50 Years Ago, Assault On Precinct 13 Proved Who John Carpenter Would Become

The 1970s were a volatile period of social, political, and cultural transformation in America. It was the decade that saw the Watergate scandal, a new era of the Civil Rights Movement, and the Attica prison riots, as well as a slowly growing wave of gang violence that would reach its crescendo in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. This transformation was sudden and ever-present: America was less than 20 years removed from televisions becoming a household fixture, meaning that every facet of the country’s chaotic metamorphosis was being beamed straight into people’s homes.

In the film industry, that wave of change was most obvious in the artistic movement we now call New Hollywood. The collapse of the Hays Code, transformations in technology, shifts in moviegoing demographics, and countless other changes created a period of renewed innovation and risk-taking among not only the major studios, but smaller, independent filmmakers — the decade gave us prestige darlings like The Graduate and Chinatown, as well as work from scrappy, low-budget artists like Walter Hill. This period of artistic and social bedlam would also give us one of the most influential genre filmmakers of all time in John Carpenter, and although his most famous film wouldn’t arrive until 1978, it was the film released 50 years ago today that defined his identity as a filmmaker.

“This can’t be happening! Not in the middle of the city, not today!” Spoken by one of the main characters an hour in, these lines from Assault on Precinct 13 represent precisely what made it such a harrowing watch. Even before Carpenter made suburbia terrified to trick-or-treat with Halloween, Assault on Precinct 13 brought a level of shocking carnage to middle-class America, a literalization of the abstract fear of rising crime and lawlessness. In it, Black highway patrol lieutenant Ethan Bishop (Austin Stoker), white Death Row convict Napoleon Wilson (Darwin Joston), desk secretary Leigh (Laurie Zimmer), and a few other survivors are forced into a tentative alliance when the decommissioned police precinct they’re working in is attacked by a bloodthirsty local street gang on its last night in operation.

Although a deeply contemporary film, Assault on Precinct 13 belongs to a cinematic lineage that runs back to the 1950s. After his debut, Dark Star, Carpenter was hired by producer J. Stein Kaplan to direct an exploitation film with complete creative control, provided the film would cost under $100,000. Carpenter, of course, seized the opportunity, wanting to make an homage to the films of Old Hollywood legend Howard Hawks. Rio Bravo (a Western siege thriller about a sheriff and his ragtag team fighting off an insurmountable gang) became the movie’s skeleton, but inspiration from the then-recent Night of the Living Dead helped provide the film’s flesh, with both films featuring a mob of wordless killers and a shockingly matter-of-fact approach to gratuitous violence.

The film’s central antagonists, a vicious gang known as Street Thunder, reflected collective fears of rising violent crime across the nation (particularly in Los Angeles, where Assault is set) but also feel unknowable and almost supernatural. Their crime spree is just one piece of a larger war between cops and robbers, but they feel less like the organized criminals you’d find in a traditional crime-thriller and more like a cult, complete with blood rituals and an almost hive-mind organizational structure. They are the definition of silent and deadly, and the ruthless, unfeeling violence they rain down on the film’s main characters feels like a vision of evil that would be perfected two years later with the creation of Michael Myers.

There’s a deliberate multi-ethnic diversity to the gang (Carpenter didn’t want to overemphasize a specific “type”) that has an ironic foil in the makeup of the Precinct 13 survivors, a group of unlikely heroes who’d traditionally never see the depth in each other. Lieutenant Bishop finds himself in a somewhat confined position of power, and without the film ever explicitly saying it, you get the feeling that he’s had to fight for every bit of respect he’s earned. Contrast that with Wilson, a convict the world stopped treating like a person long ago, or Leigh, a tough-as-nails woman who the world has probably overlooked most of her life.

While a cop and a convict might otherwise see each other as walking stereotypes, the situation’s severity quickly forces them to see the humanity and complexity in each other, a dynamic that evokes the lessons of the prisoner rights conversation of the ‘70s. The entire ensemble has an electrifying chemistry that endears you to their tenuous alliance, and you can see the spark that would lead to The Thing and its own cast of eclectic personalities trapped in a fraught, high-stress situation.

Assault on Precinct 13 offers a remarkable display of just how skilled and capable a filmmaker Carpenter already was by his second movie; the action is resourceful and white-knuckled, and while he never gets squeamish about the violent excesses of the exploitation film, there are also sobering moments that live in the quiet devastation of such senseless savagery. The film also contains one of Carpenter’s best scores, an ominous synth-and-drum cocktail with a main theme that feels as oppressive and inescapable as Street Thunder. The soundscape reinforces the superbly tense direction, creating a viewing experience akin to the feeling of being surrounded.

It’s neither his best nor most iconic movie, but it’s remarkably entertaining in a way that some filmmakers never accomplish across their entire careers. It’s a messy, thrilling encapsulation of how much Hollywood and America was changing. John Carpenter would become one of the most well-known figures in New Hollywood, giving audiences works with far more impactful legacies. But it’s this movie that gave us the filmmaker who changed the genre film landscape forever.

Assault on Precinct 13 is available on Tubi.