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It took a while for John Carpenter to get the flowers he undoubtedly deserves, but the legendary director (and composer) who burst onto the scene following the release of Halloween in 1978 mastered the art of the horror movie with that iconic slasher and The Thing as well as campy cult classics including They Live, Escape From New York, and Big Trouble in Little China.
Carpenter’s career started to fizzle out in the 1990s, and the 2001’s widely-panned Ghost of Mars essentially marked the beginning of the end for a man who hasn’t directed a feature film since The Ward was met with a similarly chilly response in 2010.
With that said, he’s been perfectly content with the well-earned retirement he largely devotes to watching basketball, playing video games, and working on various passion projects. While he’s notoriously hesitant to discuss his body of work or engage in overly philosophical discussions about the art of filmmaking, the master of horror has a tendency to be very candid in interviews where he’s never been shy about sharing his true feelings about a wide variety of topics.
That includes a recent discussion he had with Variety in the weeks leading up to his 75th birthday where he was kind enough to provide the outlet with some fairly uncharacteristic insight into his oeuvre.
That includes a segment of the conversation where he reflected on the 1992’s largely forgotten Memoirs of an Invisible Man. The movie was a bit of a departure for Carpenter, and it’s safe to say he doesn’t have the fondest memories based on his comments concerning one of the “terrible” actors he joked he’d like to see engulfed in flames, saying:
“It gave me a chance to make a quasi-serious movie. But Chevy Chase, Sam Neill — who I love and had a longtime friendship with — and Warner Bros. … I worked for them, and it was pleasant.
No, it wasn’t pleasant at all. I’m lying to you. It was a horror show. I really wanted to quit the business after that movie.
God, I don’t want to talk about why, but let’s just say there were personalities on that film … he shall not be named who needs to be killed. No, no, no, that’s terrible. He needs to be set on fire. No, no, no. Anyway, it’s all fine. I survived it.”
While Carpenter didn’t explicitly say Chevy Chase was the actor who deserves to befall a terrible fate, its pretty clear he wasn’t referring to Sam Neill (who starred in 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness, which many horror aficionados view as one of the finest cinematic translations of H.P. Lovecraft’s infamously unadaptable stories).
The former Saturday Night Live star is known for being an incredibly difficult person to work with; the comedian once exchanged blows with Bill Murray on the set of SNL (Pete Davidson is also decidedly not a fan) and was reportedly “written off” of Community after dropping a racial slur during filming.
As a result, it’s safe to assume he’s the guy Carpenter was referring to.