John Carpenter gets Career Achievement Award from LA critics: ‘For a horror guy like me, this really warms my heart’
Filmmaker John Carpenter is set to receive the Career Achievement Award from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, it was announced on October 23. The west coast journos who make up LAFCA will vote for the rest of this year’s winners on December 8, after which the awards will be presented on Saturday, January 11, 2025, at the Biltmore Hotel.
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LAFCA President Robert Abele said in a statement, “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. 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.”
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Carpenter said, “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. 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.”
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After “Halloween,” Carpenter went on to direct “The Fog” (1980), “Escape from New York” (1981), “The Thing” (1982), “Christine” (1983), and “Village of the Damned” (1995), among many other genre films, but horror typically has a tough time on the awards scene. Carpenter, for instance, has never been nominated for an Oscar, and neither were his horror contemporaries Wes Craven (“Nightmare on Elm Street,” “Scream”) or Clive Barker (“Hellraiser”). Modern horror auteurs Ari Aster (“Hereditary,” “Midsommar“) and Robert Eggers (“The Witch,” “The Lighthouse”) also haven’t gotten on the academy’s radar yet.
But the motion picture academy has often been slow to award popular genres, not embracing fantasy as Best Picture until “The Lord of the Rings” or sci-fi until “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” To date the only horror film that has ever won Best Picture was “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991), though this year there are a couple possible contenders in the mix like Coralie Fargeat‘s “The Substance” and Eggers’s “Nosferatu.” When will the time come that horror scares up some more recognition?
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