John Carpenter on His Decade Away from Filmmaking, the Problem With Today’s Horror, and The Ward1 min read
Reading Time: < 1 minuteTen years ago, after completing his 20th film in 27 years, filmmaking legend John Carpenter took a sabbatical from filmmaking. “I was tired,” he explained to Movieline, pointing to a decades-long career spent filming one project after the next, including genre classics like Halloween, The Thing, Big Trouble in Little China, and They Live.
“I had given up my personal life and given up my health – given up a lot of things, because of my love of movies, and I’d stopped loving cinema.”
Thankfully, after much needed rejuvenation (and a 2005 stint directing an episode of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series, which reinvigorated his filmmaking yen), Carpenter decided to return to features with a small-scale psychological horror tale.
That film, entitled The Ward (on VOD now and in theaters July 8), follows a young amnesiac (Amber Heard) committed to a mental institution in the 1960s who begins to suspect that she and her fellow patients (Lyndsey Fonseca, Mamie Gummer, Danielle Panabaker, and Laura-Leigh) are being haunted.
