John Carpenter

Carpenter grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky, the son of a music professor, and has said the town's isolation and his own outsider status as a horror-obsessed kid shaped the wary, watchful tone that would define his films. He studied filmmaking at USC alongside a cohort of future industry names, co-writing and scoring a student short that won a student Academy Award before he'd even finished the program.

Master of the widescreen frame and the pulsing synth score, which he usually wrote and performed himself, Carpenter's paranoid, blue-collar science fiction horror aged better than almost anything else from its era. He broke through with the ultra-low-budget slasher Halloween in 1978, made for a fraction of the cost of a studio picture and one of the most profitable independent films ever produced, then spent the 1980s working almost exclusively with a small, loyal repertory of actors and crew, including regular leading man Kurt Russell.

Long undervalued by critics on initial release — several of his best-known films were commercial disappointments or outright flops in their original theatrical runs — his 1980s output is now widely regarded as one of the most influential and rewatched runs in genre filmmaking, and he has been cited as a direct influence by several generations of horror and action directors since.