Director Report Card: John Carpenter (1994)

16. In the Mouth of Madness

John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy follows a natural progression. “The Thing” shows an apocalypse beginning, the origins of the end of the world. “Prince of Darkness” is an apocalypse in evolution, one shut down just before breaking loose and even then, only being prevented. “In the Mouth of Madness” is the pay-off to that build-up, a movie that promises Armageddon and delivers. This is how the world ends. And it’s awesome.

“Prince of Darkness” wore its influences on its sleeve. “In the Mouth of Madness” continues this pattern. Lovecraftian elements bled through each chapter of the trilogy but this film takes them much further then any of the others. A good portion of the film is set in a sinister New England town called Hobb’s End, a place that is clearly just a short drive from Arkham, Dunwich, or Innsmouth. Like Innsmouth, the town’s citizens become involved in occult rituals before becoming something other then human. The old woman who runs the local hotel is Mrs. Pickman. Moreover, the film is awash in Lovecraftian visuals. Squamous, eldritch horrors squirm with tentacles and rows of gnashing fangs, just outside the frame of our reality. A painting in the hotel, one of the creepiest elements in the film, progressively grows more disturbing. The happy couple develops the Innsmouth Look, something appearing in the water. Next we see the painting, the man and woman have changed into crawling, octopus-headed monsters, a black church rising from the waters, the appendages of something big in the sky. Most blatantly, the Old Ones themselves are named dropped.

The Lovecraft element goes deeper then just cribbing the author’s style and aesthetic. The film addresses the author’s favorite theme of madness. Violent insanity takes over the entire world in this film. While Lovecraft always stopped just short of showing society totally ripped apart by madnes,. Carpenter dives right in. Moreover, the movie explores the relationship between author and reader, reality and fiction. Millions of people reading the same story make it true, whither they believe in it or not. That belief drags the author’s world out of his own head and into our reality. From a subtext level, “In the Mouth of Madness” is one of Carpenter’s richest films.

At the beginning, “In the Mouth of Madness” almost seems like it will play out like a detective story. Sam Neil’s insurance investigator is presented almost like a hard-boiled P.I., cynical about the world, always getting his man. This is shown in a wonderful scene where Neil breaks down an arson-fraudster with ease. He is hired by a publishing house to track down Sutter Cane, a writer of cosmic horror stories and the best selling author in the world. He’s gone missing and Neil’s quest to find the man soon brings him to Hobb’s End, a town that seemingly only exist in Cane’s head. After that, the line between fiction and reality begin to blur, bleed into and over each other. Neil remains skeptical until he comes face-to-face with the otherworldly horrors, which is probably the reason why he’s resistant to the mind-shattering insanity virus for so long. The same virus that eventually destroys the world. By the end, the film’s meta elements come full circle. The viewer is left to wonder just how much of this fiction is fiction within the fiction.

All this talk of creeping dread and the end of the world wouldn’t matter much unless the film was actually scary. Luckily, the movie is chock full of horror of all different sorts. The creature effects are comparable to “The Thing.” The slimy, slithering monsters are only ever seen in quick glimpses, briskly edited montages of creepy images. The combined effect is unnerving. This is employed several times, each time the horrors growing closer. My favorite moments involves Neil catching a glimpse of Mrs. Pickman in her basement, now more monster then human, a bloodied axe swinging through the air. The film’s main theme is visually illustrated when an author pulls himself apart, pages of a book tearing apart, tearing the walls of reality apart too.

