culture vampire with Dracula, Romero invented the zombie with his films.
Night of the Living Deadis theblueprint for zombies as we know them. The reanimated corpses dragging their carcasses across the land to consume the living? The foreboding, relentless monsters who will never stop and will eventually wear you down unless you destroy their brains? We owe all this lore to George Romero.
So maybe Carpenter did not wish to fully commit to making a zombie movie because of the indelible stamp Romero left on this particular genre. Perhaps it was an act of deference, a mark of respect from one legendary horror filmmaker to another. Or maybe it was simply to avoid comparison. As excellent a filmmaker as Carpenter is and as good as a zombie movie from him would likely have been, that is solidly Romero’s territory. Perhaps he worried he wouldn’t have fared favorably in a head-to-head comparison.
Is There Perhaps Some Other Influence on Carpenter?
It’s also possible that the framework ofAssault on Precinct 13draws inspiration from somewhere other than the zombie genre. Carpenter first got into films because he wanted to make Westerns. This influence is plain to see across his filmography, from Roddy Piper’s Clint-Eastwood-like namelessdrifter protagonist inThey Live, to casting Western icon Lee Van Cleef inEscape from New York, to having Ennio Morricone ofThe Good, The Bad and The Uglyfame scoreThe Thing.Speaking to IGNback in 2001, Carpenter said in his own words:
I got in this business wanting to make Westerns. And that just hasn’t worked out. I made some Westerns, but they’re not really Westerns, they’re hidden Westerns.
Maybe the plot ofAssault on Precinct 13— where people try to hold out in a firefight, trapped in a building against impossible odds and an encroaching enemy force that vastly outnumbers them — isn’t about zombies at all. Maybe this is Carpenter putting a Battle of the Alamo pastiche on screen with his own unique twist. Perhaps it’s just one more time when his beloved Westerns influenced his work.
Or maybe it’s all just a total coincidence. But it’s a fun thought experiment. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter whether or notAssault on Precinct 13was a secret zombie movie, it stands tall on its own merits. Regardless of what his influences were or weren’t when making his movies, Carpenter has a wonderfully idiosyncratic body of work that seems only to become more beloved with time.
