Fake John Carpenter Letterboxd account delights the internet, confuses the real John Carpenter

What the hell is a Letterboxd!??

By Emma Keates  |  September 26, 2024 | 3:25pm
Photo: Michael Tullberg/Getty Images
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Fake John Carpenter Letterboxd account delights the internet, confuses the real John Carpenter

Sorry, folks: John Carpenter doesn’t actually hate his own movies. (You’ll have to turn to Davids Lynch and Fincher for that.) If you missed the hullabaloo this morning and are wondering how anyone could possibly think that John Carpenter hated his own movies, a (now-deleted) Letterboxd account wantonly posing as the famed Halloween director holds the answer. Even though the account had only about 100 followers before it was slashed, it was filled with parody gold like “I fucking hate this pile of shit and want every copy burned” for his 1992 film, Memoirs Of An Invisible Man (well, he actually kind of did hate that one) and the following for Halloween II, which we’ll just let you experience for yourself:

They paid me more money than I had ever seen to write a sequel to a film that did not need one. I took the check and spent it on beers to get me drunk enough to plow through this crap. I looked at the final script, which took a whopping 2 days to write, and said “wow, now that’s a piece of shit.” And it was.

I had faith in Rick Rosenthal and he did not deliver. I suppose I expected him to be a miracle worker and nobody could’ve made this work. I don’t regret hiring him.

Here are a few other gems from the account’s brief life. You can probably see why people so badly wanted to believe it was real. 

Of course, the whole thing was a massive hoax from the brain of some random user who just really hates Halloween II. (It’s been 43 years and 11 other Halloween movies since, but respect given to the commitment to haterism.) The fun ended when Carpenter himself dismissed the rumor in a pretty perfect way on Twitter/X this afternoon. “What the hell is a Letterboxd!??” he wrote from his real account (a message that the official Letterboxd page has obviously had a blast with).

If the other tells weren’t enough, a quick scroll through Carpenter’s Twitter should have dispelled any lingering speculation. While it’s vaguely believable that he’d use the film-logging app to really unload, the tone of the fake reviews could not have been further from his actual words, which are encouraging and humble almost to a fault. “Even though the Golden State Warriors lost…they played with poise and guts. They ROCK!!!!!” he posted last year. Recently, he mused, “Star on The Hollywood walk of fame?? There must be some mistake.” Even if you hate Memoirs Of An Invisible Man as much as whoever created the fake account, that’s a crazy statement to read from an extremely deserving artist.

Or maybe Carpenter wasn’t saying it to be humble. Maybe he secretly does hate his old work and finally got a chance to get some things off his chest before everyone else found it and forced him to pretend the whole thing was a ruse. Either way, there are some seeds of a great, Misery-style movie here. 

 
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