John Carpenter’s Vampires: 1998 Horror Film Remembered

If you’re a solid actor, do you want to win Academy Awards? Or do you want to have the kind of fun James Woods and the rest of the well-assembled ensemble cast must have had making John Carpenter’s Vampires? The iconic director’s bloody-good supernatural gore fest first drove its wooden stake into moviegoers’ hearts all the way back in 1998, and it still remains an unabashed horror hoot today (check it out on SYFY or via the SYFY app).

From his 1970s indie-film start and continuing all the way forward, John Carpenter movies nearly always just feel like John Carpenter movies. But it’s a twist of last-minute fate that we even got Vampires at all, coming during a period of post-Escape from L.A. creative boredom that almost persuaded Carpenter to walk away from filmmaking entirely. “I was actually toying around with getting out of the business for a while and I couldn’t decide if I should,” the legendary horror auteur confessed in a late-‘90s interview with Dreamwatch magazine. Why? Because “it stopped being fun.”

Fully grown and fearsome: Even the good guys get rowdy in John Carpenter’s Vampires

Then along came a studio pitch for an action-horror flick inspired by Vampire$, a 1990 novel authored by the late John Steakley. Carpenter cobbled prized elements from a pair of competing screenplays (including one shelved idea that had vampires living in a sci-fi future), and plucked his own screenplay bits from whatever he liked best. “I went in my office and thought, ‘It’s going to be set in the American Southwest and it’s a Western – Howard Hawks,’ and I wrote it,” he explained to Dreamwatch. “I combined the two screenplays together utilizing elements from this one and that one, a little bit of the book and a bunch of me, and out it came from there. It worked out pretty well.”

Hell yeah it did. As chief vampire hunter John “Jack” Crow, Woods (who was, in fact, nursing a recent Oscar nomination for his 1996 performance in Ghosts of Mississippi) arrived in the desert southwest with a fang-hating hit squad, rolling up in road-warrior SUVs and amply armed with a ridiculously overpowered vamp-slaying arsenal. Better still, they all showed up with a mean, mature, and overwhelmingly bad-attitude approach to sending the undead to eternity — with admirably irreverent prejudice. 

Flanked by right-hand deputy Tony Montoya (played by Homicide: Life on the Street alum Daniel Baldwin) and a hostage bite victim named Katrina (Twin Peaks TV royalty Sheryl Lee), Woods and the team bypassed a series of well-placed Vatican-linked landmines to go straight for the jugular of master vampire Jan Valek (Cobra Kai’s Thomas Ian Griffith), the movie’s signature baddie. Carpenter stayed refreshingly uncomplicated with his choice of vampire villainy; Valek comes off like a campy R-rated lab union between Trent Reznor, Severus Snape, Brandon Lee in The Crow… and maybe even a slight smidge of Tom Hiddleston in that one awesome Jim Jarmusch vampire flick.

From Halloween to They Live to his Escape movies and beyond, Carpenter’s action films share a singular unironic quality in their presentation. The music (in this case scored by Carpenter himself) is usually tough, and the heroes unapologetically tougher still. Woods is the right leather-necked leader to look the part in Vampires, clenching a stogie with his teeth, packing a pistol in his waistband, living behind too-cool shades, and (of course) looking completely murdered out in a weathered black jacket. But the vibe doesn’t stop at just the leading man; there’s an unmistakably adult, 1980s-vintage swagger to the way absolutely everybody behaves in Vampires… no matter if they’re good or bad.

Flying above all the straightforward, testosterone-soaked aura and gobs of booze-sponging sleaze, Vampires is a hell of an entertaining ride. It’s also gory — with tons of not-so-Grand Guignol body horror (like any good John Carpenter fright flick should have). And while the vampires in this movie aren’t exactly scary, they are tough customers — making them aptly evil, dark-side complements to good-guy hard cases like Crow, Montoya, and eventually even the devoutly straight-laced Catholic Fr. Adam “Padre” Guiteau (played by Stargate SG-1 alum Tim Guinee). 

Is there deep social commentary lurking just beneath the surface? Look for it if you like, but, more than with most Carpenter movies, it’s not needed in order to take Vampires for the freewheeling wild action-horror ride that it is. Whatever they may have to say in the subtext, Carpenter’s films rarely forget to be fun — and Vampires in particular is in zero need of any reminders. From the very first frame, the tone is pretty clear: nobody came here to party, they came ready to tango for exclusive rights to walk in the sunlight… and only one side can emerge as the winner.

Thankfully, Vampires served as a bridge, rather than as a finale, to the later and more recent stages in Carpenter’s remarkably prolific creative career. After serving up two additional post-Vampires feature films (2001’s Ghosts of Mars and 2010’s The Ward), he’s continued to craft tunes for movies — including bespoke music for David Gordon Green’s reimagined Halloween horror trilogy, as well as the soon-to-arrive 2025 horror-comedy Death of a Unicorn starring Paul Rudd and Jenna Ortega. Carpenter also dipped a recent toe back into horror directing as the executive producer for the 2023 streaming project John Carpenter’s Suburban Screams, composing the overall theme while also helming his very own episode (“Phone Stalker”). 

Bonus bit: If you like New Mexico — and just the whole aesthetic connection between windswept desert spaces and the ghostly cinematic spirit realm — then Vampires is definitely the movie for you. Carpenter crammed a whole Breaking Bad’s worth of New Mexican southwest scenery into the film’s under-two-hour runtime, complete with sweeping chaparral vistas, well-framed on-location backdrops (like the old-world streetscape of small-town Las Vegas), and oodles of intimately-shot interior spaces that evoke the region’s early Spanish Mission period. More than most Carpenter movies, Vampires exudes desolation and historically haunted vibes… which, if you think about it, is really saying something. 

Watch John Carpenter’s Vampires on SYFY or via the SYFY app!