They Live
Description
Infamous for its extended, bone-crunching fistfight scene between “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and Keith David, John Carpenter’s 1988 cult favorite is also an ingenious satire of neoliberal politics that holds particular resonance in our second go-round of Trumpism. When drifter John Nada (Piper) dons a pair of sunglasses he’s found, he discovers the true faces of many of the country’s elites—they’re skull-faced aliens manipulating people to consume and conform to the status quo—and sees it as his mission to convince the real people to believe him and resist! Like The Matrix, which blew millions of minds a little over a decade later and also features some iconic sunglasses, They Live questions the fundamentals of reality and is even more direct in its criticism of mass media and capitalist consumption. Carpenter fans also won’t want to miss the Festival’s special outdoors screening of his eerie 1980 film The Fog. —Rod Armstrong
Attendee Information
This film is part of a 6-film retrospective focus on classic horror films including Chain Reactions (2024), The Babadook (2014), Carnival of Souls (1962), The Fog (1980), and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
Biographies
Writer, director, composer, and producer John Carpenter is one of the masters of contemporary genre filmmaking. He began his feature career with Dark Star (1974), the first of many cult classics that include Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), Halloween (1978), Elvis (1979), The Fog (1980), Escape from New York (1981), The Thing (1982), Christine (1983), Starman (1984), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), They Live (1988), In the Mouth of Madness (1994), and more. In 2019, the Cannes Film Festival awarded him with its Golden Coach.