IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS: John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trio Pt. 3- Destruction of Reality

PROLOGUE: THE END OF ALL THINGS...

And so we reach Friday, and the end of our retrospective on the Apocalypse Trilogy of John Carpenter. Thus we shall always reach the end of all things, huh?

So, after a week of the world ending on my tv and my blog, it's still going on outside. In fact, last night as snow belted down in the Spring onto a pandemic-riddled Midwest, John Trent smirked at me while smoking a cigarette from the tv screen and said "Things are turning to shit out there, aren't they?"

Huh.   Yeah- Funny you should mention, pal...

And since this movie is about one of my favorite weird pet themes, Existentialism and the Nature of Thought and Reality, I think it's only appropriate that a fictional character is commenting on my surroundings. Only fair, I've been doing it to them all week.

But is he fictional? Maybe I am.  What if I'm just a character study in apathy and dissociation, right? And it's something that's being written by another writer who's outside all this and is making me do what I do for their amusement, and likely pocketbook. But then, horror of horrors, the true terror of this brand of existentialism, I'm not the main character of any such narrative, and neither are any of you. Maybe sure, we're all in a fiction, but we're not important characters- we're backstory. NPCs that are gonna die before the opening credits roll, just the scroll at the beginning. A footnote in the opening crawl about how "In 2020 the Great Plague hit and uncounted millions died" before the really bad shit actually started. And that was a hundred years ago in that movie, and-

So...you see how this type of horror is more cerebral and prone to rabbit-holing?

Well, it's not a hole, baby.

It's a Mouth. And we're in it.

PART I: THE SKEPTIC VS THE ZEALOT, or Hey, We Killed the Self and God, Who's Next?

I think it's interesting that of this trilogy of films made by a famously self sufficient do-it-yourself film maker like John Carpenter, he only wrote one. The Thing was written by Bill Lancaster, a guy whose claims to fame outside that movie and being Hollywood legend Burt Lancaster's son was The Bad News Bears films. And In the Mouth of Madness was the brainchild of Micheal De Luca before he headed off to become the head of Dreamworks Pictures. So the only one of these written and directed by John is the notable weaker offering of Prince of Darkness, and I wonder what it is about the Apocalypse that interests him so that makes it harder for him to grapple with some of these concepts more personally s a writer, but guides them to very elegant fruition as a director.

And I think I might have something: I think John Carpenter is a skeptic. He's not sure the world will end or if he is, he isn't sure how and enjoys exploring the possibilities. Prince of Darkness, for it's notable flaws, is still his personal take on the subject matter. And obviously the end-of-it-all themes of these two other scripts spoke to him for him to put his name to their realization. But it's not all the Trilogy has in common with it's constituent thirds.

A notable feature the Apocalypse Trio shares, aside from sowing the seeds of mankind's destruction in their narrative, is a skeptical hero or band of heroes parsing through clues that add up to Game Over for Humanity. MacReady is not sure about anything and Childs sure doesn't believe any of "this voodoo bullshit" in The Thing. Our scientist heroes probably don't even believe in God for the most part, so why the Devil in Prince of Darkness? Part of the reason that the world at large doesn't stand a chance in the long run against the forces of darkness, alien entities, and alien forces of darkness (okay, three things the films have in common), is that our heroes don't believe the threat is truly real until it is too late, until too many people at the Outpost are infected, when the Big Jar of Satan is already opened, and when Sutter Cane is already a best-selling author- more popular than Stephen King at his height and more influential than the already long-dead God of the Carpenter-verse. Demanding proof the world is ending kind of requires the world to die a little bit, right? Just so we're sure we truly need to act. And by then it's too late.

"Okay, you can have a little Armageddon. As a treat."

And as proof our collective shit has already hit the ol' fan in this finale?

Well, here's our final skeptic hero John Trent when we meet him:

Don't move. Sam Neill can't see you if you don't move...

Yes, John Trent starts the movie in that most Lovecraft of ways: already good and kooky, and ready to tell you all about how he got here.

And that is one of the ways this third chapter of the thematic trilogy really digs in and sets itself out as the standout finale: it draws on one of the great nihilistic story-tellers of all time, the master and creator of Cosmic Horror, Howard Philips Lovecraft. Because at the end of the day, it's hard to tell an optimistic tale about the end of the world (although films like Seeking a Friend for the End of the World certainly have tried) and it helps to seek guidance from a guy that would have perfectly okay with most of the human race getting wiped out by beings beyond our ken and certainly seemed to be expecting it. All three of the Trio are Cosmic to one extent or another, but this is the one that wears it's Lovecraft right on it's sleeve, creating in it's nominal villain Sutter Cane a hypothetical super-author, a literary "What If". What if a writer as talented, cerebral, and upsetting as Lovecraft reached (then exceeded) the mainstream success of Stephen King? What would that say about us as a culture? And what if what he was writing about was real? But we'll jump back on that pony in a little bit-

It's synopsis time!

Sit back and lemme tell ya a story...

As always, I keep my promise about blow-by-blow breakdowns, but this is a complex film and if I stay vague o the behalf of the masses, this article will make absolutely no sense.

We begin with John Trent, played by( my second favorite New Zealander after Taika Watiti) Sam Neill, getting dragged into the nuthouse. Now, what's off about this is that this place is bearing down for more admissions, because being insane seems to be getting a more and more common condition...

Anyway, after a violent outburst, topped by a testicle shattering kick that would make Grace Jones proud, Trent is chucked into isolation, only to get slapped with my favorite joke in this movie: the facility has house music that is an elevator version of a Carpenter's song  which all the inmates sing along to, much to Trent's chagrin. So yeah, a song by the Carpenters, in a John Carpenter movie, on the heels of a cameo by Carpenter as a fellow patient, yeah, funny. But then there's my favorite bit: the song is "We've Only Just Begun" (making it's first appearance in a horror film before making an outing as practically one of the main villains in the King adaption 1408) which is especially funny to me because poor Trent thinks he's at the end of his story, when in reality......

Well, ya get it or ya don't...

