John Carpenter has been thinking about death lately. Not in the way you imagine

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John Carpenter has this one recurring nightmare.“I’m in a huge, massive town I don’t really know,” he says, “and I’m looking for the movie district.And inevitably all the theaters are closed down.

They’re all closed down.That’s what the dream is.”I’m visiting Carpenter at his longtime production house in Hollywood on one of L.A.’s unjustly sunny October afternoons.

A vintage “Halloween” pinball machine and a life-size Nosferatu hover near his easy chair.I tell him I don’t think Freud would have too much trouble interpreting that particular dream.“No, I know,” he says, laughing.

“I don’t have too much trouble with that either.”Nonetheless, it truly haunts him — “and it has haunted me over the years for many dreams in a row,” he continues.“I’m either with family or a group, and I go off to do something and I get completely lost.

[Freud] wouldn’t have too much trouble figuring that out either.I mean, none of this is very mysterious.”Carpenter is a gruff but approachable 77 these days, his career as a film director receding in the rearview.

The last feature he made was 2010’s “The Ward.” His unofficial retirement was partly chosen, partly imposed by a capricious industry.The great movie poster artist Drew Struzan died two days before I visited — Carpenter says he never met Struzan but loved his work, especially his striking painting for the director’s icy 1982 creature movie “The Thing” — and I note how that whole enterprise of selling a movie with a piece of handmade art is a lost one.“The whole movie business that I knew, that I grew up with, is gone,” he replies.

“All gone.”It hasn’t, thankfully, made him want to escape from L.A.He still lives here with his wife, Sandy King, who runs the graphic novel imprint Storm King Comics, which Carpenter contributes to.

He gamely appeared on John Mulaney’s...