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.
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 4: Psychological Horror Night Beyond the Realm of Human Desire Possession (1981)
The two times I’ve watched this movie were when it aired on
TCM as part of TCM Underground, and it is a perfect movie for their late night
weekend programming. Possession is
some “weird, wild stuff.” If people know about this movie, it is most likely as
the movie where Isabelle Adjani has sex with a squid monster. Nearly a full
half hour was cut from Possession for its theatrical run in the U.S. in 1981,
but the restored version runs at just over 2 hours and that is the version
you’ll find on TCM. It is also available on DVD. Possession is most easily described as a horror movie though it is
unlike most horror movies, even off the beaten path horror movies. If there is
such a thing as Marital/Divorce Horror, David Cronenberg's The Brood and Andrzej Zulawski'sPossession are perfect
examples.
Possession begins
as nothing more than a well-acted and well-shot marital drama. Sam Neil and
Isabelle Adjani play Mark and Anna, an unhappy couple living near the Berlin
wall. Mark has just returned home from a business trip (it’s never quite clear
what his job is) to find that his marriage is at an end. Anna disappears soon
after. Then Mark receives a cryptic phone call from her saying that she needs
time “to think…about me.” Mark discovers that Anna has been having an affair
and receives another mysterious phone call, this time from a man saying that
Anna is with him and won’t be coming back. Mark finds out the name and address
and of her lover, an older man named Heinrich. But when Mark goes to Heinrich’s
apartment to get Anna back he finds out that Heinrich hasn’t seen Anna for a
long time. Nothing remotely scary or supernatural happens for almost a full
hour and then it turns into horror territory in a way that is somehow both slow
and abrupt.
The horror elements begin when a private investigator hired
by Mark to track down Anna finds her in a dilapidated and dimly lit apartment.
What he finds there and what follows make this an incredibly unusually movie.
There is a monster that is like a creature from an H.P. Lovecraft story. The
monster is hidden mostly in shadow but what you can see is covered in blood,
slime, and is gross, gross stuff. I don’t think it’s a spoiler to reveal that
there is a monster in Possession (I
know I wouldn’t have watched this movie without knowing about the monster) or
any of the other strange scenes because nothing is as strange or horrifying as
actually seeing these scenes.
More than the monster, the actions and behavior of Mark and
Anna make Possession an uncomfortable,
strange, and weird, wild movie. Though Anna leaves Mark for her new “lover” she
still returns back to the apartment to visit their son. Anna and Mark’s
interactions during these short visits are bizarre. They move from arguments
that any strained married couple would have to fiercely beating each other. In
one scene Isabelle Adjani runs out of their apartment after Mark has slapped
her and she screams in the street with a mouthful of blood. A truck carrying
wrecked cars swerves to miss them and crashes. Then Anna gets a wild eyed look
and wanders off and Mark plays soccer with a group of nearby school kids. In
another scene Isabelle Adjani is walking through a tunnel with a bag of
groceries at night and then convulses wildly. She twirls around, flailing her
arms, screaming and it goes on for a very long time. Anna’s former lover
Heinrich, played by Heinz Bennent, is a strange, odd character. When he and
Mark meet he is unusually calm and wants them to be friends and grabs Mark’s
hands puts them on his bare chest. Later, when he visits Mark, Heinrich is
wearing a white blazer over a black unbuttoned shirt and speaks in riddles and
proverbs and moves around like he is performing a drunken ballet. He also knows
martial arts and lives with his mother.
Isabelle Adjani won Best Actress at the Cannes Film Festival
for her performance in this movie. There is much more to her performance than just
acting crazy and screaming. Anna is a complex character whose motivations are
not spelled out. Adjani is great at portraying a woman that is under great stress
and does not understand herself why these things are happening to her. She
actually as a duel role and also playing, Helen, Mark and Anna’s son’s teacher,
with whom Mark has an affair. Sometimes Mark is aware of how much Hellen and
Anna look alike and other times he seems to put it out of his mind. Sam Neil
also gives a great performance, maybe the best I’ve seen from him. When called
for, Neil is excellent at being creepy, crazy, and menacing (see In the Mouth of Madness, Event Horizon). His performance has an
intensity that matches the unhinged tone of the film. He gets as many odd and
strange moments as Adjani and, to an extent, also has a duel role. The nature
of his second role is difficult to describe.
Possession is an
incredibly well made film and, tentacled squid monster aside, is visually
interesting. It is filled with low and canted angles and tracking shots. Scenes
are staged and framed in striking ways that give this film an usual atmosphere
right from the beginning. Early on Mark and Anna meet in a restaurant to
discuss getting a divorce and they sit at separate tables around the corner
from each other like they are in a spy movie. He chases her through the
restaurant and has to be tackled by waiters and chefs. It’s a great scene for
the performances and filmmaking. This happens in the marital drama half of the
movie and it is unlike scenes in other marital dramas of unhappy couples
arguing about their emotions and problems which are usually dull and
uninteresting. This scene is great and interesting because of its unconventional nature, the full
throttle intense performances from Sam Neil and Isabelle Adjani, and the
filmmaking style of director Andrzej Zulawski.
Possession moves
slow but draws you in with interesting scenes of characters having dramatic
moments. Then it is intriguing in its odd, bizarre nature and just gets stranger and
stranger. There are plenty of scenes of Mark and Anna dealing with their
dissolving marriage to make this feel like a John Cassevettees movie. There is
also a squid monster, car crashes, a shootout with police, and an ending that
is confounding and unnerving and haunting. I was reminded of The Brood, Hellraiser, Blue Valentine,
and several David Lynch movies while watching Possession. There are themes and subtext buried under the
weirdness that really give this film a lasting effect on the viewer. I’ll save deciphering those for another viewing.
