Great Director, Lousy Script: John Carpenter and "Cigarette Burns"

Click for a better jpeg, if not for a better film.

Twenty years ago, when I watched John Carpenter's "Cigarette Burns," I found it a disappointing mess. Having watched it again, I feel that I was generous in my assessment. I blame the script by Drew McWeeny and Scott Swan, but I also blame Carpenter, who is too good a director not to have noticed how the script falls apart.

Yet even a failed story can offer something to think about, or in this case, writing mistakes to avoid.

1) Seven minutes into the film, the protagonist is given a clear view of something uncanny, of something perhaps even supernatural. His response? Nothing. He sees it, and walks away.

Under the circumstances, most people would ask, "What are you showing me? What the hell is THIS?" Smart people would run away, and want nothing more to do with it. Yet the blank protagonist seems untouched by this encounter, perhaps because the plot requires that he remain untouched.

This puts the emphasis backwards. In a good film like Jacques Tourneur's NIGHT OF THE DEMON, the protagonist, a skeptic, encounters hints of the supernatural, but as a rational man, he refuses to accept them as anything more than tricks of stage magic and psychology. Only as the plot develops does he begin to recognize the danger he faces. That the film shows the viewers, right from the start, that this is indeed a tale of the supernatural, does nothing to undermine the protagonist's movement from skepticism to alert awareness. In contrast, the protagonist of "Cigarette Burns," warned with immediate, direct evidence of something terribly wrong, seems like a fool.

2) When a story builds up the idea that something horrible is out there, waiting to be revealed, the pay-off should justify the build-up. For example, in THE SHOUT (hardly a favourite of mine), the Shout is presented as a terrible magical weapon, and when it finally comes into use, the film succeeds (for me, at least) in making its impact appropriately disturbing. That moment hit me, just as the moment when Mrs. Bates is finally revealed hit me, just as the "kennel" moment in John Carpenter's THE THING hit me.

In contrast, when shots of the legendary horror film at the centre of "Cigarette Burns" are finally revealed, they offer nothing that has not been shown in the story before this; they offer no sense of anything unusual or shocking. Indeed, they offer standard images that you could find in any horror film, so what was the point of that build-up?

No, "Cigarette Burns" is a mistake. I respect John Carpenter, I love many of his films, but this one serves only to warn the rest of us of what not to do.