John Carpenter will forever be associated with “Halloween,” his brilliantly original (and profitable) 1978 horror film that helped inaugurate the modern slasher era, a movement that now includes more than a half-dozen uninspired “Halloween” sequels. But while horror is what ultimately gave Mr. Carpenter the budgetary and artistic freedom to make the films he wanted to make, his imagination has never been one-dimensional.

Beginning Monday, the Brooklyn Academy of Music will launch a brief film series dubbed “A Four-Pack of Carpenter,” consisting of a quartet of revivals highlighting Mr. Carpenter’s aspirations as a social filmmaker — as well as his penchant for exploding heads and bone-faced aliens.

Love him or hate him, Mr. Carpenter has never been a dull filmmaker. The four films on display at BAM mix genres and themes with the gusto of a mad cinematic scientist, imbuing tales of alien invasions and underground martial-arts wars with satirical surveys of class issues and Eastern traditions. Through it all, though, Mr. Carpenter never lost his primal focus, which was to entertain an audience of his peers. Each of the films at BAM features a quintessential Carpenter moment, when the story leaps off a cliff of reason into the unknown.

The series begins with the farcical “Big Trouble in Little China” (1986), a film that dishes up a little bit of everything. In search of a mirthful buddy comedy? Kurt Russell plays the goofy, rambling, über-American Jack Burton, whose trucker buddy, the placid Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), rolls his eyes as he is forced to explain to Jack the mystical martial-arts warfare unfolding in the streets of San Francisco’s Chinatown. Looking for social issues? We meet Gracie (Kim Cattrall) as she tries to rescue a teenage girl from the clutches of the nefarious Chinese sex trade (later, we see the girl chained to a bed in a brothel). Craving action? As Jack and Wang go on the hunt for the girl, taking on fire-breathing Chinese masters with their semiautomatic weapons, “Little China” unloads a full clip of mayhem on the audience in the context of a Reagan-era East vs. West showdown.

Tuesday evening offers the 1982 Carpenter classic “The Thing,” an update to Howard Hawks’s 1951 science-fiction thriller “The Thing From Outer Space,” which introduced a decade’s obsession with monster films. But in Mr. Carpenter’s tweaking of the story, the danger is found less in the titular monster than in its would-be human victims. “The Thing,” about a group of Antarctica-bound scientists who accidentally open the door to an alien presence that can infiltrate the bodies of animals and humans alike, works as a horror story of scientific inadequacy and the breakdown of an insulated society. Given all the explosions and pyrotechnics on display, “The Thing” also functions as giddy, escapist action cinema.

If “The Thing” makes more of an effort to mask its message with superficial scares, then Wednesday’s “They Live,” from 1988, is more transparent in its social critique. Watching the movie today, “They Live” appears nothing short of a searing condemnation of the police, the mass media, the ruling elite, and the growing chasm separating the classes. Former pro wrestler Roddy Piper (who once famously cracked Jimmy “Superfly” Snuka in the skull with a coconut) plays John Nada, a blue-collar everyman in search of a good construction job and a decent paycheck. Needless to say, his ambitions change when he dons a pair of special sunglasses and suddenly sees an entire race of alien invaders living secretly among us.

Now able, thanks to these magical glasses, to see not only the veiled alien beings, but the billboards, magazines, and TV broadcasts they’re using to pacify the human population, Nada chucks his chewing gum and grabs his shotgun, taking up arms to set things right. In one respect, the key is in the casting. Where Steven Spielberg would hire Tom Cruise to wear the anguish of an interstellar war on his chiseled face, Mr. Carpenter tapped the untrained, campy former wrestling “villain” to ensure that unmistakable B-movie sensation.

The fourth film in the series, 1981’s “Escape from New York,” transplants the Western template to downtown Manhattan in a futuristic spectacle of death and decay, in which America’s criminals have been locked up in a supersized prison that stretches the full length of the island. When the president’s airplane crashes into the mayhem, a prisoner (again played by Mr. Russell) is recruited (and threatened with death) to navigate the dangerous terrain and save the president from his own constituents.

Like so many of Mr. Carpenter’s films, “Escape From New York” pivots among multiple genres (action film, science fiction, fantasy, Western) while painting a cockeyed portrait of a city that, even in the early ’80s, was idyllic compared with its onscreen representation. By embracing the antiheroes, mocking the established order of society and of filmmaking, and smearing the moral line separating inmates and leaders, Mr. Carpenter posits a future America that is distinctly anti-American. Mr. Russell’s character may be named Snake, and the president (played by Donald Pleasence) may be at the mercy of an all-powerful pimp, but these trappings of B-movie schlock are only temporary diversions. Films such as “Escape from New York” and “They Live” are more than guilty pleasures; they have the heft and heart of A-class patriotic pulp.

ssnyder@nysun.com

“A Four-Pack of Carpenter” runs between Monday and Thursday at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and St. Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).