John Carpenter

Siege cinema in widescreen. Carpenter's films put a small, mismatched group inside a perimeter — a police station, an Antarctic base, a city turned prison — and apply pressure until the group turns on itself. The threat is usually less frightening than the paranoia it induces, and the institutions that should help are absent, corrupt, or the actual enemy.

Signature

• Anamorphic frames held wide and still; the danger enters the composition rather than being cut to.
• His own synthesiser scores — minimal, pulsing, doing the work an orchestra would.
• Working-class antiheroes with no interest in being heroic (Snake Plissken, Nada, MacReady).
• Distrust of institutions as a structural premise, not a subplot: Institutional Corruption and Surveillance & Control recur even in the monster pictures.
• Genre form treated as sufficient — the ideas are delivered inside the B-movie, never above it.