John Howard Carpenter (born January 16, 1948) is an American film director, producer, actor, screenwriter, and composer. Although Carpenter has worked with various film genres, he is associated most commonly with horror, action, and science fiction films of the 1970s and 1980s.
Most films of Carpenter's career were initially commercial and critical failures, with the notable exceptions of Halloween (1978), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), and Starman (1984). However, many of Carpenter's films from the 1970s and the 1980s have come to be considered as cult classics, and he has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker. The cult classics that Carpenter has directed 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), and In the Mouth of Madness (1995). He returned to the Halloween franchise as both composer and executive producer for the horror sequel Halloween (2018).
Carpenter composed or co-composed most of his films' music. He won a Saturn Award for Best Music for the film Vampires (1998). Carpenter has released four studio albums, titled Lost Themes (2015), Lost Themes II (2016), Anthology: Movie Themes 1974–1998 (2017) and Lost Themes III: Alive After Death (2021)
At the 2019 Cannes Film Festival, the French Directors' Guild presented Carpenter with the Golden Coach Award (Carrosse d'Or). The Directors' Guild described him as "a creative genius of raw, fantastic, and spectacular emotions".