John Carpenter: This Movie Could Have Been The Thing Director’s New Thing, But The Box Office Penalty Was Merciless

For several years now, John Carpenter has been accustomed to a parade of producers at his doorstep trying to convince him of the merits of remakes / prequels of some of his (masterpiece) works.

A parade that becomes as rich as the front door of his colleague Paul Verhoeven, who is literally robbed. In 2005, Assault on Central 13 began the remakes in Carpenter’s filmography. And the flow did not stop, far from it.

That said, we could always argue that Big John himself practiced the art of the remake with The Thing, a remake of The Thing from Another World by Howard Hawks, as well as The Village of the Damned, a 1960 remake of the Wolf classic. Rila.

Carpenter, unfortunately, is also known for an impressive list of projects that never make it past pre-production, although some of them could have been done without him. The list is so long thatThere’s even a Wikipedia page dedicated to his unfinished projects.

Among them, a remake project of what could have been a new rip off A master of horrors : A remake of one of Universal’s monster movies, The Strange Creature from the Black Lake.

werewolf look

Directed by Jack Arnold, one of the best post-war filmmakers, specializing in B-movies that would become classics. A strange creature from the Black Lake It is probably his most famous film.

It tells the story of the (mis)adventures of a group of scientists who, deep in the heart of the Amazon, discover the fossilized remains of a strange human-fish hybrid creature that could overturn all certainty in the theory of evolution. A species precious to Darwin. ..

The film was a major success upon its release in early 1954 for Universal, who would capitalize on its success with three sequels. While Major had previously lost the rights to the Dracula character, allowing other studios to create their own versions, the creature from the Black Lake always remained in the studio’s heart, which was then beating in the beginning. Doing a remake of the 80s.

The project was born in 1982, at a time when Carpenter was in theaters. thing. But the studio first considered handing the reins to John Landis, who was riding the wave of the success of his Werewolves of London.

Out of respect for the original film, Landis wanted to bring in the original film’s director, Jack Arnold. Backed by screenwriter Nigel Kneil, he also wanted to include not one but two creatures and adapt his film for 3D. Universal vetoed it, they already have Jaws 3 in 3D. When Landis left the project, the studio considered handing him over to Joe Dante.

Lovecraft’s creature? That’s what Big John is for!

Then came John Carpenter in 1992. This already shows the gestation period of the project. As the filmmaker then explained in a magazine interview, StarlogHe planned to create a more modern version of the story, combining various elements.

“One implies a creature that is the missing link between man and fish. It would be interesting to combine this with creationists trying to prove that man walked with dinosaurs 10,000 years ago. They are trying to prove a literary and biblical origin. Life – in complete contradiction to scientific facts.” he explained.

add: “I also want to have a Lovecraftian spirit for this film, I’m thinking of Innsmouth’s Nightmare where the fish merge with the humans. Then there are the legends of the pyramids that are still hidden in the heart of the ‘Amazonia’. I also want to mention that.’

Oscar-winning legend and Christine screenwriter in action

To put it all together, he called a screenwriter he knows well, Bill Phillips, who signed the script for his film Christine, one of the director’s biggest (and rarest…) box office successes. He also brought in absolute make-up legend Rick Baker, who at the time had already won two Oscars.

Phillips and Baker worked together on the project while Carpenter was filming his new film The Adventures of the Invisible Man. “It was basically based on loving the original material and trying to stay true to that in a lot of ways. I think we had a creature that was modernized, but you could always tell where it was coming from. It was coming from.” Baker said in an interview Ain’t It Cool News website in 2012.

The fate of the creature is sealed by an invisible person

release of The Adventures of the Invisible Man It was an absolute disaster: the film collected only $14.4 million at the box office. Far, far from covering the $40 million budget. Filming behind the scenes was hell. The screenwriter of the film, William Goldman, recalls that the director of the film was originally planned to be Ivan Reitman. But disagreements with his lead actor, Chevy Chase, were such that Reitman was fired instead of Carpenter.

The experience was so painful for Big John that he considered retiring from film altogether, as he said in a lengthy interview published in January 2023. variety : “It wasn’t pleasant at all, I’m not going to lie. It was a horror show. I really wanted out of the business after that movie.”

Double Penalty for Carpenter. Already at the box office is punishing pain, once again. But also faced with the disaster of a film that was also a modernized version of its classic Invisible Man, Universal was much less enthusiastic about Carpenter’s approach to the upcoming remake of The Creature from the Black Lake.

Without officially saying why, the major disabled the project and put it in a drawer. However, he did pop up a few times, most notably with Brendan Fraser during Mummy Madness.

But also, briefly, when Universal tried to create a dark world that would fail after The Mummy failed, Tom Cruise’s version. If Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water was an obvious homage to the famous creature from the Black Lake, the film was not a remake.

For now, the creature is set to remain at the bottom of the lake for a few more years, while Big John, willy-nilly, continues his career between producing new iterations around Halloween, a horror series, and a musical. Career. But at 76, he no longer has the desire or energy to waste as much as he did on projects with uncertain futures.