The typical trajectory of John Carpenter movies goes something like this: mixed to negative box office, mixed to negative reviews, and a decades-later reassessment as the film in question develops a cult following. It happened with The Thing, which is now considered a horror classic. It happened with They Live and Prince of Darkness. It’s even happened with the once-panned likes of In the Mouth of Madness and Ghosts of Mars. But it has not, as yet, happened with Carpenter’s final film, The Ward.
Just take a look at the Criterion Channel, with its spooky-season “Directed by John Carpenter” collection, assembling the majority of the horror auteur’s filmography, which includes flops like Vampires and Memoirs of an Invisible Man. The Ward, however, is conspicuously absent, despite arguably being Carpenter’s best all-around since They Live in 1988. Luckily, The Ward is streaming on Prime Video, Peacock, and Tubi, among others, awaiting a much-deserved rediscovery.
The Ward hearkens back to limited-location Carpenter projects like Assault on Precinct 13 and The Thing — his work closest to the movies of Howard Hawks, whose genre-diverse movies Carpenter remade both officially (The Thing adapts the Hawks film The Thing from Another World) and not (Assault was partially inspired by Rio Bravo). One big difference is a flipped gender ratio, where the location under siege is a women’s ward at a psychiatric hospital in 1966 Oregon. That’s where Kristen (Amber Heard) arrives after she’s found at the site of a house fire she started. She claims to have no memory of anything prior to the incident, but nonetheless regards Dr. Stringer (Jared Harris) with anger and suspicion.
In the ward, Kristen meets other patients: Emily (Mamie Gummer), the wild one; Sarah (Danielle Panabaker), the flirty one; Iris (Lyndsy Fonseca), the artistic one; and Zoey (Laura-Leigh), the childlike one. There’s also some chatter about Tammy and Alice, patients who have recently disappeared. (Is Tammy that mysterious Tamara those Strangers keep asking after?) In short order, Kristen encounters a menacing ghostly figure, and as it threatens her and the other patients, she tries to puzzle out a possible escape in between therapies ranging from hypnotic to electro-shock. Her memories remain mostly blank, though mysterious cutaways show a basement with a young girl (played by a 13-year-old Sydney Sweeney!) chained up as a prisoner.
The screenplay from Michael and Shawn Rassmussen, who wrote the similarly stripped-down horror thriller Crawl, is pretty boilerplate stuff. The Ward is also, unlike Ghosts of Mars or Escape from L.A., a Carpenter movie where the budget (apparently low) better matches the material’s ambitions. Without a litany of special effects requirements gumming up the works, Carpenter seems better focused on composing his widescreen shots and snaking his camera through the hospital hallways.
The Ward isn’t deeply frightening, but for a film of confinement, it has a lot of momentum as Carpenter trails Kristen’s frantic sprints down corridors and around darkened corners, not overrelying on the B-movie dialogue to tell his story. The movie’s 35mm cinematography — Carpenter retired before digital became the dominant medium just a few years later — still looks great, and Carpenter expertly places his characters in the frame, shorthanding how the women function together (or don’t) as a group. In one charming scene, the patients take a radio dance break in the midst of a thunderstorm, and Carpenter pulls back wide enough to capture multiple moves at once.
Especially after the cheeseball machismo of Vampires and Ghosts of Mars, it’s novel to see Carpenter immerse in a cast of women for what amounts to his second time ever, after Halloween. Amber Heard has somewhat bafflingly become a figure of controversy in recent years, which has obscured what a solid genre actress she is, able to play ridiculous realities with straight-faced toughness that would work equally well in an ‘80s slasher or a ‘40s noir melodrama. (Elements of both are present here.) Even as the movie blatantly withholds information from Kristen and its viewers, Heard makes her Final Girl resilience likably scrappy.
The rest of the cast is flatter and more archetypal by design — which includes an ending that might well sour some viewers on the whole enterprise. Carpenter is working well within a B-movie tradition here; save for a smidge more explicitness (it’s a relatively soft R), The Ward could have come out around the mid-’60s where it’s set. This means including a plot turn that would have been a lot more novel back then.
But there’s resonance, too, in where The Ward ends up, whether Carpenter intended it or not. Kristen is essentially challenged with whether she will suppress or confront her trauma. In doing so, the movie both anticipates the trajectory of trauma-focused horror narratives of the next decade-plus, and functions as a concise farewell to Carpenter’s big-screen horror career. Kristen’s kicking-and-screaming reluctance to submit to a greater design reads as a rumination on whether true horror stories can or should receive real closure.
Resonant or not, audiences might have booed anyway, if they’d even had a chance. After a Toronto Film Festival debut that recently passed its 15th anniversary, The Ward eventually arrived in commercial release in summer 2011, a few months after Sucker Punch, another genre movie set in a hospital. It received only a tiny fraction of the attention afforded that higher-profile flop; its brief theatrical run essentially served as advertisement for a swift home-video release. (It was also prescient in that respect, though probably not in a way that anyone involved would have preferred.)
Despite appearances, though, The Ward is as assured as any other later-period Carpenter, and arguably works better on its modest terms than his experiments with sci-fi and Westerns. If Carpenter indeed never directs another movie, it’s not a bad picture to go out on. Now it’s just up to horror fans to reclaim it.
Where to watch: Prime Video, Peacock, and Tubi, among others.
Polygon’s annual Halloween Countdown is a 31-day run of short recommendations of the best horror movies, shows, TV episodes, and online specials to stream for the Halloween season. You can find the entire calendar here.