And that's where John Warner (Of Time Bandits, The Omen, Time After Time and no stranger to this material, having starred in my favorite part of the Lovecraft anthology film Necronomicon, "Cool Air") comes in giving a reliably great performance that you are right to expect from such a pro at the old 'character actor' game. He's Trent's therapist, and by the time he's arrived our hero has covered his cell, and himself, in crosses with a black crayon. And from there we're off to the flashback narrative races, seeing Trent before all this badness happened. Back when he was just a humble insurance investigator busting scam artists (including one played with sleazy aplomb by another Carpenter standby, Peter Jason from Prince of Darkness, making him the only actor to appear in more than one of the Trilogy). And his latest assignment? Well, he's been put onto a lead that Arcane Publishing needs help finding one of it's lost sheep, the wildly popular horror author Sutter Cane. Apparently he headed off to work on his new book with his advance, and so far the completed manuscript has been nowhere to be seen- and let's just say the Cane fans are a little... rabid.

They don't know art, but they know what they like.
And they like violence.

After narrowly surviving an attack by a madman with an axe, who burst through the window of the cafe just as Trent accepts the job, his last words being "Do you read Sutter Cane?" before getting blown away by the cops. Which is where the true seeds of the conflict in this story are planted: Our ultimate Skeptic Hero, the guy who sees a scam in everything, who's wise to every trick, is up against his ultimate nemesis- the True Believer, the Zealot. Trent believes it if he sees it, sure. But the Zealot sees it once they believe it.

Which is the road that leads us to...

PART II: THE HOBB'S END HORROR, or How John Carpenter Turns Ground Zero for the Apocalypse into a Funhouse Ride


Once our hero has accepted his mission, it's time to hit up the Ol' Quest Giver for a but more info and who should it be but Charlton "Cold Dead Hands" Heston, who I guess was doing a lot of work like this around this period. Around the same time he was the Nick Fury-esque leader of spies in True Lies and wasn't far off from another "Could have been played by anybody, but instead it's Chuck" role in the Planet of the Apes remake.

"And I'd still have my good eye too, if it wasn't for those damned dirty apes!!!"

 He's given a guide of sorts in Stiles, the editor of all of Cane's work. According to them, he hasn't been in touch with them in some time. He sent a partial manuscript to his agent, but that's all.

When Trent asks if they can't get anymore details from him, they are a little taken aback. Well, don't you know? That guy with the ax WAS his agent...

This revelation, and Trent's combative but interested back and forth with Stiles pushes us off into our main thrust of the narrative: the search for Sutter Cane and the descent into the spiral of insanity that leads to our Apocalypse in the beginning of the movie.

There are some cool things I really enjoyed about the first act of this film in re-watching, such as the utter ubiquity of signs of violence and mayhem in the background. Everyone on Earth seems to be a Cane fan, and since there's uneasiness surrounding the release of his new book, there's signs everywhere that a good chunk of Earth's population is really not very happy and looking to fight about it. Subtle mentions in the background on the news about gangs of people attacking clergy or the rash of mob violence around book stores specifically, add to the sense that is just everywhere in this movie that something is wrong. Plus, there's all the weird things that are happening to Trent specifically. the chance encounter with a cop using excessive force on a homeless man haunts Trent's dreams. The encounter with the axe-man leads to mobs of them haunting his nightmares in gory displays, and in the bookstore where he gathers material for his search for Cane, a young patron walks up to him and simply whispers "He sees you..."

The last three outings from John in the directors chair before Mouth had not been very scary in my opinion. He directed a majority of the sequences in the portmanteau pilot movie Body Bags (which never made it to series, but would have been boss), and before that Memoirs of an Invisible Man and They Live. Body Bags had a vein of humor running through it that made it campy and fun, and never quite landing as pure horror, while They Live and Invisible Man have premises that veer more towards action or adventure/thriller. The last purely horror movie John had made before this was the previous entry in the Trio, Prince of Darkness. But in Mouth, he shows that while he may have taken a break from doing so, he hadn't lost a single step in regards to creating genuine dread and scary moments, a skill he shows of perfectly once our heroes get out of the city and head for the town Trent is pretty sure Cane is hiding in: (and is doubly sure that it's all some sort of stunt if he is) Hobb's End, hidden away in the rural countryside...

Ahh, corn. Where true terror dwells...

But Hobb's End (along with being another sly reference in this trilogy to the Quatermass series) shouldn't exist. It's fictional, a setting in all of Cane's novels, akin to Lovecraft's Arkham, Massachusetts or King's Castle Rock, Maine. Hence Trent's certainty this is all some sort of joke or stunt, "Find Hob's End win a Sutter Cane lunchbox" as he succinctly puts it.

And once they arrive the aforementioned fun-house ride begins.

See, the final act of this trilogy is about the destruction of Reality, right? And a fun-house works specifically by distorting your view of reality , from forced perspective, warped mirrors, and the darkness and sudden light and noise, the spook house ride is designed to alter your sense and your perception, make you trust none of them and become hyper-aware and thus, easier to scare.

And one of the tools Carpenter uses to great effect are the works of KNB Effects which did all the practical creature work in this movie (and like 80% of the horror stuff you like), and they all look really good. People's faces begin to run and warp like melting wax, their sanity replaced by a malevolent cunning, as the effects of the strange metamorphosis the world is undergoing become more and mor visible, and the rue questions underpinning the narrative become clearer: Is Hobb's End real? Well, shit- is ANYTHING?

Pictured: Me, in the actual process of writing this goddamned review.

See, Cane is indeed hiding in Hobb's End. And Hobb's End is EXACTLY as he described it in his novels, down to loose boards and paintings in the hotel and the layout of street names and the sinister church on the edge of town. So, once Cane is actively on the scene, (played with a creepy air of Euro-trash given god-like powers by Jurgen Prochnow of Das Boot and House of the Dead) it becomes less a question of "What's going on here?" and more "How do we get out of this alive?" This becomes a greater existential question for Stiles once she finds Cane in his lair, happily typing away on the last touches of his manuscript, and he's simply overjoyed to see her, happy to have his prodigal daughter home to help him spread the new truth he's been putting together here.

