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John Carpenter is one of the most influential genre filmmakers of the past few decades, having created cult classics and cinematic landmarks such as Halloween, The Thing, and Escape From New York, among countless others. Despite his impressive amount of creations, though, the director and composer has a lengthy list of unmade and unrealized projects that either never saw the light of day or were picked up by someone else. Unfortunately for Carpenter fans, a decent chunk of these would arguably have made for riveting cinema if they ever reached completion.

Few filmmakers have had a tumultuous of a career as John Carpenter, who enjoyed success early in his career but met commercial failure throughout his working years. He didn't fare much better on the critical side at first, either, but since their time of release, his films have been reevaluated by audiences of all backgrounds and have become classic pieces of genre filmmaking in their own right. However, Carpenter's bad luck at the box office partly led to his accumulation of uncompleted projects.

Carpenter has largely stepped away from filmmaking in the twenty-first century and spends most of his time playing video games and watching basketball, so it's unlikely fans will ever get to see him finally realize all of his ideas. Still, though, the man is iconic enough and was prolific enough to develop cult followings for even his unfilmed screenplays. Here are all of his uncompleted creative ventures that would be a dream come true if they had made it to the big screen.

Meltdown

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One of John Carpenter's earliest projects was this slasher-like thriller that the director described as "Halloween in a nuclear power plant." The script, which is still available to read online, features a mysterious hazmat suit-clad figure hunting people down while a reactor meltdown threatens the crew of the plant. Carpenter stated that he penned the project in 1977, and it was originally entitled The Prometheus Crisis. The screenplay is tense, intertwining Cold War political commentary and the scientifically existential threat of a nuclear disaster with more traditional slasher fare. At one point, writer and director John Dahl replaced the killer with terrorists and Dolph Lundgren was attached to turn the story into an action movie, but studio legal troubles stopped the production from ever happening.

Firestarter

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Firestarter helped Drew Barrymore gain star recognition upon its release in 1984, but the film is barely remembered beyond being one of the actress's first major roles. Carpenter was originally slated to direct the movie, but he lost the job after the box office bomb that was The Thing. The new script, written by Stanley Mann, was apparently more faithful to Stephen King's novel, but King himself stated that he was unsatisfied with the final result. Carpenter would go on to direct another Stephen King adaptation, Christine, to an unsurprisingly better critical legacy.

The Ninja

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An adaptation of Eric Van Lustbader's martial arts revenge tale revolving around Japanese mysticism sounds like a fascinating fit for Carpenter, who has proven his unique prowess at the action genre. Originally, Irvin Kirshner of The Empire Strikes Back fame was going to direct the film, but talks with producers at 20th Century Fox fell flat. Carpenter didn't fare much better, with Fox telling him that his screenplay was impossible to film. The director left out of creative frustration, but thankfully went on to create his own take on martial arts adventure films with Big Trouble in Little China.

Santa Claus: The Movie

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A family-friendly Santa film directed by the oft-proclaimed Master of Horror? That's what almost happened, except that Carpenter wanted to completely re-write the script, compose a score, cast Brian Dennehy in the lead role, and be allowed significant creative input on the final cut. Producers Ilya Salkind and Pierre Spengler of Superman moved on to hire Jeannot Szwarc to direct, but the final product was ultimately a huge bomb at the box office. One can only wonder what Carpenter's version would have been like.

Shadow Company

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Shadow Company is probably one of John Carpenter's most famous unfinished projects, with its script forming a cult following of its own over time. Not only was the Vietnam War zombie bloodfest to be helmed by the Master of Horror himself, but it was written by horror icon Fred Dekker of The Monster Squad and Hollywood screenwriter powerhouse Shane Black of Lethal Weapon fame. It was also supposed to star Kurt Russell, a recurring staple of Carpenter classics. Black described the project as a cross between Platoon and The Exorcist, and the story featured a squadron of undead super soldiers taking vengeance on American citizens to bring "the war home to those who betrayed it," in the words of the film's villain.

Pincushion

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Three decades before Charlize Theron's Furiosa would travel the wasteland in Mad Max: Fury Road, pop superstar Cher was set to star in a post-apocalyptic road trip in 1989. The script, penned by little-known writer John Raffo, is mostly known for being sold to Sony/Columbia for a whopping half a million dollars during the writers' strike that was going on at the time. However, the high budget, including the cost of Cher's housekeeping deal, sunk the project into development limbo.

Creature From The Black Lagoon

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Another of Carpenter's more well-known and lamented works-that-never-were was supposed to be a collaboration with makeup and special effects titan Rick Baker, who was in charge of the creature design. The project was actually Universal's revisit to the franchise after a failed attempt at a 3D remake helmed by John Landis in the early 1980s. Carpenter planned to expand upon the original movie's ideas on an amphibious evolutionary missing link by introducing more Lovecraftian themes, namely related to the killer fish people cult story, "The Shadow Over Innsmouth." Considering how seamlessly the director incorporated Lovecraftian elements and groundbreaking special effects in his remake of another 1950s horror film, The Thing From Another World, Creature from the Black Lagoon may have gone down as a classic. Alas, production stalled and never revved back up.

Riot

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Carpenter was slated to direct this blacklisted script written by Joe Gazzam and originally entitled Scared Straight, based on the notorious Academy Award-winning documentary of the same name about prisoners who traumatize teenagers into avoiding a life of crime. The project developed enough to cast Nicolas Cage in the role of an inmate who tries to protect one of the youths when a prison riot breaks out. An unhinged Nic Cage screaming at juvenile delinquents followed by a plot not too far removed from Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13 sounds more than intriguing, but the project disappeared after the actor left the project.

Darkchylde

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Darkchylde was on the road to becoming one of the late 2000s gritty comic book adaptations, but to this day remains unmade. The creation of artist Randy Queen, the story is about one Ariel Chylde, who can morph into nightmarish creatures to protect her town from the forces of evil. Test footage was released in 2010, proving that there was genuine interest in moving the project forward. Despite the character's popularity in the late nineties, though, the heroine has fallen into obscurity and probably won't receive a finished feature film.

Dead Space

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John Carpenter has gotten older, he has partially retired from filmmaking, and has publicly stated how much he plays and admires video games. However, a chance to adapt one of his favorite titles, Dead Space, could potentially bring him back behind the camera. The director has expressed his interest in helming the sci-fi horror, and EA initially had the film on a possible production slate, but the difficulty of a video game company financing a Hollywood script has caused the project to linger without forward momentum.

Tales For A Halloween Night Television Series

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Now would be as optimal a time as ever for a famous filmmaker like John Carpenter to shift to television, as the age of streaming brings more properties to the small screen. Syfy was supposed to bring his graphic novel anthology Tales for a Halloween Night to the small screen, but the project was announced as dead last year. In addition, Carpenter announced in 2017 that he was adapting Simon R. Green's Nightside series of fantasy noir novels for Universal's television production branch, but nothing has resulted from that deal, either.