John Carpenter

John Carpenter
Carpenter in October 2023
Born	(1948-01-16) January 16, 1948 (age 76) Carthage, New York, U.S.
Other names	John T. Chance Martin Quatermass
Occupations	Filmmaker composer actor
Years active	1969–present
Spouses	Adrienne Barbeau ​ ​ (m. 1979; div. 1984)​ Sandy King ​ ​ (m. 1990)​
Children	Cody Carpenter
Website	theofficialjohncarpenter.com
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John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American filmmaker, composer, and actor. Most commonly associated with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s, he is generally recognized as a master of the horror genre.^[1] At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the French Directors' Guild gave him the Golden Coach Award and lauded him as "a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions".^[2][3]

Carpenter's early films included critical and commercial successes such as Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Starman (1984). Though he has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker, his other productions from the 1970s and the 1980s only later came to be considered cult classics; these include Dark Star (1974), Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), The Thing (1982), Christine (1983), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), Prince of Darkness (1987), They Live (1988), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), and Escape from L.A. (1996). He returned to the Halloween franchise as a composer and executive producer on Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2022).

Carpenter usually composes or co-composes the music in his films. He won a Saturn Award for Best Music for the soundtrack of Vampires (1998) and has released four studio albums: Lost Themes (2015), Lost Themes II (2016), Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998 (2017), and Lost Themes III: Alive After Death (2021). Since 2012, he has co-owned the comic book company Storm King Comics alongside his wife, film producer Sandy King.^[4]