And that truth? That the creatures who lurk outside our dimension, sowing chaos and madness where they tread? The unknowable, inhuman horrors that prowl the outer darkness that populate all his novels? 100 percent real! And ready to come barreling into our universe to take over and wipe out the human race once Cane's final novel In the Mouth of Madness is released.

Pictured: The Sutter Cane Fan Club charter members, circa. 1994

But is even that bombshell really what's going on?


PART III: DO YOU READ SUTTER CANE? or, the Potential for Madness in the Unanswered Question...


This is where we talk less about the movie itself for now and delve more into the themes that make me enjoy it as much as I do with successive rewatchings. The rabbit hole of meta questions that burrow down to the bedrock of this movie and make it one of the best Lovecraft tales H.P. never wrote.

The look everyone always gives me when I say it's time for our relationship to move to the metaphysical level...

Did Cane get reality- altering powers from a malignant race of extra-dimensional monsters?

Or did an author find the power in himself to make his creations real?

If that's the case, did he gain this power from within?

Was it always there, waiting to get out?

Or did we, as his audience, give it to him with our faith, our adoration and willingness to believe in his fiction like the Zealot he has become in service to his new pantheon of horrors?

"And where the hell am I?"

As the movie progresses, these questions dip in and out of the viewers mind, and that none of them get satisfactory answers is one of my favorite things about it. You can take it in any of the ways I laid out, or any of the hundred that might occur to you when you watch it yourself.

"Do you read Sutter Cane?" is a question asked several times throughout the movie, and it's a signifier that seems especially apt given that every time it is asked, the question is rarely answered.

If you read it, you don't need to ask. And if you ask, you might not even be a real person.

One of my favorite performances in this movie is from Julie Carmen as Stiles. Because the level of meta-thought required to bring her to life on screen must have been enormous and I appreciate that sort of Herculean effort in art. Because unlike most characters, where an actor can just ask at any point "What's my motivation?" Julie is playing Stiles as a fictional character inside a fictional story within this fictional story. She's literally a homonculus conjured into being by Cane to bring Trent into the narrative, and to guide him to Hobb's End once he's put the clues together. And once she's accomplished her mission, she begins to degrade, being less of a person and more a packet of ideas and random actions, switching from co-lead, to amateur detective, to love interest, to damsel in distress, all from one second to the next, as this hack horror writer who is orchestrating her reality cycles through the different character tropes they need to embody to move things along. And eventually, she just becomes malleable putty that Cane warps into whatever shape pleases him once the game is over and it's time to really fuck with Trent.

You can see this in the scene where she and Cane face each other. he r face periodically goes blank as she is in the presence of her creator and he begins to alter what she is and what she needs to be in his story. He lays his hands on her throughout the scene and though there's a sexual overtone, it's more that she's not human  to him. He made her. She's his.

"Whoops, I think I broke her..."

She fully embodies an existential dread of a person realizing they are a lie, mere fiction, and is tragically  cast aside because at the end of the day she's a trope and they are just tools in a writer's toolbox. Once he's putting no more effort into making her real, Cane's female lead for his novel literally vanishes.

As Cane himself says: "I think, therefore you are."

And once Trent is outside of Hobb's End again, he sees the power extending from this one place, creeping out until it touches everything, consuming Reality itself until it becomes the plaything in Cane's hands it was always fated to be, with the foreshadowing of earlier from Stiles paying off, when she muses that "Sane and insane could easily trade places if the insane became the majority."

And once that's happened, Trent muses to himself that "Reality isn't what it used to be..." setting the stage for the ending of the world and the movie in a way that executes one of my favorite Fourth wall breaks ever, and one of my favorite moments of a Lovecraft-style protagonist finally giving in and cracking, teetering into the unadulterated joy and terror of utter madness as the credits roll.

Credits that feature one of my favorite "Wait, WHAT?" moments outside a Naked Gun movie.

And that wraps up this weeks series on the Apocalypse Trilogy of John Carpenter! I hope you enjoyed our thoughts on these three very distinct films from some very different points in Carpenter's career, and that you'll keep an eye out for more film retrospectives from BEYOND MIDNIGHT in the future.

Because of some other projects I have going on (and because the next movie I really want to review hasn't shown up in the mail yet), this one will be updated a bit less often, but there should be more reviews coming of the smaller, more easily digestible variety at our sister station Bad Movie Express (feel free to follow that link too) and I'll keep thoise of you who are more avid followers up to date on future projects.

For now I'm checking myself in at the Inter Planetary Psyciatric Association's Free Self Care clinic for as long as my insurance will let me.


NEXT TIME: DO WE HAVE WORMSIGN, STILGAR?

PRINCE OF DARKNESS: John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trio Pt.2- Destruction of God

PROLOGUE: THE MIDDLE CHILD SYNDROME

Welcome back kids, it's time to dive into the second chapter of John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, PRINCE OF DARKNESS, starring the Big Jar of Satan!

Today, we're sinking our teeth into one of my many favorite John Carpenter films, because I love them all, but in wildly different ways, kinda like one's children- sure you have a favorite, but don't tell the others, yeah? You still love them all, and besides the others kinda know.

Plus, my usual writing music is even more apropos than usual today, since my favorite brain stimulant when pounding away at these articles is Ghost...

"Someone mentioned there would a big jar of Satan at this party, yeah?"

But this particular thesis is going to be cut through with a little bit of criticism as well, though never outright condemnation. This is one of my favorite John Carpenter movies to throw on and have a good time with friends, give it the ol' MST3K treatment, and have fun with one of John's more gonzo ideas.

But as a feature that is part of a thematic trilogy, this is the one that doesn't especially fit. It's the odd one out, and appropriately enough, the middle child of the 'series'. It was made after Carpenter's wacko love letter to Wu-Xia cinema Big Trouble in Little China burst onto the scene in usual Carpenter studio film fashion: flopping hard, getting critically mauled, then finding a loving and appreciative audience on vhs and tv. And frankly, John was just a little tired of the studio system's shit. So this one ended up being his first independently produced film since Escape from New York, and that's where my mixed opinions on this movie come in.

