Top 42 John Carpenter's The Thing Quotes
#1. Anybody can make a movie, if you have the will. The digital revolution has made it very inexpensive to make a film. Anybody who wants to can do it.
John Carpenter
#2. One could make money and get a career going with a low-budget horror film about killers attacking on holidays. It is always flattering to have somebody copy you.
John Carpenter
#3. Halloween put me on the map, and I'm very sad to hear of his death.
John Carpenter
#4. My earliest memories of horror are 'Friday the 13th Part 2,' John Carpenter's 'The Thing,' 'Halloween,' 'An American Werewolf in London,' and 'A Nightmare On Elm Street' ... and 'Hatchet' is so obviously inspired by those films that I may as well have made it in 1984.
Adam Green
#6. There are a lot of movies that I don't care about, especially not remakes.
John Carpenter
#7. Rich tofu-eaters would move out to the country, buy a small farm that was going under anyway and then not know what to do with it. (See Green Acres and multiply by hundreds of thousands and both members Eva Gabor. But crossed with Karen Carpenter and take away all shreds of common sense.)
John Ringo
#8. Captain Carpenter rose up in his prime
Put on his pistols and went riding out
But had got wellnigh nowhere at that time
Till he fell in with ladies in a rout.
John Crowe Ransom
#9. We had many good directors - John Carpenter, Brian De Palma - but things have become polluted by business, money and bad relationships. The success of the horror genre has led to its downfall.
Dario Argento
#10. I would not knock old fellows in the dust
But there lay Captain Carpenter on his back
His weapons were the old heart in his bust
And a blade shook between rotten teeth alack.
John Crowe Ransom
#11. What scares me is what scares you. We're all afraid of the same things. That's why horror is such a powerful genre. All you have to do is ask yourself what frightens you and you'll know what frightens me.
John Carpenter
#12. You have to fight really hard for a private life, and sometimes you don't have one. It just gets to you after a while. It's tough.
John Carpenter
#13. John Adams was a farmer, Abraham Lincoln a small town lawyer. Plato and Socrates were teachers. Jesus was a carpenter. To equate wisdom and judgement with occupation is at best insulting.
Mark Sheppard
#14. I don't watch my films. I've seen 'em enough after cutting them and putting the music on. I don't ever want to see them again.
John Carpenter
#15. From a will: And to my communist nephew Oswald, I leave the sum of 10,000 pounds - to be shared equally with his fellow Britishers.
John Carpenter
#17. I don't want to be a part of the demographics. I want to be an individual. I wear each of my films as a badge of pride. That's why I cherish all my bad reviews. If the critics start liking my movies, then I'm in deep trouble.
John Carpenter
#18. What a director does ... essentially, it's storytelling, but a director also controls the feeling and the sounds and the texture. It's an act of creation, like a symphony or a painting or a story. But with different tools.
John Carpenter
#19. I was familiar with that and 'Rio Bravo.' 'Rio Bravo' was what John Carpenter did, that brilliant move of taking a western and turning it into an urban flick. And from there you got, you know, all the cop genre movies of the time.
John Leguizamo
#20. I think there are certain subjects I don't want to tackle, that I don't think I could do a good job with. I don't think I'd be good with ... broad comedy? I don't know. Maybe I would.
John Carpenter
#21. In Halloween, I viewed the characters as simply normal teenagers. Laurie, Jamie Lee's character, was shy and somewhat repressed. And Michael Myers, the killer, is definitely repressed. They have certain similarities.
John Carpenter
#22. When I was a kid, I loved 'The Curse of Frankenstein,' 'The Creeping Unknown,' 'X: The Unknown.' I love 'Forbidden Planet,' 'The Thing from Another World.' They were science fiction/horror movies, generally.
John Carpenter
#23. It's a very good time for horror. This business certainly has changed, but there's still room for serious horror films. Look at 28 Days Later, that's not a tongue-in-cheek picture.
John Carpenter
#24. 'Raiders of the Lost Ark' made me want to make films. I am wild about the films of John Carpenter, Ridley Scott, Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah.
Neil Marshall
#25. As a filmmaker, it's about surviving and lasting. So many talented people that I've known in my life - directors and writers - just haven't made it and haven't had a chance.
John Carpenter
#26. Directing is all about storytelling. It's not about equipment, or anything else.
John Carpenter
#27. I can play just about any keyboard but I can't read or write a note.
John Carpenter
#28. Horror has been a genre since the beginning of cinema, all the way back to the days of silent films. I don't think it will ever go away because it's so universal. Humor doesn't always travel to other countries, but horror does.
John Carpenter
#29. Horror stories have always worked on film. It's where they work. That's where vampires and ghosts and UFOs are real. They're not particularly real in life, but they're real on the screen. It's the communal aspect of movie-watching.
John Carpenter
#30. I made a decision back in 1978 that, in a trade off for money when I directed Halloween, I would have my name above the title in order to basically brand these movies my own.
John Carpenter
#31. I've gone through various periods with superheroes. They work in the right hands, but they don't work in other hands. It's tricky. But any movie is tricky. It's impossible to say, 'This is what you do in any situation.'
John Carpenter
#32. To make Michael Myers frightening, I had him walk like a man, not a monster.
John Carpenter
#33. I stopped directing in 2001 for four or five years, until I did the TV series 'Masters Of Horror.' I had been working steadily as a director since 1970. That's a long time. I was burned out.
John Carpenter
#34. Well, 'They Live' was a primal scream against Reaganism of the '80s. And the '80s never went away. They're still with us. That's what makes 'They Live' look so fresh - it's a document of greed and insanity. It's about life in the United States then and now. If anything, things have gotten worse.
John Carpenter
#35. John Carpenter created the idea of Halloween, so his vision remains the most focused and intelligently directed of the series. The directors that have followed have kept the original intent of the concept.
Donald Pleasence
#36. Remakes, in general, are a result of necessity being the mother of invention. They can't open movies consistently and break through the advertising clutter that's out there.
John Carpenter
#37. We all question our sanity. Everyone has had an experience of loss of control of something.
John Carpenter
#38. I love everything John Carpenter's ever done.
D.J. Cotrona
#39. There are two different stories in horror: internal and external. In external horror films, the evil comes from the outside, the other tribe, this thing in the darkness that we don't understand. Internal is the human heart.
John Carpenter
#40. If I had to pick one scary movie, I'd go with John Carpenter's 'The Thing.' That's probably number one.
Drew Goddard
#41. I never thought I was doing the same thing as directors like John Carpenter, George Romero, and sometimes even Hitchcock, even though I've been sometimes compared to those other guys. We're after different game.
David Cronenberg
#42. I like all of John Carpenter's movies. 'The Thing' is my favorite.
Rob Lowe
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