Many of John Carpenter's best horror movies are counted as some of the best horror movies ever made. From Halloween to They Live, the director's heyday saw him innovate one of filmmaking's most important genres only for his career to decline.

Looking at every John Carpenter horror movie and its score on IMDb shows the ups and downs of one of the most widely revered film directors of the 20th century and how even masters of a genre can have a few duds to their name.

11/11
Ghost Of Mars (2001) – 4.9


Ghosts of Mars is both John Carpenter's worst horror movie and his worst film overall according to voters on IMDb. While the bottom end of Carpenter's filmography can be ranked in various ways by fans, it should come as no surprise that this ended up taking last place on IMDb.

The plot and production design in the movie are quintessentially low-budget sci-fi fare, but Ghosts of Mars sadly lacks enough of the ingenuity and charm that made movies like Carpenter's Escape from New York so beloved. The story is confusingly framed, the world it's set in is underdeveloped, and, despite a great cast, the characters fail to leave an impression. Ice Cube has plenty of charisma as an actor, but he fails to transform into a Snake Plissken type for this movie. Similarly, Carpenter was known for his skills with genre filmmaking but couldn't quite reconcile the blend of noir, action, horror, sci-fi, and Western tropes required for this story about cops and outlaws fighting possessed colonists on Mars.

10/11
The Ward (2010) – 5.5


John Carpenter's final film to date, and the only one he directed after the critical and box office failure of Ghosts of Mars, was not as badly-received as the director's previous movie but was still not the return to form that had always been hoped for by his fans.

Set almost entirely within one female ward of a psychiatric hospital in the 1960s, the film is an interesting parallel to Carpenter's The Thingas it's the only movie in his filmography to feature a predominantly female cast. Still, with a lack of the kind of weird and grotesque ideas that made his earlier films famous and a fairly conventional twist, the psychological horror of the haunted ward failed to compel even longtime fans of the director's movies.

9/11
Village Of The Damned (1995) – 5.6


While the original 1960 adaptation of John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos is very highly-rated on IMDb, John Carpenter's remake is not, which is unfortunate given the film's strong roots, the fact that it was the last theatrically-released film of Christopher Reeve's career, and that Carpenter's movie from only the previous year is ranked as one of his best ever.

The classic story sees a town fall under the control of a group of eerie children, born under mysterious circumstances and possessing psychic powers. Sadly, like The Ward, it contained too few of Carpenter's hallmarks to feel like one of his best movies.

8/11
Vampires (1998) – 6.1


A rare hit of Carpenter's later directing career, Vampires stars James Woods as the leader of a group of vampire hunters who must hunt down and take on a powerful antagonist who killed most of his team.

Though the characters lack the kind of originality seen in John Carpenter's best movies, there's plenty of gore keeping the audience entertained throughout, and the film was well-received enough to spawn two direct-to-video sequels.