Before I became a good little film geek and started keeping track more obsessively of production and release dates of films, I had always assumed this film was one of John's earlier pieces, an indy contemporary with Micheal Myers and Snake Plissken, from much closer to 1980 than 1990, and defineitely with a bit of the 70's still hanging around.

I mean what about THIS mustache screams 1987? 

And there are other ways it feels more like early than mid Carpenter, but we'll get there. Let's dive into the pool and find God, shall we?

Or not...

PART I: STOP MAKING SENSE, or God + Quantum Physics = Horror Movie?

Prince of Darkness is one of the films that John Carpenter directed publicly but wrote privately. This was a way to make his films look a little more polished and collaborative from the outside, but also a great way to wear some of his influences on his sleeve and give little Easter-eggs for the audience in the know. So his nom-de-plume in Prince of Darkness? Martin Quatermass. This is a pretty un-subtle nod for those in the know to the Quatermass series of serials and films in Britain, a large portion of which were early influences on a little show called Doctor Who. For this film's purposes, it serves as a callback more specifically to Quatermass and the Pit in which the heroic scientist is called away from the British Rocket Group after the initial Quatermass Experiment to help investigate something strange getting dug up during construction on an underground train line: an alien space-craft with dead ET's inside that link back to our prehistoric origins as experiments of these aliens.

Pretty heavy stuff for the 60's and featuring one of my favorite little themes in dark sci-fi, one I like to call "Where Is Your God Now, Priest?" where the origins of man are pretty clearly divorced from anything laid down in the Book of Genesis, and thus the existence of God can be denied in something as outlandish as an anime about a transforming superhero fighting shape-shifting monsters. and if there's an outlier for this particular genre in American film that really digs deep into that particular well until it hits some glowing green shit, it's Prince of Darkness!

We hit the ground running like we always do in Carpenter films with a priest dying and leaving some weird freaky shit in the hands of another priest, One credited only as Priest, but named as Father Loomis and played by none other than Donald Pleasance of Halloween, The Puma Man and Escape from New York, and always ready to give some class and credibility to even the weirdest John Carpenter projects.

If you don't want that key, keep the box.
You could totally keep your weed in there.

After the creepy old key he's bequeathed leads him to a rundown church with... something in the basement, the old hideout of an esoteric religious order known as the Brotherhood of Sleep, he calls in an old acquaintance of his, a physicist  named Dr. Howard Birack played with a "I used to be a mad scientist, but I'm much better now" air of quiet weirdness and mystery by Victor Wong of Tremors, Big Trouble in Little China, and The Golden Child.

Birack is intrigued by the weird shit his old buddy is spouting, as his job is itself to spout weird shit- giving lectures on the more fun and mind-bending elements on quantum physics at a nearby college. So he gets some of his favorite students and colleagues together to go do some science.

That's where our ostensible leads come in, that mustache I pictured up there and few of the other students. They're all basically the archetypes you'd expect from  a movie full of 30-somethings playing "college students", with my personal standout being Dennis Dun of Big Trouble in Little China putting as much energy in here as he did in that previous film as a very passionate grad student named Walter.

This is all the space I wanna dedicate to these two, there really isn't much here.
It's strange that a film-maker aware of how good a movie can be without
 the obligatory Breeding Pair can be still felt the need to force one in here.

Maybe what this film needed was an Asian lead with a leading man smile and a cocky demeanor.

And as our leads come together, and the mystery is approached, studied, and unraveled, one of the weirdest issues I have with this movie comes up.



PART II: SCHRODINGER'S HORROR FILM, or How Prince of Darkness is Only Scary to It's Audience

See, what they find down in this church basement isn't what remains of a dread bake-sale or an ill-fated potluck dinner, but this-

A GREAT BIG JAR OF SATAN!!!

They aren't sure that's what it is at first, but there's no denying that this is a tall glass of swirling evil, and with the last of the Brotherhood that has kept it secret for eons gone it is gaining strength. The evidence gathers around the church as our scientists dig into their research. The low creatures of the Earth pulse and roil, ants, worms, maggots, and beetles gather in unsettling numbers and organization. And this power reaches out to the dregs of the human race as well, touching the minds of the weak-willed and enslaving them, especially a steadily growing group of the homeless led in cameo by none other than one of my favorite rock artists, the legendary Alice Cooper!

 "Yeah, yeah, Hail Satan- ya got any change?"

I feel like this may have been some sort of commentary on how the political moves of the 80's led to a mass expulsion of patients from closing mental institutions all over the country, resulting not only in massive spike in the homeless population in the major cities (since many didn't have next of kin able to take them in), but for this spike to be largely comprised of the mentally handicapped or the mentally ill. But I suspect it was more of a easy way to present a group of frightening people with a sense of quick and easy "otherness". And that's a whole Jar of Satan that I don't have time to open today; Horror and it's tendency to dehumanize and other those with mental health issues goes all the way to the beginnings of the form and deserves an article all of it's own that I don't have time to deep dive into this afternoon.

But all that aside, I think the real weak spot of the film is the specificity of it's cast. Where this becomes apparent is in the results of translating a Big Scary Book next to the Big Scary Jar and getting to the big reveal: that there isn't any God in particular, that Jesus Christ was an alien sent to Earth by a humanoid race to tell us all to be groovy to one another AND fight a battle against the being we know as Satan, an extra-dimensional alien that is only the son and herald of a much more powerful being, a sort of Spooky Galactus referred to as the "Anti-God" that this creature existed to bring through into our plane of existence from their dimension of utter chaos and evil. The Church has managed to keep the physical form of Satan bound after his defeat, but the being cannot be entirely destroyed, since he is partly energy and energy can only change form. Keeping up?

"You sure that's what it says?"
"Hang on, let me check my script.....Jesus Christ..."
"-is an alien, yeah we got that, skip to the end?"

So, that is- to put it lightly- some PRETTY HEAVY SHIT to lay down largely in one go of an exposition scene around a table not far from the aforementioned Jar de Satan.

