THERE’S SOME SHARED WISDOM THAT says that a classic story is one that’s never quite finished with what it has to say to us. That’s a fair definition of John Carpenter’s filmography, and certainly of Starman, which recently celebrated its 40th anniversary. It was a film that tapped into a sustained moment in the ’70s and ’80s when the real world of American space exploration fused with moviemakers’ imaginations.

“When I was a kid, I loved SF and horror movies,” Carpenter tells SFX. “Science fiction books, literature, short stories: I just fell in love with that stuff.” He adds emphatically, with a smile, “That was my stuff.” A key entry in the “stuff” that fired Carpenter’s imagination was the 1953 movie It Came From Outer Space.

A graduate of USC Film School in Los Angeles, Carpenter got to work as a filmmaker with his cherished genres of science fiction and horror in and then with.