Considering that John Carpenter had not made a film in nine years when he made The Ward, it doesn't really feel like he went away, primarily because his back catalogue has been so efficiently strip-mined in the intervening years. Starting with Assault on Precinct 13 in 2005, there has been a steady stream of remakes of Carpenter's seminal work from the '70s and '80s that has simultaneously burnished and cheapened his legacy as one of the great genre film-makers. Whilst some of those remakes turned out to be entertaining and functional (Assault on Precinct 13) and others wound up being dreadful, witless retreads (The Fog), none of them displayed the same sense of a personal vision that Carpenter's best work did, and his return to film-making following the utterly awful Ghosts of Mars should be cause for celebration.