If you have any religious convictions of your own, that can be pretty creepy a concept to wrap your head around. It's acknowledged that up at the highest levels the Church is aware that it's selling a false bill of goods, waiting for the day when the human race is ready to deal with the truth, which after 2000 years of being told a dumbed-down fairy tale version of the truth, is going to likely be never. And we see a few of the religious characters dealing with this here and there. Father Loomis is having a tough time of course, and one of our grad students appears to be religious, but it really only comes out when he starts belting out hymns after getting possessed by the Devil.

Hmm? Oh yeah, the Big Jar of Satan starts leaking and spraying into people's mouths, turning them into zombies. So if you wanted to really sit and think a minute with how there's no God and you were raised believing a lie, we don't have time now. Zombies.

"Should we wake him up?"
"I dunno.."
"Should we shake him?"
"Oh, no- he HATES that! Makes him all fizzy."

But the real loss of impact comes with the audience in the story for this bombshell of information: a bunch of grad students and physicists. You already have the clear divide of the Skeptic and the Zealot here with Loomis and Birack, and when the gaggle of scientists discover there's no God and Jesus was from outer space, it's kind of met with an indifferent "Yeah, figures." and doesn't come down with the weight it should. Maybe being raised by parents with a religious background, but not being particularly religious myself, I feel like there should be some more oomph behind this revelation, someone not being able to deal and going crazy before shit starts to go down for real.

What's this? Computers? Vials of different colored liquids?
MY GOD! Are you boys DOING SCIENCE IN HERE?!

Now I'm not saying Prince of Darkness is not a scary movie. It is. And a damn fun one too.

It has style for miles, a sense of dread second to none as it builds towards the classic Carpenter race to survive in cramped quarters against insurmountable odds, and a very unique premise (One of the few of his films I have NO IDEA how to turn into a Western is Prince of Darkness). Plus the recurring dream sequence that paces around in the back-ground of the movie is eerie as all Hell and the only bit that still gives me the chills. It was this dream that served as the nucleus of the production, inspired by a dream that Carpenter's writing partner and former spouse Debra Hill had about a shadowy figure emerging from a church and filling her with dread, leading to John wanting to make a film with that same feeling.

And he 100 percent succeeds. The dream scene (which anyone who sleeps in the church has and purports to be a message sent backwards through time via tachyon transmission as a warning from the year "One-nine-nine-nine...") is not only weird as hell, it's also slightly different each time we see it, showing how the events in the present are subtly reshaping the future and really committing to the whole sci-fi element of our horror/sci-fi tale.

But for me a big part of horror isn't just how the film might make me feel as a viewer, but also how the characters are effected by the horror of the scenario. If there was more solid dread coming from the characters about their situation- that they have found out their world is a lie, the truth is horrible, and the truth is now consuming their friends and trying desperately to kill them and destroy the world as we know it, it would fit in a bit more comfortably with it's two companions in the trilogy.
The characters are scared sure, who wouldn't be when there are psycho homeless people outside, people are getting turned into zombies, and your friend the cute blonde has been turned into a literal avatar of Satan?

And whatever THIS SHIT is? Yeah, that's happening too!

Which leads me to think of this as Schrodinger's Horror Movie it is both scary/not scary because while yes, it's a tightly directed John Carpenter movie, it lacks a bit of the personal element of horror he managed to capture in  films like Halloween and The Thing. And while it's far from his weakest film, (looking at you, Ghosts of Mars) it is lacking a certain something, which I think is linked to the way it drops the majority (and to me, most frightening elements of) it's premise for a much simpler one after doing all the work to set it up.


PART III: JOHN CARPENTER'S NIGHT OF THE EXISTENTIAL DEAD, or "I prefer to think God is not dead, just drunk..."


For the first half of it's run-time, Prince of Darkness is an atmospheric sci-fi horror film. And it's awesome. For the second? it gradually becomes something we never quite saw John do in a straight-up sense, but get an idea of how good it would be here: a zombie movie.

"Brains?"
"Shut up, Karen this is serious."

While some of his films have that element, and that same stripped-down style and pacing that makes the early George Romero Dead movies so good, he has never made a straight up zombie movie. He made this one because he was getting tired of seeing so many derivative horror films out there and wanted to inject some weird new ideas in.  And he succeeds for the most part, making a film made memorable by it's strangeness and charm. But the second half is really only memorable for me for a few things, and they're all things that stand out in disagreeable ways for me. Like remember the cute blonde I mentioned that gets the pull possession treatment? There's a reason I remember her hair color so well, and if you've seen this flick you know where I'm going with this.

She was played by an actress named Susan Blanchard who as best I can tell retired from acting about two years later. And yeah, I can imagine that someone who isn't entirely committed to their craft and all is someone who might ask that the creature make-up they have applied doesn't mess up their hair.

"Is it really noticeable?"
"Only on the face, sweetie."
"Oh."

I normally don't hit below the belt like this, but this is one of those things that completely took me out of the experience every time I watched this movie. The sheer power and corrupting nature of the films take on Satan is so horrific and so toxic that to fully integrate into Kelly's body is to begin that body's slow goopy dissolution. To accomplis his mission, Satan has to destroy her body and soul, kicking off a slimy, viscous transformation into an animate decayed meat husk with the mind of the most evil being on our planet inside that somehow leaves the nice blonde hair and pretty white top of it's host untouched. I've gotten a little sweaty at work and looked worse off than her clothes do in her scenes.

If the film really wanted to sell me on her being Satan incarnate, squelching clothes run through with blood and pus, a trail like a decaying slug, and wet, stringy hair coming off in clumps would have sold this character as someone who only cares about accomplishing their 2000 year old task and not about keeping their hair from getting mussed up. End of that rant, sorry. But this villain is memorable for all the wrong reasons and really brings down the back half of this movie.

As for the rest of it, like I said- It's an exciting and original take on a zombie movie that feels like it has some real stakes, with Satan trying to bring his father into our reality through a mirror while the surviving human characters try to find ways to stop it while dealing with the reanimated threat of their dead friends. And it's an enjoyably spooky watch, but it doesn't feel like a proper End of the World movie until the literal last scene.

