Review: ‘Christine’, Once Again, Proves the Brilliance of John Carpenter
The 1983 adaptation of Stephen King’s novel is dark, eerie and surprisingly thoughtful
I was reminded of, and have since been haunted by, John Carpenter’s Christine by rapper billy woods’ extended reference to the film. It has been years since I focused on Carpenter’s work in general, despite its quality, but woods’ reference brought such vivid images to mind that I had to go back to Carpenter’s adaptation of Stephen King’s novel. Suddenly, the film I had written off as a ridiculous story of a killer car — the tagline on my DVD copy states that Christine, the car, will ‘possess you then destroy you. She’s death on wheels’, for example — had been brought back, this time attached to far darker imagery and connotations.
In his song named after Carpenter’s 1983 film, woods tells a simple story (listen here). The opening verse captures the same kind of strange eeriness, an inexplicable tension, that Christine itself evokes. The lyrics tell three different stories, all of which are connected to the idea of Christine’s killer car. The first story in particular speaks of the narrator’s childhood, when he sees a dead man in the road. Years later, when dealing drugs and trying to avoid the police, woods feels the police presence as demonic. He…
