Alien Probably Wouldn’t Exist Without John Carpenter’s Debut Film (2024)

In the 1970s, John Carpenter began a legendary run of action, horror, and science-fiction movies that stretched out over ten years. Most fans would probably limit this from his second feature, Assault on Precinct 13, to They Live in 1988. Within this run, you have genre classics such as Halloween, Escape From New York, The Thing, and Big Trouble in Little China. But Carpenter's masterful influence over genre filmmaking was already locked into place with his very first movie, Dark Star.

Dark Star is a science-fiction comedy that Carpenter directed and co-wrote with Dan O'Bannon in the early 1970s. The film follows a group of working-class crew members of a spaceship destroying unstable planets to make way for future space colonies. Dark Star was a ragtag production, and it is a relatively tiny movie, but even if you haven't seen it, you almost certainly know of Alien, the iconic Ridley Scott sci-fi horror film that would not exist without Carpenter's first movie.

'Dark Star' Began as a Student Film Before Expanding Into John Carpenter's Feature Debut

Alien Probably Wouldn’t Exist Without John Carpenter’s Debut Film (1)

Dark Star started as John Carpenter's and Dan O'Bannon's student film project while studying at the University of Southern California. Carpenter began with the concept, and O'Bannon contributed much of the film's comedy. The working class, stoner-esque sense of humor in Dark Star definitely feels in line with the collegiate origins of the project, and is prescient of the type of comedy that would become popularized in film and TV, and even internet content, in the 2010s.

The humble beginnings of this project led to Dark Star's original cut being only 45 minutes long. The film received additional funding and was expanded with 50 minutes of additional footage, before falling into the hands of a distributor who cut about half of that out, and had new footage filmed to replace the missing sections. This three-wave production process stretched Dark Star into a four-year endeavor, and saw the film take many forms before it was finally released in 1974.

Dan O'Bannon Wrote 'Alien' In Response to 'Dark Star's Failure to Launch

Alien Probably Wouldn’t Exist Without John Carpenter’s Debut Film (2)

One of the many sequences added during the expansion from Dark Star's shorter, earlier version into the feature-length edit involved an alien encounter on the spaceship. This alien, literally constructed out of a painted beach ball with latex feet attached at the bottom, was puppeteered by Nick Castle, who would go on to portray Michael Myers in Carpenter's third film, Halloween. The sequence where Sergeant Pinback, played by O'Bannon, attempts to wrangle the alien displayed some of the film's most overt comedy. The slapstick, physical comedy elements of Pinback's confrontation with the alien unfortunately didn't play well in the mostly empty theaters, where the audience members who were there didn't seem impressed.

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The failure of Dark Star's extended alien-based set piece inspired O'Bannon to challenge the audience with a more terrifying version of the concept. O'Bannon began writing what would become Scott's Alien a couple of years after Dark Star, alongside collaborator Ronald Shushett, who had also started to develop Total Recall, which O'Bannon ended up contributing to as well. O'Bannon recalled later that, "My second film, Alien, was basically Dark Star made scary. I figured, if I can’t make them laugh, maybe I can make them scream." And he was successful in that goal, as Alien went on to immediately cement itself as a classic of both horror and science-fiction, spawning multiple sequels, prequels, spin-offs, and a franchise that is still going strong, with Fede Alvarez' Alien: Romulus being both a critical and commercial success.

Dark Star is not Carpenter's best movie, nor is it the most interesting work in O'Bannon's filmography, but it cannot be ignored that we might have never gotten the greater works that built their legacies without this strange little space comedy kicking off their careers. Maybe you'd never guess that the guys who taped rubber claws to the bottom of a beach ball would make the defining horror movies of the 1970s, with Halloween and Alien both coming just a few years later. But Dark Star is proof of the ingenuity, cleverness, and craft that made O'Bannon and Carpenter rule the genre films of the coming decade.

Alien Probably Wouldn’t Exist Without John Carpenter’s Debut Film (4)

Dark Star (1974)

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Dark Star follows a team of astronauts on a prolonged mission to destroy unstable planets. As they contend with the challenges of outer space, including a rebellious alien mascot and an intelligent bomb questioning its purpose, the crew faces existential dilemmas and unexpected malfunctions, testing their resolve.

Release Date
April 1, 1974
Director
John Carpenter
Cast
Brian Narelle , Cal Kuniholm , Dan O'Bannon , Dre Pahich , Adam Beckenbaugh , Nick Castle , Joe Saunders , Cookie Knapp , Alan Sheretz , John Carpenter , Miles Watkins

Runtime
83 Minutes

Main Genre
Sci-Fi
Writers
John Carpenter , Dan O'Bannon

Dark Star is streaming on Tubi in the U.S.

Watch on Tubi

Alien Probably Wouldn’t Exist Without John Carpenter’s Debut Film (2024)

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