Aside from Lovecraft, Carpenter pays due to the other masters of horror. The careening camera angles in the opening asylum sequences remind me of Argento, as do the close-ups of thrashing blades. Stephen King is referenced by name and Sutter Cane himself seems at least partially based on King. (The Lovecraft elements and meta devices are things King would probably do, too.) The scene of Neil’s love interest twisting herself into a four-legged monstrosity, bones cracking, creaking around, wouldn’t be out of place in a David Cronenberg film. If it wasn’t made three years before, I’d say the close-ups of yellow road lines passing through the headlights is a reference to David Lynch’s “Lost Highway.” Either way, parts of the film drip with surreal, Lynchian atmosphere. The long sequence of a boy/old man on a bicycle is there for no reason beyond it’s freaky. “In the Mouth of Madness” captures Lovecraftian creepiness the best since “Possession,” which it seems to wink at a few times. Aside from both films starring Sam Neil, both share a shot of a monster in a person suit standing behind a glass door, an evil force pushing through from one side to another.

The movie indulges in some traditional horror elements from time to time. Neil seeing a cop beating a man in an alley-way is creepy. When it’s repeated in a nightmare, it’s creepy if a little overdone. When Neil wakes up in a nightmare within a nightmare, it gets a little silly. Luckily, the film’s further use of jump scares are a little better. The only horror element that doesn’t work is the Hobb’s End townsfolk being consumed by the evil forces. The make-up is great and, as long as the shots of deformed people are confined to quick edits, they work. However, kids with creepy voices and messed up faces lack the subtle creepiness the rest of the film employs. It might not sound like it but “In the Mouth of Madness” has a darkly comic vein running through. A muzak version of the Carpenters is well-used and a long held shot of an axe wielding maniac walking towards our protagonist is both creepy and oddly funny.

Sam Neil does a great job in the lead, running the gamut of emotions. He maintains an oddly funny edge throughout while never undermining the horror of the situation. Jurgen Prochnow is very creepy as Sutter Cane, doing a lot with just a malicious glance or grin. Julie Carmen is probably the weakest of the leads but she has the tricky goal of playing someone being manipulated by other forces. This considered, I suppose she does an okay job. Charlton Heston, David Warner, and John Glover all stop by for amusing cameos, each one playing the kind of part you’d expect. And a bit of praise must go out to Frances Bay, probably better known as Happy Gilmore’s Grandma, as Mrs. Pickman. She’s the nastiest old lady you’re likely to see in any horror movie and she does it without ever raising her voice.

Powered by one of my favorite Carpenter scores, “In the Mouth of Madness” is the director’s last masterpiece. Genuinely creepy, packed full of plenty of content to chew over, darkly funny, and deeply clever, it’s an underrated and underseen chiller from one of the weakest decades for horror. [Grade: A-]

Director Report Card: John Carpenter (1987)

12. Prince of Darkness

“Prince of Darkness” is, perhaps, the oddest film in Carpenter’s filmography. The central villain in the film is a giant canister of swirling, green fluid. The green fluid is self-aware and intelligent. Also, it’s literally Satan. A Satan that controls insects, earthworms, and hordes of schizophrenic homeless people. A devil that turns people into blank-faced zombies that spray slime at people out of their mouths. There’s dream sequences, an Anti-God living on the other side of the mirror, threatening messages typed out frantically on computer screens, a man made of beetles, and some other weird stuff. Even in a career that featured beach ball aliens and evil automobiles, this one sticks out for sheer oddness alone.

The story, revolving around a group of advance physics students investigating strange events at an old church, features a tantalizing concept at its core. The script explicitly links the metaphysical with the blatantly religious, justifying a belief in both. There are subatomic levels so far out there and obscure, that our minds aren’t capable of comprehending them. There are worlds beyond our physical perception. The Devil is real but he’s somehow simultaneously an abstract concept and a literal, physical being. Religion is a lie but not for the reasons you think. Jesus really was the Son of God but his real reason for coming down here was to warn us about the Satan Slime, who fell from the stars, a concept that can be read both as religious metaphor and science fiction. Also, Satan Slime is just the second worse guy around. His Dad from out of town is way worse. “Prince of Darkness” shows pure horror and pure sci-fi coming together.

