John Carpenter’s First Student Film Is Unearthed

Just in time for the Halloween festivities to begin is John Carpenter’s first student film. According to The Hollywood Reporter, his film has been found in the archives at the University of Southern California.

With this find, the film known as Captain Voyeur will be restored with the help of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

“Captain Voyeur follows a man at a boring computer job who eyes a woman at work and follows her home. He dons a mask and attempts to kill her but is shot by his co-worker.”

John Carpenter wrote and directed the film for an introductory film class  at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts in 1969. The film is said to be 8-minutes long and is shot in black & white. According to Dino Everett the “film has visual and thematic ties to the writer-director’s 1978 classic Halloween.”

Also Everett told THR that “at one point, the voyeur puts on a pair of glasses over his mask, much in the manner that Michael Myers wore glasses over the bedsheet covering his head in the Halloween prologue…. Captain Voyeur is shot from the point of view of the attacker, and the woman being stalked “could have been a young Jamie Lee Curtis,”