AT THE MOVIES

Flashback To the Future

''Ghosts of Mars,'' which opens across the country today (review, Page 10), is John Carpenter's 19th feature film in 28 years. Like the movies that made him famous -- ''Halloween'' (1978), ''Escape From New York'' (1981), ''They Live'' (1988) -- it belongs to the genre that Mr. Carpenter affectionately describes as the science-fiction horror-thriller.

But there's something strikingly different about this one. The futurist tale of a military unit assigned to protect our Martian colonies from an invading army of angry phantoms, the film is told in interlocking flashbacks -- a radical departure from the usual, straight-ahead storytelling in horror movies.

''It's really deconstructed, in a sense,'' said Mr. Carpenter, sitting cross-legged on a hotel-room couch during a recent visit to New York. ''My co-writer, Larry Sulkis, and I wrote the first draft in a linear fashion, from the very first scene to the very last, in an absolutely pure, straightforward way. And it was like touring one's own living room; it was extremely familiar. I could anticipate every beat that was coming along. So we unstructured it and put the movie in a flashback.''

''This way you can disrupt time,'' Mr. Carpenter explained. ''You don't have to keep the clock ticking. Sometimes in a thriller you want the audience to sense that time is running out for the characters. In this case, we did away with it, so you're really not sure how long they've been there, how long it's been since a particular thing happened. It's a slightly disorienting situation, but because the story is a basic genre film -- I mean that in the best way -- I thought we could get away with it.''

Mr. Carpenter continues to make his films in a classical, seamless style, an anomaly at a time when horror movies like ''Scream'' and ''Final Destination'' make fun of themselves.

''An interesting thing happened back in the 80's when they were making the 'Friday the 13th' films,'' Mr. Carpenter said. ''They made a conscious creative decision not to differentiate between the characters. They wanted the audience to see each of the characters in the movie as a generic victim. That way they could be ahead of them, and talk back to the screen -- 'Don't go in that door, you dummy!' and so on. They already realized that the thing to do was to get people vocal, almost an interactive type thing, so that the audience feels superior to the film.

''So now, that's a whole lot of what you're seeing -- making the audience feel superior to the movie, and look down on it. I wouldn't be able to do it myself, at least not intentionally.''

Drawing on a cigarette, Mr. Carpenter spoke with a touch of sadness: ''The audience often mistakes sincerity for weakness. They think that if you're sincere, it's corny. Strange, isn't it? But I don't think we should bemoan the modern situation too much, because there are a lot of interesting things going on. The genre will survive. Horror never does go away. It's always there.''

Keaton Close-Up

Jeffrey Vance got to know Eleanor Keaton when he was asked to present a paper on ''Chaplin, Keaton and Women'' at the annual Keaton conference held in Iola, Kan., near the small town where the comedian was born. ''I figured, for research on Keaton and women, what better person to talk to than Eleanor, Buster's widow?'' Mr. Vance said, speaking by phone from Los Angeles.

A friendship grew between the young academic and the elderly Mrs. Keaton, and out of that friendship has grown one of the most handsome film books in recent memory, ''Buster Keaton Remembered,'' a profusely illustrated account of Keaton's life and art written by Mr. Vance and informed by Mrs. Keaton's memories.

Mr. Vance, who was then working as a photo archivist for MGM/UA, volunteered to help Mrs. Keaton sort out her huge, chaotic collection of photographs. ''And that's where I discovered she had a story for every photo,'' Mr. Vance said. ''She had all of this wonderful information I had never heard before. I asked her if she had ever thought of writing a book. She just looked at me and didn't give me an answer, but the next time I came over, she said, 'If you can get a publisher for this, I want to do it.' ''

Mr. Vance and Mrs. Keaton began working on the book early in 1998, and finished it just weeks before her death in October of that year. ''I didn't realize how ill she was at the time,'' he said. ''She was in good health at the beginning, but I didn't realize the extent of the cancer in her body. She died of the same illness, lung cancer, as Buster.''

Working with the photo editor Manoah Bowman, Mr. Vance took pains to obtain high-quality, first-generation images for the book -- his way of combating the myth that silent films were smeary, dirty and out of focus. (They weren't, but the poor dupes shown on television in the 1960's and 70's were.) Finding those photos wasn't easy.

''The book was actually a major archival project,'' he said. ''Just trying to track down all the photos that she and Buster had lent out to other people for their books, and that never came back, was a lot of work.''

''We wanted to get the whole collection under one roof and get it properly cared for,'' said Mr. Vance, who eventually placed it with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, home of an already extensive Keaton collection. ''Eleanor got to see some of that before she died,'' Mr. Vance added. ''Putting that collection back together gave her a lot of satisfaction.'' Keaton died in 1966.

Film Forum in Manhattan is presenting a Monday night series of Keaton films. (The next offering is ''Our Hospitality.'') Mr. Vance will be present to introduce the final film in the series, ''The Cameraman,'' on Oct. 1. ''That film was partially shot in New York,'' Mr. Vance said, ''so it will be fun to see it in Manhattan.''

Killer Psyche

A very young-looking 34, the Korean director Chang Youn-hyun hardly seems old enough to get in to see ''Tell Me Something,'' much less to have conceived the grisly images that fill his film, a thriller about a serial killer who scrambles the body parts of his victims.

''There's no factual event that this film is based on,'' Mr. Chang said, speaking through an interpreter. ''But I spoke to a lot of psychologists about serial killers and what's missing in their psyches. From that I created a character, and from the character, I created the events.''

''Tell Me Something'' was a huge commercial success in Korea, and it opens next month in Manhattan at Cinema Village. Why the worldwide fascination with serial killers?

''The world was once fascinated by wars between nations,'' Mr. Chang theorized. ''But at this stage in global capitalism, wars are between people. It isn't countries that abuse power now, but individuals. So that's where the fear is.''