Night 12: John Carpenter Night
“Do you read Sutter Cane?”
With credits like Halloween, The Thing, Christine, and They Live, director John Carpenter is unquestionably one of the true masters of horror. John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness is not as famous or widely seen as those movies though it is equally well-crafted and very scary. It opened in February of 1995 to mostly negative reviews and indifferent audiences, but over time has gained somewhat of a cult status and a special edition Blu-ray release in 2018 from Shout Factory (through their special horror label, Scream Factory). Currently it is streaming on the Criterion Channel, Tubi, and The Roku Channel. The film begins with the main character, John Trent (Sam Neil), being dragged into an insane asylum screaming that he is not insane. He’s interviewed by a psychiatrist played by David Warner and we flashback to see how Trent ended up in a padded cell. They make reference to how bad things are “out there” and it is clear that Trent’s story will also explain the beginnings of that as well. In the Mouth of Madness is part of John Carpenter’s Apocalypse trilogy, along with The Thing and Prince of Darkness, each of which is about how the end of the world, at least as we know it, begins. Here the cause of all the trouble is the latest book by the mysterious horror author Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow). Trent is an insurance investigator hired to locate Cane, the most famous and best selling author in the world, who has vanished along with the manuscript for his new book, titled In the Mouth of Madness. Cane and his work are so popular and create such hysteria that riots break out when bookstores sell out of copies of his current novel. Trent believes that the disappearance is a hoax and is smugly proud that he’s never heard of Sutter Cane. Cane’s editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) goes with Trent on his search. They end up transported to a town that shouldn’t exist, Hobb’s End, the fictional town in Cane’s novels that looks like a perfect small town but has many strange things and horrors that emerge from every corner. The town residents, starting with the children, are mutating: some have deformed faces, some have tentacles. Trent and Styles find Cane in a red chamber in a Byzantine style church finishing his novel. He reveals that he has merely been channeling his work from ancient otherworldly creatures that once lived on earth and seek to remake the world and return. Jurgen Prochnow is very well cast as the mad author Sutter Cane. He is so low-key in his surprisingly few scenes that it only makes his character more frightening. In a very memorable scene he stands in front of a pulsating door covered in slime and then…rips a hole in reality… is probably the best way to describe it. Cane is a villain but there is no ultimate bad guy. The horror of In the Mouth of Madness is in its characters questioning their reality, learning knowledge or ideas that will drive them mad, and the horror that an idea can alter reality and bring about mass destruction. Sam Neil gives a superb performance as a man who begins as a smug skeptic and then is driven to madness. The image of him sitting alone in a movie theater with black crosses drawn all over his face and eating popcorn as he finally succumbs to the spreading madness is a haunting and unforgettable scene (there’s little surprise that it has turned into an internet meme). Neil also has one of the great screams and maniacal laughs in movies. No matter what state his character is in, you believe it. Julie Carmen as Styles also begins as a conservative character, then her hair comes down and she too succumbs to madness. She is not just a tag along character either. She witnesses the strange sights first as their car flies through the air to reach the otherworldly, horrific town of Hobb’s End. Once she witnesses the horrors Sutter Cane shows her, she becomes an important part of getting the insidious manuscript to our world.
Sutter Cane is obviously modeled after Stephen King. Both have similar sounding names, set their horror stories in New England towns (King uses his native Maine, Cane uses neighboring New Hampshire), and both are extremely popular. However, Sutter Cane is more of a stand in for the extremely influential, and problematic, early 20th century weird and horror fiction author H.P. Lovecraft. Also a New England native, Lovecraft set most of his stories in or around the fictional town, Arkham, Massachusetts. His stories often dealt with ancient monsters that predated humanity and sought to reclaim the earth. He rarely described the monsters in detail but used many adjectives to describe the terrified reactions of the characters. A very Lovecraftian scene happens when Neil peers down into an abyss and sees the creatures approaching the portal to reality. Carpenter keeps the camera on Neil whose expression communicates the approaching horror. The next scene is not only nightmare fuel but the epitome of a nightmare: being chased by a mass of monsters down an endless hallway. We see only quick flashes of the monsters, close ups of mouths and teeth and tentacles and claws. Their anatomy seems to make no sense and that is part of the horror. Carpenter also makes good use of well timed jump scares and more subtle moments of suspense. In an early scene Trent and his boss, played by the late, great Bernie Casey, are having a casual conversation in a diner while a deranged looking man crosses the street towards them carrying an ax. This is one of my absolute favorite, top 13 horror movies. The screenplay by Michael De Luca and Carpenter’s direction effectively use many different kinds of horror. This is a horror movie with monsters, gross effects, and jump scares, but also a horror movie with suspense, surreal imagery, unsettling ideas, and disturbing themes. Compared to Stephen King or Edgar Allan Poe, there are only a handful of adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories or novellas, which due to Lovecraft’s literary style are inherently difficult to visualize (The filmmaker who has probably had the most success with adapting Lovecraft to the screen is Stuart Gordon, director of Re-Animator, From Beyond, and Dagon). Even though In the Mouth of Madness is not a direct adaptation of any specific Lovecraft story, it may well be the best cinematic representation of the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft.
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