13 Nights of Shocktober: Prince of Darkness

by A.J. 

This is my favorite time of year, second only to Christmas. Autumn has arrived, the weather is cooling down, and October becomes the month-long celebration of scary movies called Shocktober. There are a lot of horror movies out there, but as a genre, horror is still looked down upon by some mainstream critics and moviegoers. It doesn’t help that, admittedly, there are so few quality horror movies made but, like comedy, it’s a very difficult and subjective genre. So, in the days leading up Halloween I’ll be posting some recommendations for scary movies to help you celebrate Shocktober. 

Night 5: "Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level... into ghosts and shadows." John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness 

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is the second film in his Apocalypse Trilogy (the first is The Thing, the third is In the Mouth of Madness), which are films that focus on a small group of people dealing with the beginnings of events that could lead to the end of the world. We get the set up for the movie in scenes interspersed with one of the longest opening titles sequences of any movie; John Carpenter’s director credit comes about 10 minutes after the movie starts. Donald Pleasence plays a priest who enlists the help of a physicist, played by Victor Wong, and his graduate students to stop an otherworldly evil from being unleashed on the world.

The movie takes place in the basement of an old church in Los Angeles where a mysterious and evil cylinder containing a green liquid has been hidden away by the Catholic Church. It is transmitting a signal, so Professor Birack (Wong) and his team of grad students set up equipment to decipher the message. As you might expect, creepy stuff begins to happen. An army of zombie-like homeless people (led by Alice Cooper) surrounds the church. We learn from a conversation between Father Loomis (Pleasance) and Professor Birack that the origin of the 7 million year old cylinder is an alternate universe made of anti-matter, ruled by an Anti-God. The liquid in the cylinder is the physical form of an Anti-Christ attempting to bring the Anti-God into our universe. It’s an interesting attempt to blend quantum physics and Christian dogma. For a physics and horror nerd like me, their conversation is the highlight of the movie.

The green liquid infects some of the scientists and turns them into essentially zombies. This is when the real horror of the film kicks into gear. Prince of Darkness turns into a siege movie when the heroes barricade themselves from the zombie-like homeless outside and the possessed team members inside. In a nice twist on the siege movie because these people have no arsenal of weapons since all they brought with them is their lab gear. The scientists having no weapons is more exciting than you might think. They fight off the zombies with pieces of lumber or just outrun them which heightens the sense of danger the characters are facing. Also, they still have to prevent an evil Anti-God from coming into our universe. 

There are good and gross visual effects in Prince of Darkness, including a pretty famous one in which Alice Cooper impales someone with a bicycle. One character becomes more and more monstrously decayed as she becomes possessed. The grossest part to me are the insects that swarm the building. Another special effect that holds up quite well is mirrors turning into liquid portals between universes. 

Prince of Darkness takes its time with the set up and zombie climax. It has interesting ideas about religion and mirrors being portals to other dimensions. It has fun playing with concepts from quantum physics (each particle of matter has an opposite antiparticle) and  horror/sci-fi riffs on those ideas (our God has an opposite anti-God, different from Satan). Those ideas are interesting, but are not explored as much as they could have been. Some things are never explained; for example, what do the zombie homeless people have to do with any of this aside from menacing the scientists? Despite its flaws, Prince of Darkness is still an interesting take on the apocalyptic horror subgenre. This is a lesser seen John Carpenter movie and though it is not his best (it’s hard to top films like Halloween and The Thing) it is still a good scary, creepy movie and contains a lot of interesting ideas that make this movie worth watching.