Wealth & Money Quote by John Carpenter

Carpenter isn’t complimenting the industry so much as diagnosing it: Hollywood learns the wrong lesson quickly, then mass-produces it. The first sentence lands like a shrug with a knife in it. “One could” is doing heavy lifting, framing the slasher boom as less an artistic movement than an obvious arbitrage opportunity. Make it cheap, slap a calendar on it, and you’ve got a marketable premise with built-in publicity. The detail “killers attacking on holidays” is pointed because it’s so clearly a formula - a way to turn cultural rituals into branding. It’s not just that fear sells; it’s that familiarity sells.

The second sentence pivots into dry, defensive grace: “It is always flattering...” On the surface, it’s magnanimity. In subtext, it’s the director’s version of: sure, steal my homework, just don’t pretend it’s studying. Carpenter, shadowed by the endless Halloween imitators and holiday-themed slashers that followed, acknowledges that copying is a kind of recognition while simultaneously exposing it as industrial habit. Flattery becomes a consolation prize for having your innovation turned into content.

Context matters: Carpenter made Halloween on a shoestring and watched it reshape horror economics. This quote captures the double-edged legacy of that success - pride in cracking a code, annoyance that the code became the point. It’s a creator watching originality get franchised into predictability, and sounding just amused enough to keep from sounding bitter.