Earlier this month, I attended the Up All Night: Pay to Get Out Horror Movie Marathon at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, Long Island, New York. This is the second year I’ve done this, so it’s now an annual tradition for me. The theater hosts many special events throughout the year, but for horror fans their movie marathons are something special. This year, 7 films were advertised with a mystery 8th film to cap off the marathon before a special bagel breakfast for those who survived the evening, along with the guaranteed $10 refund. Here’s a rundown of my experience at this year’s event, which took place on Saturday, August 3, 2019.

The long-awaited next movie in the Halloween franchise will finally arrive in theaters in just a couple of days. And it’s a special one. Not just because it brings back original star Jamie Lee Curtis and original Michael Myers/The Shape Nick Castle, but also because the man behind the original, director and co-writer John Carpenter, was once again involved in making the film as an executive producer, creative consultant, and composer.

Obviously those involved with the movie are doing their part to promote it, including Carpenter. And while the focus is mainly on Halloween, other things sometimes come up. During a recent chat, Carpenter hinted at a possible sequel to his 1988 sci-fi horror cult classic They Live. See what he had to say below.

If someone penned a biography of me, it would be called “Pro Wrestling and Horror Movies.” Okay, maybe it would have a more clever title, but you get the idea. Someone who linked those two geek subgenres was “Rowdy” Roddy Piper. I was 5 years old when I watched Piper defeated Adrian Adonis at Wrestlemania III in what was billed as his last match. So a year later, when I saw Piper was the star of a movie, I needed to see it. The film was John Carpenter‘s They Live, a sci-fi action thriller that to a young kid, was about ugly aliens and CURSING! As I’ve gotten older, They Live has grown into an outright cult classic, with themes much deeper than my 6-year old brain could understand. And with the unfortunate and untimely passing of Roddy Piper on Friday, at the age of 61 from cardiac arrest, it assures They Live will live on forever, for both pro-wrestling and horror movie fans.

Rather than write a review of a near 20-year old film, let me simply point out some of the reasons They Live earned its cult status:

For the better part of the last 40 years, Roderick George Toombs was known to the world as “Rowdy” Roddy Piper, the bombastic, loudmouth, straight shooting, dastardly, wrestler, and movie star. Nicknamed the Hot Rod, Piper was at times as big a star as Hulk Hogan, and is beloved by cult movie watchers for his turn in John Carpenter’s sci-fi classic They Live. The WWE hall-of-famer died in his sleep at his Hollywood home on Thursday from cardiac arrest, and was found on Friday.

I don’t know if John Carpenter, one of my favorite directors of all time, will ever again make a movie as good as the genre classics he used to blast out back in the golden days before old school directors like him would be forced to slog away in the salt mines of direct-to-video filmmaking. But during that wonderful near-two decade period when he was without equal in the ranks of America’s finest and most prolific directors, Carpenter made many classics that would endear him forever to fans of science-fiction, horror, and action cinema, and his 1988 film They Live was possibly the last truly great feature he would ever sit behind the camera on.

Held over the weekend in Dallas, TX and co-sponsored by Rue Morgue Magazine, the horror convention Texas Frightmare Weekend hosted a panel discussion with the three stars of They Live – former WWF (now WWE) superstar Roddy Piper, Keith David (who also co-starred in another Carpenter classic – 1982’s The Thing), and 1980’s genre mainstay Meg Foster (Blind Fury, Welcome to Arrow Beach). Rue Morgue’s managing editor Dave Alexander moderated the hour-long panel.

You can watch a 16-minute compilation of highlights from the spirited discussion here below.