‘We used a beachball as an alien !’ John Carpenter on his gloriously shonky sci-fi comedy Dark Star

‘The control room buttons were upside-down ice-cube trays, one space suit had a dish-drying rack on it – and the special effects guy wrote the theme tune lyrics’ In 1970, I partnered with Dan O’Bannon, a classmate at the University of Southern California, on a senior student project. We wanted (…)