Awards Voting Set For Sunday, December 8

LOS ANGELES - October 23, 2024 — The Los Angeles Film Critics Association has chosen John Carpenter as the recipient of this year’s Career Achievement Award. 

LAFCA’s awards honoring the year’s best achievements in filmmaking will be decided by the membership on Sunday, December 8. Those winners will be honored alongside Carpenter at the organization’s awards event, to be held Saturday, January 11, 2025 at the Biltmore Hotel. 

“John Carpenter is such an ideal choice not only for his ability to spin stylish, prescient, genre-bending features of otherworldly menace and powerful emotion, but also because his glorious career happens to span our group’s 50-year existence,” said LAFCA President Robert Abele. “That strong connection starts with LAFCA recognizing his horror prowess early on with our New Generation award in 1979 for his stone-cold classic Halloween. So it’s only fitting that this longtime Angeleno, whose nightmares always said more than what was on the surface, become our first New Generation recipient to also get our Career Achievement award.”

“The L.A. Film Critics Association was one of the very first groups to present me an award, so I’m truly honored by this recognition,” said Carpenter. “For a horror guy like me, this really warms my heart, and it also shows just how important horror is as a genre, which the Los Angeles Film Critics Association has known for decades.”

Raised on westerns, sci-fi and horror, John Carpenter burst out of USC film school ready to make his mark in a burgeoning independent American cinema, starting with the DIY space saga Dark Star (1974), followed by the urban siege masterpiece Assault on Precinct 13 (1976). But his reputation exploded with his inspired, unmatched, and perennially enjoyed slasher film Halloween (1978), after which horror movies, the career of Jamie Lee Curtis, and suburban babysitting were never the same. His memorably anxious music for the film carries its own cinematic legacy.

 From there, Carpenter became known as a gifted scaremeister who centered strong women and boasted a brilliant eye for the elegant, unnerving possibilities of the widescreen frame. But he’s also turned his considerable visual storytelling skills to a range of genres, including dystopian adventure with Escape From New York (1981), sci-fi romance with Starman (1984), and alien-invasion terror with They Live (1988), a cult classic whose sociopolitical satire has only grown more trenchant. There have been valiant stabs at remaking Carpenter’s best-known work, but he himself showed everyone how do-overs are done with his gory, claustrophobic freakout The Thing (1982), starring frequent collaborator Kurt Russell and some of the most indelible horror images ever created. It’s as a true original that Carpenter has become as influential as any director Hollywood’s ever produced, inspiring filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino and Guillermo Del Toro to Bong Joon-ho and Mati Diop.