There are few directors who can make great movies over and over without letting the odd underwhelming effort slip through the cracks; fewer still who can knock out quality films one after the other on an annual schedule. American filmmaker John Carpenter scored five knock-out films in five years when between 1980 and 1984 he helmed The Fog, Escape from New York, The Thing, Christine, and Starman. Stretch the timeline back two years in either direction and you hit Halloween or Big Trouble in Little China. Whatever way you appreciate Carpenter’s output at his height – and critics and fans have appreciated him a lot – it is difficult to think of a more impactful director of science fiction, fantasy, and horror over that period. Spielberg managed two Indiana Jones and E.T. Ridley Scott had Blade Runner. Cameron directed The Terminator. Really, in the English-speaking world at least, the first half of the 1980s belonged to John Carpenter.

His 1983 film Christine is based on the Stephen King novel, and came out in the middle of the first large-scale wave of King adaptations alongside Cujo, The Dead Zone (both 1983), Children of the Corn, and Firestarter (both 1984). To my mind it is the best of the set: a first-rate horror film that absolutely nails King’s nostalgic small-town aesthetic while doing a superb job of actually making an engaging thriller out of an evil car.

At the film’s centre is Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon), a nerdy teenager whose plan to become more popular at school focuses entirely on a dilapidated Plymouth Fury. He begins the film as something of a stereotype. He ends it entirely changed and rendered a dangerous obsessive. That transition is a difficult one to translate from page to screen, since King had a few hundred pages and Carpenter had 110 minutes, but even in its truncated form it’s remarkably effective.

At first you could easily assume Arnie was the film’s central character, but that emerges as his more successful friend Dennis (My Science Project‘s John Stockwell). More popular than Arnie, but not so popular he’s ignored by local bully “Buddy” (William Ostrander), he shapes up a classic ‘everyperson’ protagonist King favours so much in his writing. It is a hard character to make interesting. Stockwell does a great job. It is honestly a rock-solid cast all round: Ostrander may be visibly too old for his role, but commits, and both Alexandra Paul and Roberts Blossom do good work in supporting roles.

The titular car is a particular highlight. Donald M. Morgan’s photography does a fantastic job of bringing an inanimate object to life, and a key sequence involving the car in slow motion, on fire, running down its prey is memorable and iconic. The practical effects used to show Christine magically undoing dents, scrapes, and other damage are tightly edited and well-presented. It would be ridiculous to claim that the film has not dated, but if told the film was made considerably later than 1983 I would have believed it.

To an extent Christine gets overlooked by Carpenter fans, in favour of its more cult-like stablemates. It is well worth revisiting, however, and given its due. The film is honestly ageing very, very well.