This might be underselling it a bit, but the original They Live is one of the best sci-fi B-movies of all time. Written and directed by John Carpenter, it features one of “Rowdy” Roddy Piper’s greatest performances, on of the best fight scenes in any movie, one of the best badass lines in any film, and an allegorical plot that resonates as much today as it did when it was first released on November 4, 1988. The cult classic has many fans, myself included, and we might be in luck.
John Carpenter is doing the publicity rounds for the latest Halloween sequelboot., a film which he executive produced and composed the score for. He did an interview with Den of Geek, and the conversation came around to which of his other works might he revisit in the present day:
Would you be up for a similar sequel to any of your other films, the way this Halloween is being done? With the right filmmaker in place, the right script in place, would you be up for doing something along these lines?
I don’t know. Let’s see the next proposal. I can’t do a blanket kind of, “Oh, okay. Yes, I’ll do that.” I don’t know, but I’m up for almost anything that involves money. That’s a nice thing. It’s always nice.
If you took something like They Live, for example, given how much worse the world and the political landscape have become in the past 25-30 years, how would you refashion that today?
Well, I’m not gonna tell you about that, because it might be closer to reality than you think.
There was a remake in development.
There was a feature film. It was a feature film called Resistance, written by, oh, the guy who did the Apes movies. Matt Reeves. But then he moved on, and so the sequel is, well, we’ll see. We’ll just have to see.
So, okay. It is not a definite confirmation. It might not officially count as a hint. But if you read between the lines, it sounds like Carpenter has had some involvement in a They Live sequel, it is being worked on, and might be close to becoming a reality.
Or that could be the fanboy in me projecting my hopes onto a vague answer to a question. But one can hope can’t he?
For those of you unfamiliar with the film, Piper play a drifter named John Nada. He stumbles upon a special set of sunglasses that lets him in on a horrible secret–that the Earth has been infiltrated by a race of aliens who have been keeping humans docile through subliminal messages. The glasses allow Nada to see through their disguises and see the world as it really is.
Obviously, the themes at play in 1988 are still in play in 2018. Piper died in 2015, but, {SPOILER} the film would have had to carry on without his character anyway. It will be interesting to see if Carpenter’s hints pay off into something real down the line.
