Christine Review (1983)

John Carpenter’s Christine isn’t just a Horror movie, it’s a grease-stained flick about obsession, possession, and a car that wants your soul as much as it wants your blood. Forget cheap shocks or rivers of gore. This one seeps into your bones slowly, like exhaust fumes filling a garage, choking you out before you even realize what’s happening. Next to the Dukes of Hazzard, this is the movie that helped to create my lifelong obsession with Hot Rods

Arnie Cunningham, a hopelessly awkward kid, finds a rusted-out ’58 Plymouth Fury and claims her as his own. But this isn’t just a project car, it’s a parasite. As Christine gets rebuilt, so does Arnie, but not in a healthy way. The more the chrome gleams, the darker he becomes, shedding his nerdy skin and hardening into something cold, predatory, and MEAN. By the time Christine’s finished, Arnie is too. The kid’s gone, what’s left is something twisted and fused with the car.

This movie doesn’t feature frantic jump scares, or splatter just for the hell of it. Instead, it builds a suffocating tension, letting you watch obsession rot a kid from the inside out. Christine herself is less a car than a living predator, her headlights glow with hellfire eyes, her engine growls with the hunger of a beast. When she hunts, it’s not a chase. It’s a ritual that ends in death.

The atmosphere of the movie is pure Carpenter gloom. The shadows are thick enough to chew, the score throbs like a cursed heartbeat, and every scene drips with menace. The kills are brutal and surreal, headlights cutting through the night as Christine runs people down like a chrome-plated reaper. It’s absurd on paper, but onscreen, it’s rad and everything about it works.

Keith Gordon nails Arnie’s breakdown, turning from fragile nerd into a dead-eyed psycho in a way that’s almost too believable. His friends, John Stockwell and Alexandra Paul, feel like the last shred of humanity standing in the way of Christine, powerless to stop the crash that’s coming.



Christine isn’t Carpenter’s best film, but it’s one of his most venomous. It digs under your skin with its sick mix of supernatural terror and human frailty. A boy, a car, and a love story that leaves a trail of bodies in the dust. This movie goes deep in how easy it is to give yourself over to the wrong kind of love. It doesn’t scare you with screams. It runs you down, backs over you, and leaves the smell of burnt rubber and gasoline in your lungs. I’ve never been able to look at cars the same way since watching this film.