10/01/2026
We're so excited about this!
Every year we try to do something fun for October at Zombie Burger + Bird.
This year, we thought we’d pay homage to one of the cinematic greats, and the director behind some of my favorite movies of the season, John Carpenter.
But I didn’t want to just make a list of John Carpenter movies.
That’s too easy.
I wanted to go backwards a little bit.
What did Carpenter watch?
What scared him?
What movies gave him some of the pieces that eventually became Halloween, The Thing, Assault on Precinct 13, The Fog, Prince of Darkness and all of the other weird places he took us?
And then what happened after Carpenter?
Who picked up those pieces?
I’m not claiming every movie on this list was a direct influence. Some absolutely were. Some were movies Carpenter loved. Some probably just share a little DNA.
And some just belong to the same family of movies that feels right to me and brutha James.
That’s more interesting to us anyway.
So this October, we’re calling it:
ZOMBIE BURGER AND BIRD’S JOHN CARPEN-TOBER
31 days of Carpenter, what came before him, what came after him, and probably a few movies that just somehow belong here.
OCTOBER 1 / THE THING FROM ANOTHER WORLD, 1951
This one!
A group of scientists isolated in the Arctic discover something that really shouldn’t be there.
Carpenter loved this movie.
So much so that you can actually see it playing on the television in Halloween.
Then, about 30 years later, Carpenter went back to John W. Campbell Jr.’s original story, Who Goes There?, and made his own Thing.
Not really a remake of this movie.
Not really the same movie at all.
He went back to the source and made something much darker, stranger and, at least to me, one of the greatest horror movies ever made.
But before MacReady.
Before the blood test.
Before that damn dog.
There was this.
For John Carpen-Tober, this feels like a pretty good place to start.
