One could make money and get a career going with a low-budget horror film about killers attacking on holidays. It is always flattering to have somebody copy you.

On 10 October 2010 Carpenter received the Lifetime Award from the Freak Show Horror Film Festival. Approximately one-third of the finiJohn Carpenterd film is the newer footage. The made-for-TV movie was a hit with viewers[citation needed] and critics[citation needed] and was also released as a feature film in cinemas outside the U.

However many of his works from the 1970s and the 1980s such as Dark Star (1974) Assault on Precinct 13 (1976) The Thing (1982) Starman (1984) Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and They Live (1988) have since been seen as cult classics while Carpenter has been acknowledged as an influential filmmaker. Some of the films in Carpenter's career were critical and commercial failures with the notable exceptions of Halloween (1978) and Escape from New York (1981). Although Carpenter has worked in numerous film genres he is most commonly associated with horror and science fiction films from the 1970s and 1980s.