How a Micro-Budget Student Film Changed Sci-Fi Forever

An anonymous reader writes: In the early 70s, young filmmakers John Carpenter and Dan O'Bannon created a spaceship tale for a graduation project -- little knowing it would influence Alien and many other works. Made for $60,000 by film school students, horror maestro John Carpenter's directorial debut Dark Star is now regarded as a sci-fi cult classic. Having just turned 50 years old, it's a world away from much of the sci-fi that came before it and would come after, neither space odyssey nor space opera, rather a bleak, downbeat and often absurd portrait of a group of people cooped together in a malfunctioning interstellar tin can. Arguably its most famous scene consists of an existential debate between an astronaut and a sentient bomb. Dark Star was a collaboration between Carpenter, who directed and scored the film, and Dan O'Bannon, who in addition to co-writing the script, acted as editor, production designer, and visual effects supervisor, as well as playing the volatile, paranoid Sergeant Pinback. They met as budding filmmakers at the University of Southern California. 'While [Carpenter and O'Bannon] couldn't be more dissimilar in personality, they were both very energetic and focused,' says Daniel Griffiths, director of Let There Be Light: The Odyssey of Dark Star (2010), the definitive documentary about the making of the film.

The sci-fi films of this period tended to be bleak and dystopian, explains John Kenneth Muir, author of The Films of John Carpenter -- films like Silent Running (1972), in which all plant life on Earth is extinct, or George Lucas's 1971 debut THX-1138, in which human emotion is suppressed. 'Dark Star arrived in this world of dark, hopeless imaginings, but took the darkness one step further into absurd nihilism.' Carpenter and O'Bannon set out to make the 'ultimate riff on Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey,' says Griffiths. While Kubrick's 1968 film, explains Muir, was one 'in which viewers sought meaning in the stars about the nature of humanity, there is no meaning to life in Dark Star'. Rather, says Muir, it parodies 2001 'with its own sense of man's irrelevance in the scheme of things'. Where Kubrick scored his film with classical music, Dark Star opens with a country song, Benson, Arizona. (A road in the real-life Benson is named in honor of the film). The film was even released with the tagline 'the spaced-out odyssey.' Dark Star captured the mood of the time in which it was made, says Muir, the atmosphere of Nixon's America. 'The 1960s was all about utopian dreaming and bringing change to America in the counterculture. The 1970s represent what writer Johnny Byrne called 'The wake-up from the hippie dream', a reckoning with the fact that the more things change, the more they stay the same.'

When Dark Star premiered at the FILMEX expo in 1974, the audience response was largely positive. 'They recognized the film's absurdist humor and celebrated its student film roots,' says Griffiths. It had a limited theatrical release in 1975, but it was not a commercial success. 'The film met with negative reviews from critics, and general disinterest from audiences,' says Muir. 'Both Carpenter and O'Bannon realized that all the struggles they endured to make the film did not matter to audiences, they only cared about the finished product. I think they were discouraged,' says Griffiths. The growth of the VHS market, however, helped it find its audience and propelled it towards cult status. Its influence can still be felt, perhaps most directly in Ridley Scott's Alien, for which O'Bannon, who died in 2009, wrote the screenplay. The two films share DNA. Alien is also set on a grotty working vessel with a bickering crew, only this time the alien wasn't played for laughs.

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