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?