Despite the promise of seeing Jason Statham shoot possessed ghouls in space, Ghosts Of Mars was a box office disappointment in 2001. What might have happened had John Carpenter directed it in the 1980s…?
In theory, Ghosts Of Mars sounded like everything filmmaker John Carpenter loved, thrown together into one pot. Even more unabashedly than his earlier films, it was a thinly-veiled western – in many respects, another reworking of Carpenter’s genre favourite Rio Bravo, a Howard Hawks film he’d freely borrowed from for his exploitation classic, Assault On Precinct 13.
Ghosts Of Mars was also a sci-fi horror, placing it in a similar bloody genre bracket as Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), by the 2000s already re-appraised as a masterpiece. And yet, despite everything it promised – and a premise that married ideas by Quatermass creator Nigel Kneale to those of the aforementioned Hawks – Ghost Of Mars was a critical and financial failure. It was quickly withdrawn from cinemas in 2001, and while reviews were perhaps a touch too harsh on the film at the time, it’s telling that, unlike other work by Carpenter that wasn’t appreciated on its initial release, his mashup isn’t regarded much more positively almost a quarter of a century later.
So what went wrong?
Again, the basis for an entertaining genre romp was at least there. Set in the 22nd century, it imagines Mars as a dusty, barely-tamed settlement much like the Old West. In the ironically-named Shining Canyon, a remote mining outpost far outside the dusty metropolis of Chryse, the discovery of an ancient burial site unleashes a plague of supernatural Martians which are capable of taking over human bodies and turning them into ghoulish killing machines.
Battling the threat is Natasha Henstridge as the tough-talking, gunslinging Lieutenant Ballard, who forges an unlikely alliance with a convicted criminal, ‘Desolation’ Williams (Ice Cube), as well as Dr Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy) the archaeologist who accidentally dredged up the deadly force in the first place. Also along for the violent ride are Jason Statham, Pam Grier and Clea DuVall, all somewhat anonymous members of the Mars Police Force.
From the eclectic cast to the B-movie plot, Ghosts Of Mars was clearly intended as a fun genre piece from the beginning, though the production itself sounded less than enjoyable in places. Courtney Love was initially cast in the lead role as Ballard, but she bailed a week before production was due to begin; ex-model Henstridge, who’d made her acting debut in Roger Donaldson’s schlocky 1995 monster film Species, was ushered in as her replacement with almost no time to prepare (the rest of the cast went through some sort of weapons-and-combat bootcamp).
A fair chunk of Carpenter’s $28m budget was spent on trying to turn a large corner of Eagle Rock, California into something that resembled Mars. Much of the external action was shot in an old gypsum mine, which then had to be sprayed with dye in order to make the chalk-white surfaces a Martian shade of red.
“The first night of shooting,” Carpenter told Cinefantastique magazine at the time, “the leaders of the Pueblo Indians came up and their religious figure blessed the set. We needed all the help we could get; it was the monsoon season. It rained every day. We had to redo the red dye every day.”
Meanwhile, special makeup effects artist Greg Nicotero – whose work stretches from 1985’s Day Of The Dead via 1987’s Predator to Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time In Hollywood – spent countless hours conjuring up the film’s possessed horde. Several sequences required over a hundred extras, all dressed up in scarified, vaguely death metal-inspired makeup, and getting them ready took hours. Worse, almost the entire movie takes place at night, meaning the cast and crew were working from the late afternoon and well into the early hours of the next morning.
“We’d get [to set] at 4pm, and we wouldn’t start shooting until 9pm,” Nicotero told Cinefantastique, “so we would work five hours and do a massive assembly line of prosthetics. Then they would shoot all night, and they’d wrap and we’d have to clean everybody up. So we were working from four in the afternoon until eight or nine the next morning.”
One bout of shooting in Albuquerque was, Nicotero said, “like guerilla warfare.”
“We were in the middle of the desert,” he said, “freezing wind coming in, rain, and it was really hard.”
The shoot appeared to take its toll on Henstridge, who, when Cinefantastique journalist Denise Dumars visited the Ghosts Of Mars set in 2000, was nowhere to be found. Henstridge was said to be one of several members of the cast who’d gone down with a cold; Carpenter, however, said that “We had to shut down for three or four weeks,” due to Henstridge’s illness. “It wasn’t just a cold. She had to stay home.”
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Jason Statham, by contrast, seemed far more chipper at this stage in the production. “Oh yeah, I love it,” Statham chirped when asked about his various action scenes. Even shooting in the harshness of the desert didn’t seem to bother him; “It was dusty, windy at times, but I found it slightly more enjoyable than being stuck here,” he said, referring to a disused power station that had been dressed as a stand-in for a Martian jailhouse.
Certainly, John Carpenter was used to difficult shoots. His earliest films, including Assault On Precinct 13 and Halloween, were made creatively on tiny budgets. The Thing enjoyed the backing and resources of a major studio (Universal) but required weeks of filming in chilly British Columbia and a brutally long shoot on a refrigerated Hollywood soundstage with complex special effects that took hours to set up and often went wrong.
The problem for Ghosts Of Mars, perhaps, was that Carpenter had grown cynical about filmmaking by the turn of the millennium. An astonishing run of films in the 70s and 80s was followed by some less even work in the 1990s; Memoirs Of An Invisible Man was an expensive flop for Warner Bros in 1992, and it’s fair to say that Carpenter didn’t get along too well with its star, Chevy Chase. In The Mouth Of Madness (1994), was arguably Carpenter’s best film of that decade, and certainly deserved to fare better with audiences and critics; instead, it barely made its $8m budget back for New Line, at least in cinemas.
