‘Everything I know about evil I learned in that small town’: John Carpenter on terrifying the world with Halloween, The Thing and The Fog: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/20/everything-i-know-about-evil-i-learned-in-that-small-town-john-carpenter-on-terrifying-the-world-with-halloween-the-thing-and-the-fog
'Then there’s They Live, from 1988, which seems to have taken on a life of its own. The story concerns a homeless worker (played by wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper) who discovers some sunglasses that reveal subliminal propaganda messages beneath every advert, magazine and piece of packaging he sees: “Obey”, “Marry and Reproduce”, “Stay Asleep”. Even the dollar bills secretly say: “This is your God.” The glasses also reveal the aliens who walk among us undetected, controlling humanity.
Not exactly subtle, and They Live is by no means his best film (Piper is no Kurt Russell), but it has become part of the culture, endlessly mimicked, turned into memes and even co-opted into a successful clothing brand by the graphic artist Shepard Fairey – the ultimate irony, perhaps. Just last week, pranksters doctored billboards for Meta’s AI glasses They-Live-style, revealing Kylie Jenner to be an alien and the ad’s subliminal slogan to be “We’re always watching”.
Carpenter was specifically targeting the Reagan era in They Live, he says, the hyperconsumerism, but also the inequality – contrasting Piper’s homeless community with the affluent heights of 80s Los Angeles. “It’s a documentary, and it didn’t end. It’s still going on now, even worse.” He stops himself. “You’ll get me ranting here, and that’s not a good thing.” But, almost needless to say, he’s depressed by the state of his country. “Things are bad here. I guess you guys realise that over there?”
Žižek, the Slovenian philosopher, called They Live “one of the forgotten masterpieces of the Hollywood left” in his 2012 documentary The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology, which saw the film as a metaphor for not just consumerism but ideology as a whole: “When you put the glasses on, you see dictatorship in democracy. It’s the invisible order which sustains your apparent freedom.”
“I don’t know if I’d go that far,” says Carpenter (he has never heard of Žižek, and asks me to send him the clip). “It’s actually democracy under pressure from the dictator. I’m a real sucker for American values. There’s a lot of people like me and we’re constantly fighting, but we’re doing it within the system. I vote. That’s the only power I have. I’m not a rich guy like these guys. And I keep believing that we’ll fight them off one day. We’re all going to be like Roddy Piper, we’re going to give ’em the finger at the end there.”'
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