If you told me when I was twelve, in the aftermath
of this film's Apocalypse, that it all started because of
some dumb-ass named Brian? I'd have shrugged and said "Figures."

So while I don't knock this films place in the canon of the Apocalypse Trilogy? I feel like other entries in the Carpenter library could fill it's spot a bit more ably. You telling me the world doesn't descend into an Apocalyptic revolution that would end life as we know it in the aftermath of the final scene in They Live? Or that the overall state of the world and the final "Fuck you" from Snake Plissken to the President doesn't lead to the eventual extinction of the human race in Escape from New York? (Escape from LA not withstanding)

At the end of the day, I always find Prince of Darkness an entertaining flick, but am a little disappointed that a movie with such high concept, high impact ideas tees them up just to slice into the woods of the Zombie movie.

We know from the previous entry and the succeeding one that existential dread is one of the favorite thematic loose teeth John Carpenter likes to wiggle, I just wished he'd spent more time doing that in this one.

John Carpenter: What happens to us when we destroy God?

Also John Carpenter: Zombie shit, apparently.

"Hallelujah, brother..."

NEXT TIME: DO YOU READ SUTTER CANE?

THE THING: John Carpenter's Apocalypse Trio, Pt.1- Destruction of Self

Editor's Note: This will be the start of an experiment here at Beyond Midnight. We've started a more light-hearted sister blog for shorter reviews of b-movies that are intended as palate cleansers between these much heavier, labor-intensive essays. Doing these one a day every week is a bitch, but this week I'm going to give three a try. Hopefully this will lead to a schedule of MWF for Beyond Midnight, with my sister blog uploading on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If this experiment turns out to be unsatisfactory, that schedule is likely to be inverted. However, with this weeks subject, it's the only way I really wanted to get it done. SO, without further ado...


PROLOGUE: ON TRILOGIES, PARANOIA, AND PANDEMICS

So this film is a bit of a first for me on this blog. See, for the first time since I've started writing on here, I didn't watch the film under discussion before setting to work on this essay. Seems unusual for a guy who reviews/discusses a movie not to bone up, right? Well, I have my reasons.

Chief among them being I don't need to.

This film is a part of me, an integral memory concerning why I love horror so much, why I love film so much, and why I love horror films so much above either of these two alone. I've been falling back on this kind of thing during my period of isolation, and finding them to be as valued a companion now as they ever have been. Especially in these times of rather intense paranoia, I found my thoughts turning to John Carpenter's The Thing.

"I SAID SIX FEET BACK, MOTHERFUCKER!!!"

But not just The Thing, but the entirety of what Carpenter refers to as his Apocalypse Trilogy: 1982's The Thing, 1987's Prince of Darkness, and 1994's In the Mouth of Madness. 

These three films aren't connected in terms of continuity, although I'm sure one of you super nerds and I could find ways they could be, or even theme. They're connected in terms of subject matter, tone, and film-maker. They're all kind of bleak, nihilistic, and concern one thing: the end. Of everything. One way or another. And other film-makers have done this kind of cinematic hydra as well, such as Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy (Rosemary's Baby, Repulsion, The Tenant), Terry Gillaim's Imagination Trilogy (Brazil, Time Bandits, and The Adventures of Baron Munchhausen), and of course Edgar Wright's Three Flavors/Cornetto Trilogy (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, The World's End) for the most modern example that readily springs to mind. And each of them has very little connective thread attaching them outside of occasionally shared actors and explorations of certain specific ideas. There's plenty in each of them to dive into and unpack, and maybe someday I will with each of them, we'll see how I (and you, of course, Constant Reader...) like this adventure.

Each of Carpenter's trilogy is about the destruction of one core thing in our world leading to the annihilation of everything else. And in our first entry, we explore the concept of weaponized paranoia;  how the world might come apart if we can't trust one another. If we can't tell who's infected.

When we can't tell if someone is even human...and neither can they...

PART I: THINGS COME TOGETHER- My Personal Feelings on The Thing,
or "It's gone, MacReady..."


Like I mentioned above, this movie was a big deal to me growing up. A bar that couldn't be topped and still rarely ever is, and quite possibly the strangest and most gut-churning take on that old beloved genre of mine: the Spam in a Cabin movie.

Frozen Spam keeps longer... Millions of years if you're lucky...

But it's also a film pretty much my whole family liked, even making it's way into casual conversation. Lamenting shitty weather or bad luck with a sigh, a shake of the head, then "First goddamn week of winter..." Or, to this day when something can't be fixed, we fall back to paraphrase my favorite exchange:

Garry: The generator's gone!
MacReady: Can ya fix it?
Garry: ....it's gone, MacReady...

and just say "It's gone, MacReady..." and chuckle ruefully while planning our trip to Home Depot.

When I was little, my family lived in a very isolated area. So much so, in fact, that getting friends over to visit was always a chore because I had to convince my parent to let them come over, and then  convince their parents to bring them all the way out and come get them the next day. We were far enough out in the sticks that getting them to come out for the day was out of the question, it was always a mini-staycation at the abode of the Alex from Beyond Space.

So, occasionally, especially in the depths of winter when there was a quarter mile of drifted over driveway between us and the highway before you could even try the three miles to the nearest town, or the fifteen or twenty to the nearest supermarket, I could really sympathize with the boys out at U.S. Antarctic Research Outpost 31. In fact, one year we were hit by a snowstorm so bad that my mom ended up marooned in the town where she worked delivering the mail, about 15 miles from us, and things were so bad that we didn't see her for a week or two.

We have a few family portraits that look eerily similar to this one.

So we didn't exactly have a lot of neighbors. I didn't have a lot of visitors. What we had was a lot of wilderness to explore, each other, and one other thing: dogs. We always had lots of dogs.

Most of these are good doggos. One of them is not.

So the feel of The Thing for me was always one of both fear and familiarity. I really liked and sympathized with a lot of the elements of the setting and the characters. But the story and the monster scared me senseless. Because this film, ladies and germs, was my first true introduction to the concept of Body Horror, which remains one of my pet fascinations to this day. But we'll get back to that in a moment.