It’s a mishmash of divergent influences. A group of logical, scientific researchers investigate an ancient, insidious, alien evil, finding things that challenge their beliefs. This is straight out of Nigel Kneale’s Quatermass films. Carpenter upfront acknowledges the influence by crediting his screenplay under the pseudonym of ‘Martin Quatermass.’ Said ancient, alien evil, which definitively comes from the stars, links to an alternate dimension, occupied by a great, overseeing wicked god, as spoken of in an arcane book of forbidden knowledge. Another example of Carpenter’s great debt to H.P. Lovecraft. There are moments of the film, with arms exploding out of walls and masses of deadly writhing bodies that remind me of a George Romero zombie flick. Other minutes, with demonically possessed people running around trying to spread their disease, seems out of “Evil Dead,” while the image of a devil-possessed, scarred up, bedridden woman seemingly intentionally recalls “The Exorcist.” Carpenter even manages to slip in a scissor stabbing murder, involving an elaborate tracking shot of the blades, that wouldn’t be out of place in an Argento giallo. Despite drawing from so many different sources, there’s something distinctively Carpenter about “Prince of Darkness.”

Maybe it’s just the cast, which features several of the director’s veteran performers. Donald Pleasence headlines as a priest, tossed headlong into an uncertain world. Pleasence plays the part roughly along the same wavelength as Dr. Loomis, a wizened knower of evil that seems rather ominous himself at times. The big difference is that unlike Dr. Loomis, the unnamed priest goes on an arc of recovering his faith. Just like the film, he makes room for both angels and demons. Victor Wong has a good role, very different from “Big Trouble’s” Egg, as a physicist equally seeing his beliefs challenged by his strange experiences. If anything, Wong fills the Dr. Loomis role a little better then Pleasence does. Fellow “Big Trouble in Little China” alum Dennis Dun plays one of the students, whose constant horndog pick-up lines, bad jokes, and panicked screams make him the film’s comic relief most of the time. Peter Jason as a smart alec doctor running the research trip provides the rest of the relief. Jason’s part seems like it could have been played by Charles Cypher. Similarly, the mustachioed leading man, played by the undistinguished Jameson Parker, probably would have been played by Tom Atkins a few years earlier. I’d be remiss not to mention Alice Cooper’s extended cameo as the leader of the killer bums. (Cooper also contributes a pretty awesome song to the soundtrack, by the way.)

The reason “Prince of Darkness” has such a cult following, aside from its general off-beat tone, is because it builds up several effective horror set pieces. The opening credits, which last ten minutes, cuts between the story’s set-up, characters discovering disquieting things, with the white on black titles, Carpenter’s pounding synth score droning along creepily.

Despite some heavy-handed exposition, the movie builds some decent feelings of dread as things build towards the end of the first act. The image of the green slime pooling upside down on the ceiling is oddly off-putting. There’s creepy or gross images like a crucified dove or worms clinging to a window. The image of an evil woman crawling over someone’s bed, waiting to deliver a deadly kiss, reminded me of the Old Hag. My favorite bit involves a corpse brought to life by mass of beetles, quivering out a message before collapsing in on itself. A scene of a character caught between two oncoming crowds of madmen delivers a genuine thrill. A man stabs himself to death after finishing a hymn.

Soon, the film becomes a reverse siege picture of sorts, people besieged by things from inside their fort. Arms pushing through doors and walls recall zombie flicks and Carpenter’s own “The Fog.” The movie manages to build some decent tension and the last act is genuinely creepy, as the film throws more strange images at you. Right before the disquieting end, we get a really strong jump scare, of which the movie has a few. Most famously is the reoccurring dream images, which we see more of with every nap, getting more ominous with each repetition.

