@p Carpenter never founded a genre. On the other hand he is a much more technically skilled director. He drifted off big Hollywood movies. Romero never overcame his B-movie origins.

Notice that Carpenter's films are almost all widescreen. That's a trick - it was a special aperture that exposed shorter frames on the same film stock, so you got 1.5 or so times as much footage from the same length of celluloid AND it has that epic widescreen look. The new finer grained 1970s film stocks made this possible.

Also Carpenter was a very early adopter of the Steadicam, indeed Halloween was the first place most saw Steadicam work, the Woody Guthrie bio where it glided out having done poorly.