Director John Carpenter Still Railing Against Reagan Era

“They Live” was about more than just a gum-chewing hero and a horde of aliens gussied up as your friends and neighbors.

The 1988 sci-fi film, a clunky classic from director John Carpenter, railed against media manipulation and consumer excess. And, of course, the Reagan/Thatcher regimes, according to the director.

Here’s Carpenter, doing promotional interviews to sell copies of the new Blu-ray edition of his film (Capitalism alert!), noting how “prescient” his lark of a movie turned out to be.

“The ’80s never ended,” Carpenter said. “The consumerism has gotten bigger since then. It’s all still going on. That’s why it seems prescient. That was just a cry in the dark against Reaganism and Thatcherism. There was nothing particularly special about it — it was just my rage about what had happened to the culture, which is not shared by a lot of people. A lot of people thought everything was great – ‘Let’s make some more money.'”