Given the film’s go-for-broke wacked-out-ness, not all of it works. The ensemble cast is large enough that some characters don’t receive much characterization, some of them obviously being more or less monster fodder. The computer typed message of doom pushes into melodramatic goofiness. The pasty-faced zombies spitting on people is just as likely to amuse as put off. There’s a stretch in the middle that drags, when the characters are standing around, waiting for the apocalypse to come. The love story proves the film’s biggest problem. Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount quickly go from classmates to lover, falling in bed with each other within a single night. Her eventual fate sets up the climax’s entire emotional crux. While creepy taken on its own, the love story is never convincing. Parker and Blount don’t have much chemistry, Blount is kind of flat in general, and both characters are written slightly thin.

“Prince of Darkness” is just strange enough, just spooky enough, to overcome whatever flaws it has. As the middle chapter of Carpetner’s Apocalypse Trilogy, it feels undeniably apocalyptic, dredging up a real sense of dread before the end. It strikes me as an oddly personal project for the filmmaker, with him throwing together a lot of the things that fascinate him, even if it doesn’t make much sense. There are a few of his trademark tracking shots and the score is pretty decent. It’s probably one of the filmmaker’s less seen movies. Somewhat uneven but fascinating never the less, I’d recommend it. [Grade: B]

Director Report Card: John Carpenter (1982)

8. The Thing

“The Thing” is a good example of how public opinion can shift over the years. Coming in the wake of “E.T.,” the film was eviscerated by critics, dismissed as heavy on gore and little else, and greeted with hostility by the public. It was a blow against John Carpenter’s reputation as a proven hit-maker, one he would never really bounce back from. In the intervening thirty years, things have changed. “The Thing” is now regarded as a landmark in special effects, one of the director’s best pictures, and a masterpiece in the sci-fi and horror genres. It is even considered by some as one of the greatest horror films ever made.

The film is only a loose adaptation of Howard Hawks’ original “The Thing from Another World,” instead drawling more from the original novella, John Campbell Jr.’s “Who Goes There?” The story is a study in chilly isolation and nightmare imagery. Like many of Carpenter’s previous films, it is both an ensemble piece and a siege picture. However, unlike “Assault on Precinct 13” or “The Fog,” the threat comes from inside, not outside.

Carpenter has his best handle on atmosphere here since “Halloween.” “The Thing,” if nothing else, is skillfully orchestrated in tone and mood. One of the earliest shot in the film is a pan over the snow covered hills of the Arctic. A first time viewer wouldn’t know why the seemingly mad Norwegian is gunning after that husky. A sense of mystery is maintained throughout the first act. One of the biggest departures from the original film and the book is that the main cast isn’t the first ones who discover the Thing. Instead, they have to investigate the Norwegian camp, discovering an abandoned building and charred, bizarre remains. Why the change? Strictly to fuel more mystery, create questions of “why,” “who,” and “what” in the audiences’ minds. The first creepy shot in the movie, and the film’s first use of Carpenter’s trademark steady-cam, involves the strange dog wandering down a hallway, stopping to look at a shadow on the wall before walking off. Upon this rewatch, I realized the dog couldn’t make its move until it was on its own. It’s the first sign of a sinister, insidious intelligent.

Small moments like these prepare the viewer for the well-spring of nightmarish special effects the movie unleashes soon after that. When it comes to practical make-up effects special effects, animatronics and puppetry, Rob Bottin’s work has never been topped. “The Thing” features some of the most disturbing special effects ever put to film. The monster is all twisting, squirming, crunching limbs, tentacles, and slime. The dog kennel scene slowly escalates, the walls of twisted, mutated flesh building. When a blossom of death, a mouth/hand covered with teeth emerges from the dog(s)’ diseased form, it becomes clear to the audience that this Thing doesn’t come in peace. The body horror has an almost surreal effect. The shot of Bennings, turning to face the others, its hands twisted into claws, releasing an unearthly howl, is like something out of a nightmare. The defibrillator scene is another tour-de-force of cringe-inducing special effects. Yellow gibs squirm inside the monster, nightmare faces shooting out it, heads crawling away. It’s hard to believe all of this was accomplished with only latex, wires, and pumps. Critics of the horror genre frequently say it relies solely on special effects. If any film proves that monster effects themselves can make scares, “The Thing” does.

