31 Days of Horror Recommendations: In The Mouth Of Madness (1994)

 

Year: 1994

Country: USA

Subgenre: Lovecraftian 

Runtime: 95 minutes

Director: John Carpenter

John Carpenter refers to this is the third installment in his "apocalypse trilogy," which includes The Thing and Prince of Darkness. The film has always struck me, however, as being as close to a horror spoof as Carpenter gets.  What I have always found cathartically amusing about the film is his putting the words "hack horror writer" in the mouth of his main protagonist John Trent (Sam Neill). It's pretty clear that he is aiming that at Stephen King. Carpenter famously adapted King's Christine for the big screen a little more than a decade before this film. And although it's been reported that King had not terribly kind words for the Carpenter film, the truth is that neither has any animosity toward each other (Carpenter has even said as recently as five years ago that King is such a complicated writer that adapting his writing for the screen is really hard work). I think Carpenter, in making this film about a "hack horror writer," has something deeper to say in regards to another writer: H.P. Lovecraft. And it is not that the film overtly Lovecraftian to an extreme--you'd have to be a complete novice not to spot that. It is that Lovecraft is a deeply divisive writer and his work is fraught with what I can only refer to a "corrupted racism." I know that's a weird term, but Lovecraft was not your run of the mill racist (and he was a racist, just not a terribly sane one). His work attributes corruption in the world to kinds of humans that are closest in some form to the oddly inter-dimensional/demonic old ones, who are also alien in some form. Carpenter takes that dark sludge and turns it nicely on it's head.  There is both a deep dread in this film and complete amused disregard for the impending doom that the coming of the "old ones" will bring. The entire film feels like it wants to criticize or even make fun of horror novelists (complete with a town called "Hobb's End"--a joke name playing on one of the old names for the devil "Hobb"), while at the same time giving them a last laugh. It is a ton of fun to watch, has (as you can imagine) great music, and has much more to say about the state of our national spiritualism than it appears to at first blush. Also, I think, essential watching for the Halloween season.