Born on January 16, 1948 in Carthage, New York, John Carpenter is counted among the most highly individual film directors in the USA. He took film classes at the University of Southern California and there he produced, with a minimum of funds, his first short film, "The Resurrection of Broncho Billy", which everything himself won an "Oscar" in 1970.

"Dark Star" (begun in 1972 and completed in 1975) won the director acclaim in off-beat film circles. This successful mixture of set pieces from the movies of his great idol, Stanley Kubrick, including "Dr. Strangelove; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb", "2001 - A

Space Odyssey", combined with the basic idea of a science fiction satire, was praised by critics and moviegoers alike. "Dark Star" became the cult film of the 70's.

Awarded the London Film Festival Prize in 1977, John Carpenter's second film, "Assault on Precinct 13" (1976), is a violent thriller which relates the story of a gang's attack on police station. Coldly and without compromise, the film maker unfolds his story without losing sight of the socio-political aspects, a matter close to his heart. In his movies, John Carpenter does almost everything himself - directing, script-writing, production, editing - and the score. Other role models of his include Howard Hawks, John Ford, Roman Polanski and Alfred Hitchcock. He concentrates on variations and contrasts, and sets old and new forms and ideas against each other. This will give rise to his "Brutal Films of the 70's" (Sound & Silents). It is to be a movie genre with the central theme: terror gangs of the 70’s.

1978 marked the year of Carpenter's international breakthrough. He shot "Halloween", which was honoured at the Festival of Fantasy Films in Paris. "The Fog" followed in 1980 and in 1981 "Escape from New York", a drama about the end of the world. The director uses a free-moving Panavision camera hurtling across a dark New York bridge to create horror and suspense and to sear our consciousness with one thought: there is only one way to escape from the dilemma of our times, the civilisation hated by the director - the only way out is to seize the bull by the horns. The critics stylized Carpenter into the idol of a new kind of American movie genre.

In the next films of this committed multi-talent including "The Thing" (1982), "Starman" (1984), "Halloween II" (1981), "Big Trouble in Little China" (1986) and "Prince of Darkness" (1987), Carpenter conjures up visions of exorcisms, Mafia murders and that American phenomenon which has always guarantied around-the-block movie theatre lines: the science fiction adventure. While making "Christine" in 1982, he employs the "parable of a man-eating automobile to impress on his audience that nothing good can be expected from our old world anymore.

Among John Carpenter's greatest successes, the horror film series "Halloween" has long achieved cult status and is for splatter fans possibly the ultimate in this film genre. The score for this film, for which John Carpenter did most of the composing, using synthesizers and sequencer music machines, along with a collaboration from his long-time friend, Alan Howarth, provides tremendous moments of suspense at the movie theatre. His compositions for "The Fog" and "Escape from New York" already mark John Carpenter as a "self-made" man of film music, developing his musical ideas by trying them out on music machines. He prefers the somber, heavy and drawn out tones, and rarely takes advantage of the high registers of the computer, and then only seldom does he let himself fall into shrill, even shock-type tone levels. The undercurrents of his music, which Alan Howarth orchestrates almost to perfection, creates a somber musical picture. Without the visual impact of the movie itself, the film scores of John Carpenter and Alan Howarth take on a comtemplative character; they are musical visions of the end of the world which turn the present into the traumas of the future, and which prepare us for the 21st century with a note of warning but also with a stubborn note of harmony.