John Carpenter Calls ‘Dead Ringers’ an ‘Actually Very Funny’ Film

John Carpenter is finding the humor in even the most absurdly gruesome of dramas.

The legendary horror director cited David Cronenberg’s “Dead Ringers” in his Criterion top 10 favorite film picks of all-time, but not for the reason you’d expect (or Cronenberg would prefer). Turns out, Carpenter finds “Dead Ringers” to be lethally hilarious.

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“I find ‘Dead Ringers,’ with those horrible instruments and Jeremy Irons’s great dual performance, to actually be very funny,” Carpenter said. “It all really works!”

Sounds like it works better for Carpenter than even Christopher Nolan’s 2023 epic, “Oppenheimer.” Carpenter was, ah, not a huge fan.

But the well-oiled machine behind 1988 film “Dead Ringers” is all due to Cronenberg’s “intellectual” approach to filmmaking, according to Carpenter.

“David Cronenberg is a friend of mine,” Carpenter said. “His approach to his movies is very intellectual. He’s always thought everything out.”

“Dead Ringers” was recently adapted into a Prime Video series with Rachel Weisz playing the gender-swapped twins.

The original film actually did have some ties to the comedy world, according to Cronenberg himself.

The writer/director said in 2019 that he originally wanted “Dead Ringers” to have the title of “Twins,” but that Ivan Reitman was working on the Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito comedy with the same name. According to Cronenberg, Reitman ended up paying him for the use of the title and Cronenberg retitled his script to “Dead Ringers”….which was in part financed with money from the “Twins” title change.

“And they both did OK, on their own levels,” Cronenberg said at the time.

He added of his signature nonconformist filmic tones, “People have thought my films are cold or distant, but that’s my attempt to avoid sentimentality, which is not the same as emotion. Oscar Wilde said that sentiment is the death of true emotion, and you can feel the desperation in filmmakers to generate emotion via sentimentality. If there’s emotion in my movies, I want it to be real — hard won, and deserved by the plot — not the easy stuff.”

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