Village Of The Damned (1995), a remake of the British 1960 classic, fared even worse. Escape From LA (1996) was far from a hit, though its off-kilter approach to following up Carpenter’s own Escape From New York looks more bold with each passing year.
By the late 1990s, Carpenter had admitted that Escape From LA had left him feeling disillusioned about the process of filmmaking, and that he almost left the industry altogether before he got the offer to make the 1998 horror-western, Vampires. “I was actually toying with getting out of the business for a while and I couldn’t decide if I should,” he said in 1997. “It stopped being fun.”
Although there are worthwhile ideas in both, it’s a wonder what Carpenter would have done with the same material had he tackled Vampires and Ghosts Of Mars in the early 1980s rather than the early 2000s.
Carpenter had begun his film career wanting to make westerns; he co-wrote, edited and composed the music for the 1970 short film, The Resurrection Of Broncho Billy, which won an Academy Award.
Around the same time, the young Carpenter wrote the screenplay Blood River, a western which almost became a vehicle for John Wayne. Due to the star’s advancing years and bouts of illness, he never starred in it; instead, it emerged 20 years later as a TV movie directed by Mel Damski and co-starring Wilford Brimley (who was so brilliant in The Thing) in the role originally eyed by Wayne.
At one stage, Carpenter himself wanted to direct Blood River, but his fame as a horror filmmaker, and the dwindling popularity of the western, meant it never happened. Nor did El Diablo, another western Carpenter co-wrote in the early 1980s; again, he wanted to shoot it himself, and once said he planned to get it into production after completing The Fog. Like Blood River, El Diablo eventually surfaced as a TV movie in 1990, this one directed by Peter Markle.
All of which is a round-about way of saying that Carpenter always wanted to direct a pure western, and both Vampires and especially Ghosts Of Mars were westerns with only the lightest handfuls of other genres laid atop. Had Carpenter made them at the height of his creative powers in the 1980s, they may even have emerged as among his best films. Ghosts Of Mars, in particular, could have been a trashy yet gripping siege movie, fusing the suspense and claustrophobia of Assault On Precinct 13, the gunplay and cynicism of Escape From New York and the outlandish gore of The Thing.
In two separate essays, writers Ryan Harvey and John Kenneth Muir pointed out the potential tucked away in Ghosts Of Mars’ premise. In essence, it’s a deconstruction of earlier Hollywood westerns and their tropes that would otherwise (rightly) look distasteful to modern audiences. The demon-possessed Martians are an obvious stand-in for the aggressive Native American antagonists commonly seen in the westerns of the 1940s and earlier, while Ballard’s line, “This is about one thing: dominion… this isn’t their planet anymore,” is reflective of a colonialist mindset once commonplace in westerns.
“I do not believe John Carpenter holds any actual malice toward Native Americans,” Harvey writes. “His motivation here was probably similar to the reason Gus Van Sant wanted to attempt a shot-for-shot remake of Psycho: to find out what it’s like to stand in the shoes of long dead filmmakers and imitate what otherwise could not be made today. Carpenter took a discarded Hollywood myth – an unpleasant one – and used science fiction as a disguise to openly play with it, and even make it more extreme.”
Regrettably, any intent to pick apart the movie western or flip the patriarchal trappings of a Howard Hawks film (the society in Ghosts Of Mars is pointedly introduced as a matriarchy) are buried under some of the flattest filmmaking in Carpenter’s career. An eclectic cast fumble through indifferent dialogue, awkwardly-lensed action scenes, while the whole thing looks curiously less expensive than its $28m budget might suggest.
During filming, Carpenter himself appeared testy, at least towards Cinefantastique’s reporter. Seemingly wounded by reviews of Halloween and The Thing written at the time of their releases years earlier, Carpenter somehow concluded that both the magazine and its readers as a whole hated his movies. “Truly, stay home and watch Buffy, man,” Carpenter said to writer Denise Dumars. “Don’t go to see my films… tell your readers to not go see this movie – under any circumstances! I’m never gonna make another good movie.”
It’s impossible to say whether Carpenter had his tongue in his cheek when he said all this, though the passing of time makes it feel sadly prophetic. Audiences – whether they were Cinefantastique readers or not – failed to rush out to see Ghosts Of Mars. In the years since, he’s only occasionally returned to directing, having made two episodes of the series Masters Of Horror and one feature film, 2010’s horror-thriller, The Ward.
In a 2022 interview with The New Yorker, Carpenter was candid about just how worn out he was during the making of Ghosts Of Mars. “I was exhausted,” he said. “That was the big thing. I remember seeing a behind-the-scenes [featurette], and it showed me on set working, sitting in the scoring session. God, I’d aged. Tired and ancient. And I thought, I can’t do this anymore. It was too rough. For me, it became not worth it. And I didn’t want to say that about movies. Movies are my first love, my life.”
Despite all that exhaustion, Carpenter’s love of movies still pops up from time to time in Ghosts Of Mars. It’s there in the shot of a burning stuntman – a clear homage to Hawks’ The Thing From Another World, a film that made young Carpenter throw his popcorn in the air as a kid. It’s there in Carpenter’s characteristically murmuring score – a kind of metal twist on his music for Assault On Precinct 13.
Then there are those shots of the possessed horde, descending in their hundreds as the heroes retreat to the safety of an armoured train, lobbing explosives and firing shotguns. In the midst of all the chaos, Clea DuVall’s character is struck in the neck by a flying disc, leading to a seamless, shockingly abrupt decapitation. You can almost hear Carpenter cackling somewhere far off behind the camera.
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