Filmmaker John Carpenter’s “They Live” from 1988 marked arguably the last work of the auteur’s golden period.
Before that, the filmmaker had been on a roll for just over a decade with classic after classic, including “Dark Star,” “Assault on Precinct 13,” “Halloween,” “The Fog,” “Escape from New York,” “The Thing,” “Christine,” “Starman,” “Big Trouble in Little China,” and “Prince of Darkness”.
“They Live” starred professional wrestler ‘Rowdy’ Roddy Piper, Keith David, and Meg Foster in a story set in a world unknowingly under the influence of alien beings. Piper plays a drifter who obtains a pair of sunglasses allowing him to see the truth – seeing subliminal messages to society to “consume, breed, and conform” to the status quo.
Carpenter recently sat down with Variety to talk about his career and he was asked about studio notes on his projects. He revealed one ridiculous change the studio wanted to make to the aliens in “They Live” was to strip away any hint of the film’s social commentary about unabashed consumerism:
“Yeah, I got some notes. (Laughs) Yeah, which I ignored completely, but they didn’t want the aliens to be capitalists. They wanted to gut the whole movie. ‘Why don’t you make them cannibals from outer space?’. It was just ridiculous. But anyway, we did it and I got the movie I wanted to make.”
The film has since become famous for its pointed satire of Reaganomics and unrestrained capitalism, along with various dialogue lines and a famed extended fistfight sequence. Not a hit upon release, much like many of Carpenters’ other works, the film has since garnered a cult following and is regarded as a largely underrated work.
After “They Live,” Carpenter’s work became a bit more hit and miss with his first true dud with “Memoirs of an Invisible Man” followed by the great “In the Mouth of Madness,” the underrated “Village of the Damned,” and more mixed results with “Escape from LA,” “Vampires,” “Ghosts of Mars” and “The Ward”.
“They Live” is now available, in 4K, on disc and streaming platforms.