For those of you who don't know, somehow, The Thing is a remake of the 1950's creature classic The Thing From Another World. TFAW was a very loose adaption of a short story by John W. Campbell called "Who Goes There?"

Side-rant:  The Thing follows a very important rule about remakes (which I summed up but did not name specifically in my lackluster analysis of the 2019 Pet Sematary). I call it Huston's Law, based on the quote of actor and film-maker John Huston "Why not remake some of our bad pictures and make them good?" In other words, if everyone agrees that something is an unassailable classic, leave it the hell alone. If it hasn't aged well, or could use an update to reach a new audience or find a fresh way to interpret the material (like say hewing closer to the original short story than a film from the 50s ever could), give it a try. But when doing so, don't be so anxious to revisit the past that you don't move forward. This is the movie I always bring up whenever somebody makes the blanket statement of "All remakes suck." Nah bud. You've just seen some shitty remakes. End rant.

In the wastes of the Antarctic tundra, in the "first goddamn week of winter", 1982 an isolated research station is suddenly under siege by man in a helicopter who is desperately trying to kill a dog. Once the apparent madman has been killed, the dog is taken in by the baffled team as they attempt to solve the mystery. From there the film unfolds into a tale of very personal cosmic horror as they discover the research station this man came from is abandoned, destroyed, and filled with corpses. and not all of them are even remotely humanoid.

Special shout out to the incredible Rob Bottin here, too.
 I still dream about this face now and then, man. Good job.

It becomes clear after the dog they took in explodes that night into a tentacled tongue demon that appears to have sprung from the slickest layer of Moist Squelching Hell, somewhere south of the Mushroom Fuck Jungle that they have taken in something horrifying. That which can only be called a Thing. A living nightmare that can assume any shape, imitate any life-form it has absorbed. It's multiplying. And it had hours alone with the men of Outpost 31.

And suffice to say it's from out of town...

Which is where you strap in hard for the ride that is going to take you to the conclusion of such a masterclass in building suspense. Because this movie isn't just about a shape-shifting alien. It's about the destruction of the Self, and how that leads to the end of all things we know...or at least recognize.


PART II: THINGS CHANGE SHAPE, or the Importance of the Self in Body Horror

As I mentioned earlier, The Thing was my first taste of Body Horror. For those who don't know, Body Horror is when a narrative revolves around a distinct physical change in it's protagonists or characters surrounding them to generate tension and shock, calling into question identity and sanity, and if it's even possible to return to a state of normalcy. There's a fair portion of this concept at play in the early days of horror, in subtle ways. The werewolf in film and it's ancestor the bifurcated demon known as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde bears elements of it. Societal tensions about Communism in the 50s became the Pod People of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The surreal heightened reality of 1958's The Fly had seeds of it that blossomed into the Body Horror masterpieces of David Cronenberg (including his peerless 1986 re-imagining of the original film) and lives on in more modern takes on it like 2014's The Hive or even comedic takes like 2016's The Cleanse or 2013's Bad Milo. 

But to call The Thing my first taste is a little underwhelming of a statement. That's like saying you got introduced to cars by driving in a demolition derby, or that you lost your virginity at an orgy officiated by three screaming naked Turbo-Caligulas on PCP.

It was my first all you can eat buffet of the bizarre and existential terror of not knowing what's real, who you can trust, even if you are yourself.

One of my favorite characters in the ensemble, Childs played by Keith David, at one point asks "If I was an imitation, a perfect imitation? How would I know?" and that sent chills down my spine for years. Does the Thing fool itself? Is it's cover so perfect it will sleep inside it's own cells until the time comes to defend itself? And for those of you who have seen it the answer is, of course, yes. One character is revealed as the monster because the alien went so far as to imitate his heart problems, and all the stress he believes he's feeling makes his (alien, shape-changing) heart give out.

Now, the Self in horror is an often-fucked-with notion. There are a few flicks I can point out where the Self is called into question to provide doubt in our Narrator (is this character they hang out with all the time even real or something else we do not talk about, for instance) or to reveal that our protagonist, far from being on the run from a killer, has been one the whole time. Hidden portions of the Self, hitherto unexplored recesses in our own minds and hearts, that's a playground for horror stories. And The Thing gives us just enough time with the ensemble at Outpost 31 to let you know them pretty well but not well enough to know if they're still them from one scene to the next. Obvious marks get revealed as innocent victims. Someone we trusted starts to crack then undergoes literal metamorphosis into a nightmare.

Where that comes into stark relief is at the beginning of the narrative when all our cast already have a sense of uniformity to them: they're all dudes. This wasn't initially intentional, according to legend there was one female cast member, but she dropped out before filming began and when the character was recast it was with a man. No info seems to exist beyond that, but it's a neat rumor.  But these are men who have lived together, cheek by jowl, some friends, some practically family, some indifferent, for months by the time our story opens. But along with their shared Y chromosomes, they also have that sense that I'm only truly beginning to appreciate now: they haven't gotten out in a while...

So despite this being a horror movie, the group scenes occasionally just look like a beer commercial.

I'm sure there's plenty of important research to be done and whatnot, but for the most part that's off-screen, not germane to the story at hand. So these guys have fuck-all to do and they've all gotten a little weird the way you can only get when you all know that if er'rybody smell like a monkey's butt, basically none of you do and it's no big deal. In fact, there is only one female voice even heard in the entirety of the film, when we meet our nominal lead, chopper pilot, and (in my head-canon) cousin to S.D. Plissken, R.J. MacReady, played by Kurt Russel.
When he plays video chess with the computer, it has a female voice reading out it's moves (and before MacReady uses the ultimate chess move of dumping a tumbler of ice and bourbon into the CPU, is actually voiced by Adrienne Barbeau, though she's uncredited, who at the time was married to John Carpenter).

The female lead of John Carpenter's The Thing, ladies and gents.

