Dark Star (1974)

Thursday, April 16 2026 Doors: 6:30 Screening 7:00pm

John Carpenter is the People’s Director. In his best work, he elevates “lowbrow” genres–sci-fi, action, horror–in films permeated by class consciousness and sympathetic to workers and other underdogs. In Escape from New York (1981), a folk hero convicted bankrobber is coerced into rescuing the Nixon-esque US president he despises. In The Thing (1982), an isolated ice station crew has their solidarity eroded by an infiltrator. In They Live (1987), an unhoused construction worker pierces the veil to see through to the heart of capitalist exploitation in what Carpenter described as an explicit critique of Reaganomics.

But before all that, there was Dark Star (1974), which started as an USC film school project but, in an example of reclaiming one’s own labor, Carpenter opted to drop out and abscond with the work in progress rather than relinquish the rights to the University (which retained ownership of all student efforts). Carpenter and his classmate collaborator Dan O’Bannon then secured outside funding to expand the film to feature length and in the process invented the “used future” aesthetic lifted by George Lucas for Star Wars (1977) and the blue collar astronaut “truckers in space” concept that O’Bannon himself recycled in his script for Alien(1979).

Despite its serious influence on Hollywood sci-fi, Dark Star itself plays for laughs. But just beneath its surface of schlocky slapstick and stoner humor, there is a claustrophobic existential discomfort and an earnest attempt at finding meaning in the void, as if to suggest that when one has traveled as far as it is possible to go, the only place left to turn is inward.

We’ll be setting the cosmic tone with landmark educational film short Powers of Ten (1977) as an interstellar appetizer. –RdR