“The Thing” confirms its horror classic status by featuring two all-time great jump scares, and a few other pretty good ones. The dog kennel freaks the audience out by building on horrifying images. The defibrillator scene springs those same images on the audience totally out of the blue. It’s a real shock and the freakishness just keeps coming immediately afterwards. If the defibrillator scene is unexpected, the blood test scene measures suspense. Each time the hot cord is about to touch down in a dish of blood, the audience’s leans forward in anticipation. The viewer’s expectations are pulled completely taunt when the trouble starts again, causing the watcher to jump out of his seat. There’s no relief since the horror keeps on coming in the form of more monstrous, twisted flesh.

The blood test is another turning point in the script. It ends the paranoia-thon that comprises the meat of the second act. After the threat of the Thing is revealed, nobody can trust one another. Blair goes nuts. There’s a burnt body in the snow outside, power outages, and slashed clothing. Everyone is on edge, MacReady especially. The film mines tension out of that paranoia, since anyone is bound to react in a number of ways. The stand-off before the blood test is probably the peak of this type of suspense. After the monster is determined, “The Thing” becomes a men on a mission flick. This is encapsulated in MacReady’s monologue to the remaining troops. Though “The Thing” is widely considered a study in paranoia, it just as much a movie about people coming together in times of adversity.

The third act is honestly a little disappointing compared to the fantastic first two. We know early on Blair is the Thing and everyone is working together, deflecting the monster’s plot. It’s the movie at its most slasher-like, the monster chipping through the remaining cast members. MacReady facing off against the monster alone shapes up to be a great one-on-one finale. The floorboards rippling forward is a pretty good jump scare. The story’s Lovecraftian roots become obvious here. Exhibit A: Giant tentacles reaching out of the ground. While the Blair Monster is as grotesquely horrifying and fantastically realized as any of the film’s other combination, MacReady shouting swears, jumping away, and blowing the monster to smithereens is a little underwhelming. The movie makes up with that with the final images, taking the story out on a note of ambiguity and bristling winter cold. The last shot of two men, sitting together in the cold against a dying fire, feeds into the film’s twin themes of paranoia and brotherhood.

The ensemble cast is really the only problem I have with the film. There are too many characters here and only a few of them get any development. MacReady is one of Kurt Russell’s best performances. He has no problem going dark, getting some paranoid jitters in a few scenes. Ultimately, MacReady proves himself as the right man for the job. He’s less a standard hero then just an everyman that keeps his head on the straightest and survives. It lacks the tough guy bravado of Russell’s other performances in Carpenter’s films, instead showing a more considerate side.

There are some other strong standers in the cast. Wilford Brimley really gets to go over the top as Blair while also showing some creepy, alien other-worldliness near the end. Keith David is nicely hot-headed as Childs, the film’s second most likable character, and Donald Moffat provides some comic relief as the frustrated Garry. The rest of the cast is thinly developed. There’s the squirmy Windows, stoner helicopter pilot Palmer, laid-back cook Nauls, dog-lover Clark, Fuchs the scientist. Beyond these general ideas, we don’t have much to go on for the rest of the cast. It doesn’t damage the movie any but I wonder if it would have been an even tighter affair with a slightly trimmed set of characters.

Carpenter’s curbs some of his own tricks from “Halloween” here. The icy cold of the Arctic is emphasized with chilly blue/purple lighting and dark shadows. Ennio Morricone provides a creepy score, full of scrambling strings and slow, electronic droning. Though not quite perfect, “The Thing” is incredibly good and fully deserves its reputation. It’s a film that particularly rewards re-watching. First time viewers wonder who the Thing is. Multiple viewers wonder when someone became infected, where the monster moved off-screen, and watch the infected individuals more carefully, looking for signs. It’s a film that inspires investigation and new discovery, sure signs of a great film. [Grade: A]