And one of the ways MacReady stand out from the rest of the cast, aside from his glorious beard which I appear to be catching up on, is he seems to be okay with the solitude of the outpost. According to Russell, there was some backstory worked up for MacReady that never made it into the film that he was a chopper pilot in Vietnam and was haunted by the things he'd seen there and came to the Outpost to get away from the world for a while. However, this background never makes it into the film, so it's canon is up to you, but I think it makes so many of his actions and his natural paranoia make sense. He's a man who knows how to function under stress because he's been doing it this whole time even before the alien monster showed up.

Other standouts are the aforementioned Keith David, who you might recognize as the voice of Goliath, Spawn, and any ad for the Navy you can think of. Also Wilford Brimley who, let's be honest here, you either recognize from this movie, Westerns you watched with your dad,  or the "dia-beet-us" memes. The others are all great though, bringing the natural chemistry to life between these guys perfectly. John likes to work with unknowns or actors he knows and that's one of the things he balances really well here, while keeping his cinematography with his longtime collaborator Dean Cundey loose and organic enough to make a lot of scenes of 4-8 men in a room talking interesting.

Brimley really does stick in the mind as Blair however, a forbidding presence amongst the men even before he understands the true nature of the threat we are dealing with. His comfort with the red stuff comes honestly, too. It was noted by the cast and crew that Wilford was a ranch-hand in his younger days, so when it comes time to dissect the charred remains of one of our downed monsters, he approached it in character as if he was just delivering a calf or castrating a bull, really selling the autopsy scenes and getting in there and getting messy and grossed out for our benefit.

Seriously, every creature Bottin made for this
needs to be put on display in a gallery somewhere.
Who'd go with me?

SO watching how each one of these guys and all the other deal with the threat of losing their humanity, their Self, is very revealing of how it happens to lots of people when they're faced with this kind of thing.
Blair goes full sicko mode, grabs an ax, and goes galaxy brain on the problem, making sure that the alien never gets somewhere it can infect a large population by destroying any means of communicating with the outside world. And later, when he's realized that everyone but him is probably fucked, and he's next up, we see him contemplate suicide.
MacReady goes in a similar vein, but never gives up, going combat mode against and unseen enemy being not entirely different from what Kurt Russell imagined for ol' R.J. in his backstory anyway...
But that their reactions are at their most individual early on is very much in line with their still retained humanity. It's when people start to rationally deal with this Lovecraftian beast in their midst you need to start questioning sanity and humanity in those around you.

Because as the movie goes on, all their (and thereby our) versions of the self are destroyed, taken away, or subverted. Their Group Self, who they are amongst friends, is robbed from them the moment the group is confirmed to be suspect. Their Moral Self is threatened when they have to contemplate killing each other, and the implications if they happen to be wrong about someone. And finally their Physical and Mental Selves are threatened by the creeping, amorphous horror that stalks them, being the utter antithesis of not only anything human, but anything we recognize as a traditional living being...

PART III: THINGS COME APART, or "I do not believe any of this voodoo bullshit..."

One of the most fascinating elements of the story in both the film and the original tale, is the nature of the monster.

Or the lack thereof...

The thing is never portrayed as being particularly intelligent. At no point does an absorbed person "break character" to reveal some deeper cunning or master plan for what to do with the people of the Earth. For the Thing, kayfabe is everything. It's nature is one of a skulking, hunting animal; most dangerous to you when you're alone, or asleep in the dark. If it's found out, then it's time to shape-shift into an appropriately deadly form to defend itself from hostiles, drawing from everything it has ever absorbed into itself for lethal inspiration.. Which is where the creature reveals it's true nature and why it's the prefect beast to threaten the nature of our inner Self.

The Thing is the Anti-Self.

 As we discover more about it's biology and abilities, we discover that each piece of tissue, each cell, is capable of autonomous action, of spontaneous adaptation. Which is a deeply weird concept for us limited, binary mono-forms. Our bodies can seem so unassailable. Our forms so unchanging, despite the odd love-handle or thinning patch of hair.

To imagine life as the thing is to imagine a body where such changes are second nature, where the Self is never fully dictated by the outer appearance, and can change at a moment's notice to deal with an imminent threat to the whole.  It's like imagining your finger growing teeth to fend off a paper cut, or your head, say running away from it's body after a fiery accident...

Have I mentioned the head crab is my favorite monster in The Thing?

It evokes some of the truly bizarre imagery in Japanese film, animation, and manga, such as the groaning, bio-mechanical body transformations of Tetsuo: The Iron Man, or the liquid, mutating flesh of the finale of Akira, the creeping disfigured monsters of a Junji Ito comic, and even the supernatural mutilations and body-horror/heroics of the characters of Go Nagai's Devilman. Again I find myself struck by the echoes of Carpenter through horror canon. Not all of these are direct influences, or things he directly influenced, but the similarities tell of a time when the mind of horror artists drifted to something that could strike anywhere, could move unseen amongst us, and change our world forever. Times where nobody trusts anybody anymore...

So y'know. Times like now.

It's really interesting to see so many parallels with The Thing and the situation today (April 2020, deep in Corona country, for those of you lucky enough to be reading this in the far future of really anytime that isn't now, you lucky bastard). Of course, these are very much in line with how the AIDS epidemic was treated in the 80's, as mostly a not our problem thing, especially when it was stigmatized into "a gay disease", but I feel the full power of what Blair was so scared of has finally come to bear on us as a species. Sure, it's not a deadly shape-shifting alien, but a virus we don't have any immunity to is pretty intense in and of itself. It puts into perspective our more ordinary fears for those of us who can grasp a thing like perspective. I look around and see some folks being like dinosaurs watching the meteor come down and mumbling, "Well, that doesn't look good for the economy..."

And it's speculated in The Thing that if the creature reached the mainland, total assimilation would be accomplished in something like a few years, a rather conservative estimate we're now finding out in the world of COVID-19.

But despite all this, it isn't the end of the world. Well, actually I hope it is. Not entirely.

Just as we know it.

I think I wanna send these out next year as Christmas cards...

Stay safe, stay inside, this is R.J. MacReady, helicopter pilot, U.S. outpost 31, signing off.


NEXT TIME: LIES, PHYSICS, AND A BIG JAR O'SATAN!!!!