John Carpenter’s Escape from New York revisited

The Revisited series takes a look back at the 1981 John Carpenter / Kurt Russell classic Escape from New York

We’ve discussed John Carpenter on this channel as much or more than nearly any other director. Some of his movies, like The Thing, have gotten a different type of show appreciation via discussions on its behind the scenes in a WTF, a comparison with its novella source material, and a look at what its legacy is in a Deconstructing video, amongst a few others. Looking at his catalogue, there is a wealth of stuff that is firmly in the horror realm from Christine to In the Mouth of Madness, Prince of Darkness to Halloween. While he has some movies that are outside that wheelhouse like the western homage Assault on Precinct 13 or Academy Award winning sci-fi drama Starman, Escape from New York is something special. In addition to being one of my favorite films of all time, full stop, it’s also sneaky in its ability to horrify. While I won’t enrage the comments… yet… by calling it a flat-out horror film, its horror elements stand out more now than ever especially compared to some of its other parts. Call me Snake as we revisit Escape from New York.

Before we get into the crux of what makes this influential 1981 masterpiece more horror tinged than it seems, lets discuss it as a whole. What makes this movie so damn special? Starting with the cast you have Kurt Russell as S.D. “Snake” Plissken who rallied hard for this role to shake his Disney child actor persona and had worked with Carpenter already on a late 70s Elvis TV Biopic. He came up with a lot of the mannerisms like the Eastwood sounding voice and the eye patch and his lone screenwriting credit would eventually come when the character was pulled out of retirement for the ultimately disappointing Escape from LA. Many of the other actors were or would become involved with Carpenter. Tom Atkins had just done The Fog, Charles Cyphers joined in against leper pirates as well as being in Halloween, Jaime Lee Curtis, who only had done a voice for New York was a damn near Carpenter regular at this point, and Donald Pleasence would find roles before and after this movie with the horror maestro. Looking further you have Adrienne Barbeau who was married to Carpenter at the time while also tagging along for The Fog and Harry Dean Stanton who would go on to appear in Christine. That’s a LOT of people who made multiple movies with the director.

The ones who didn’t appear in other movies from Carpenter are just as special and memorable. Ernest Borgnine as Cabbie, Isaac Hayes as the Duke of New York, and the legendary Lee Van Clief as Hauck who plays foil to Snake’s anti-hero while having a mutual respect. Kurt Russell sounding like Eastwood is a fun touch as Van Cleef had starred opposite the western legend 15 years prior. All of these fun actors and characters miraculously don’t get lost in the shuffle of a sub-100-minute movie and that’s due to the plot, which seems simple enough, and the pace at which it moves. That simple plot follows New York city becoming ungovernable after crime rates jump 400%. In the far-off future of 1997, at least for 1981 purposes, the state is now the one maximum security prison for the whole country. You commit a crime and that’s where you go, no parole and no hope. With a world on the brink of war, the U.S. President’s plane goes down in the worst spot and a rescue attempt is made by sending in a lone man.

The one man is one of the quintessential badasses of all time. He doesn’t care about your president or your wars. Plissken is an anti-hero like no other. He’s capable of doing the job as we see him deftly land a plane on the top of a building and protect himself from incoming hordes. He also does what he needs to in order to get information on places that have things he needs or even more vital information. He doesn’t help people when he can as be evidenced by the poor woman being accosted in the tunnels and he points a gun at nearly everyone that knows him in New York. He lies and offers promises of escape that he can’t deliver on, at least not with certainty. He cares more about the tape that the president is in possession of than the actual president as that’s his ticket to avoiding head explosion. Even at the end when he holds the possible fate of the world in his hands, we don’t know for sure that any answer the president gives would have made Snake inclined to replace Cabbies’ music with the speech tape.

One thing that aids the relatively straightforward plot, and I say straightforward even if it is cool and fun in a way we would make up in our heads as kids using our toys, is a movie trope called the ticking clock that gives us, as well as the main character, something to think about. What’s novel here, if not slap you in the face obvious, is that the ticking clock mechanism is an actual ticking clock strapped to Snake’s wrist. While we often give John Carpenter movies their rightful praise, it’s not only him that creates these things. Love the character of Snake Plissken? You can thank Kurt Russell for making it his own and Nick Castle for helping Carpenter write the script. Love how the movie is shot with its natural light in an otherwise natural disaster of a post-apocalyptic hellscape? Give Academy Award nominee Dean Cundey his flowers for this and a handful of other projects he worked on with Carpenter.

