Though it didn’t do well on initial release, They Live is one of John Carpenter’s ever-more-revered films, because of its extraordinary prescience in depicting the fallout from the Reagan Revolution that overwhelmed American society in a disastrously complete way starting in the 1980s. Regarding the admiring reappraisal of the film, Carpenter says, “Over the years, what I was yelling and screaming about in economics, has become painfully clear to a lot of people. . . . The eighties never ended, and they’re really with us today.”