Format: DVD from personal collection on laptop.
Why is it that John Carpenter doesn’t get the respect that he has clearly earned? Sure, some of his movies are terrible, but that’s true of just about every director you can think of. Carpenter has made some incredibly influential and important films as well. Horror wouldn’t be the genre it is without Halloween and The Thing, and movies like Escape from New York and Big Trouble in Little China are rightfully cult classics. That’s the position of the film The Live, a relatively low-budget science fiction/horror film that can be easily referenced by just about anyone with any knowledge of either of those two genres.
It’s also worth noting that the story itself is a classic. The film is based on a short story called “Eight O’Clock in the Morning” by Ray Nelson, but it’s not an uncommon theme. There’s a little bit of Invasion of the Body Snatchers here, for instance. Stephen King fans might know a short story of his called “The Ten O’Clock People” that is a slightly different version of the same story—enough that it almost feels like plagiarism. Even The Matrix has its roots set at least partly in They Live. Its influence is in many ways all out of proportion to the film that we have.
