Christine

Dir. John Carpenter. 1983, 110 mins. DCP. With Keith Gordon, John Stockwell, Alexandra Paul, Robert Prosky, Harry Dean Stanton. After The Thing bombed at the box office, Carpenter was fired from his next gig, a movie adaptation of Stephen King’s Firestarter (a job that Roller Boogie director Mark L. Lester took over). But Carpenter bounced back with another King adaptation: Christine, a prescient vampire story about the perils of nostalgia starring an insatiable, murderous Plymouth Fury. Today, Christine feels like an essential gear-shift after The Thing‘s full-throttle madness. Though it is set in 1978, the year Halloween came out, and was filmed in the same South Pasadena neighborhood as that earlier film, Christine feels like Carpenter’s way of refusing to let his future career become defined by his past glories. —Simon Abrams