“I like to think that if all the filmmakers of that American New Wave were a giant school class, and Coppola was the captain of the football team, and Spielberg was the good lookin’ rebel in the leather jacket hanging out with the bikers, and the drama majors are Altman and Cassavetes… and then you had Carpenter who is like the Ally Sheedy of this Breakfast Club, he’s the outsider who’s tucked away, probably getting a blow job behind the shed, but ends up coming up with some of the craziest, weirdest things.”

The other day, we were visited by a man who wanted to tell us the good news about a dude named JC. This JC had long hair, a legion of devoted followers, and he managed to change the world. And he was just a humble Carpenter, too!

Dark Horizons editor Garth Franklin was our guest this month, and he quickly decided on the great John Carpenter as his filmmaker of the month, a choice that definitely delighted us here at Hi4H Central.

Watching all of a filmmaker’s works in one hit can be revelatory. You can look at Halloween or Big Trouble In Little China or Starman and know they’re all John Carpenter films, but until you see them all in one go, it’s difficult to fathom just how adept he was at every genre he turned his hand to. It’s also fascinating to see exactly what interests Carpenter, and how these themes echo across all of his works.

That’s what we dig into in this month’s episode. First, as always, we also look at some key new release films, including Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight, Lenny Abrahamson’s Room, and Ryan Coogler’s Creed.

We also take a look at something that’s been on our minds in the month where we lost both David Bowie and Alan Rickman: how we define the legacies of beloved actors when we primarily know them through their imitation, rather than themselves?

Outro music: score from Halloween (1978), composed by John Carpenter

It’s a jam-packed episode, and a hell of a way to kick of 2016. Stream or download from our website, listen via Stitcher Smart Radio, or subscribe on iTunes!

If you’ve ever wanted to look up some news about a film, be it a piece of casting info or movement on a long-awaited sequel, the odds are better than not that you made your way to Dark Horizons. And that means you’ve certainly read the work of Garth Franklin, the site’s Sydney-based founder and editor-in-chief, and our first guest of 2016.

Created in January 1997, the now-19-year-old Dark Horizons is now legally able to drink, drive and vote in Australia. But more importantly, it was one of the first real places on the internet to get film news from, and it remains one of the few must-read movie sites anywhere on the web. That’s a helluva run, and it’s a testament to Garth that the site continues from strength to strength.

Given Garth is someone who writes about every franchise, every release, every film from Hollywood and around the world, we were very curious to find out which filmmaker he would he want to discuss on our show.

The answer? None other than one of cinema’s true masters of horror, John Carpenter!

Although John Carpenter’s work is too diverse to refer to him as simply a horror filmmaker, you can’t actually talk about modern horror without talking about Carpenter. After his first film, the seminal science fiction comedy Dark Star (1974) and his second, the legendary action thriller Assault On Precinct 13 (1976), Carpenter cemented his place in pop culture with the terrifying Halloween (1978), the film widely credited with bringing the slasher sub-genre into the mainstream.

As if his first three films hadn’t done it already (and they had), Carpenter – who, we note, celebrates his 68th birthday tomorrow! – proved himself adept at any genre he turned his hand to, from the action sci-fi of Escape From New York (1981), to the science fiction romance of Starman (1984), to the high-comedy fantasy of Big Trouble In Little China (1986). If his filmography included only half the classics they do, he’d still be lauded as one of modern cinema’s most influential visionaries.

But which of these Carpenters is the one that won over Garth? Was it the horror Carpenter, the science fiction Carpenter, or the comedy Carpenter? Or perhaps all of them combined?

We look forward to finding out on January 31, when the first Hell Is For Hyphenates of 2016 is released!