Finally, we get a lot of newer movies that have synth scores that get the label of Carpenter-esque but look at a lot of his best and most famous scores and you’ll find a partner, collaborator, or unexpected guest like Ennio Morricone for The Thing. Here, it’s Alan Howarth and boy, if you need to do something in a hurry and want some free anxiety to speed things up, listen to “Over the Wall.” I always pictured it as Snake’s heart getting faster as he knows the timer is ticking away. Escape from New York works as well as it does because the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. Pieces of this movie wouldn’t work by themselves either but when you blend them all together it creates a stew that is worth sitting down to every time.

As you can see, the movie is a brilliant piece of dystopian sci-fi that has been copied and replicated but never bettered. I did promise you horror, though, so let’s get into that, starting with the score I mentioned before. While there are tracks that pump you up or make the on-screen action seem more intense than it is, there is also a sorrow and fear that permeates many of the tracks. Its lonely out there for Snake whether he feels it or not and when his plane lands inside New York, the score itself seems to be warning Snake of what’s to come. From “Across the Roof” to “Descent into New York” which starts with a literal jump scare both in the score and in the background, the uneasiness we get puts us on edge right up until poor Season Hubley, Kurt Russell’s then wife, gets pulled down to become a free meal.

The crazies themselves are horrifying in the sense that they are never explained. In fact, the whole explanation, or lack thereof, from the military guarding the prison about what goes on in there is terrifying. They don’t know how the inmates have the power that they do or who is in charge. When Romero, one of a handful of fellow horror director names used by Carpenter for characters, says if they try anything the president will die, they don’t even know he is being held by the Duke or who that is. They know the crazies exist but not why they are the way they are, nor do they care to solve that particular underground problem. The fact that a certain population of this prison are a cannibalistic tribe with no explanation could have been its own section of the movie or another movie altogether.

The idea of the prison itself is a horrible thought for the alternate timeline of 1997 too. The city that was originally hope for anyone from all over the world to seek refuge in is now where we put the worst our country has to offer. The posters and a lot of the advertising had the head of the statue of liberty destroyed and on the ground long before the Cloverfield monster threw it across downtown. It also doesn’t matter what you did to end up in New York, that’s where you will stay. Murderers, white collar criminals, and everything in between will be forced to figure everything out on their own and form alliances. One of my favorite things to ponder is why Ernest Borgnine’s Cabbie is there. He says he’s been driving cabs in the city for 30 years, but it hasn’t been a prison that long. Did he just stay as the uncoordinated chaos hit and the government enacted whatever plan they had for evacuation or is he just some sort or serial killer who took the persona of a cab driver and really thinks he has been there for so long. On a final note, the writers even knew how horrifying New York had become because as Snake is walking through to get ready for prison, we overhear that you have the option to self-terminate rather than accept your sentence. Maybe it’s better to not know what awaits you and perhaps being euthanized is a better option than trying to escape New York. Lending credence to this is when we see prisoners trying to escape on a raft and let themselves be blown up rather than go back to the city.

Escape from New York is one of those movies that only gets better with time but also is a one-of-a-kind film. We have had multiple attempts at remakes with Leigh Whannell rumored to have a go at it and even an attempt to bring Kurt Russell’s own son in to play the character. It got a fun but underwhelming sequel, tons of comics including a mega Kurt crossover with Big Trouble in Little China, and an attempted video game that sadly never materialized. The character of Solid Snake from the Metal Gear series is as close as we will ever get to a continuation of a character that is as cynical and badass as Snake Plissken. Luc Besson even produced a movie so close to Escape from New York‘s themes, that Carpenter sued them and won. If you want to see “we have Escape from New York at home,” check out Lockout, but if you want to watch the movie with a new lease on just how sneaky a horror movie it can be, throw on the new 4K from Scream Factory and remember, the name’s Plissken.

Two previous episodes of Revisited can be seen below. To see more of our shows, head over to the JoBlo Horror Originals channel – and subscribe while you’re at it!