I always had a soft spot for John Carpenter. As a kid, he was the first director whose name meant something to me. Seeing his name flash across the screen for the commercials for The Fog when I was a child left an impression that I’m still trying to shake off today. More than any other director, Carpenter appeared to be making movies just for me. Halloween and The Fog were there when I was first discovering horror movies. Escape from New York, The Thing and Starman arrived when I was exploring other genres. When I discovered Stephen King, Christine arrived at the video store. When I stumbled on martial arts movies, he gave me Big Trouble in Little China. When I became interested in science, Carpenter churned out the underrated Prince of Darkness (a pessimistic and claustrophobic End of Days story offset by the optimism of quantum physics). And when I started to question authority, along came They Live (a movie remembered more for its excess than its restraint). Looking at Carpenter’s work from The Fog (1980) to They Live (1988), not only is it an impressive resume, but it is a body of work that perfectly reflects the paranoia, glut and cynicism that was the Eighties.

Sadly, the Nineties would not be a good time for Carpenter, and this, like many of us, is when I started to lose interest in his work. Memoirs of an Invisible Man, while inventive at times, is painful and never quite understands what kind of movie it wants to be; all of this is made worse by the fact that many scenes practically scream studio intervention.

So when I saw the trailer for 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness, I tried not to get my hopes too high. The good news was the movie ended up being pretty good, and the bad news was that it would be Carpenter’s last good movie.

In the Mouth of Madness stars Sam Neill as John Trent, an insurance investigator hired to find Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) who is said to be “this century’s most widely read author”. Having disappeared two months earlier, Cane’s publisher wants Trent to retrieve Cane’s book “In the Mouth of Madness” for publication. Parts of this book was sent to Cane’s agent, who went insane after reading it and wandered around Manhattan with an axe until he was shot dead by the police. Trent, with the help of Cane’s editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), not only has to find Cane and the elusive book, but also convince himself that the whole thing isn’t just some elaborate marketing stunt. In any case, Sutter Cane’s latest book is, of course, more than a book; it threatens to rewrite reality itself and make Cane a god. But that’s only half the fun.

What makes In the Mouth of Madness such a delight is how it’s a giant love letter to H.P. Lovecraft, which most specifically plays off of his short story “Pickman’s Model”. In this 1926 story, Richard Upton Pickman is a brilliant painter who paints amazingly detailed images of horrifying scenes, monsters and all. After his recent disappearance, a friend of Pickman shares a tale of the time he visited Pickman in his gallery. After a series of bizarre and unsettling incidents, the friend stumbles upon a photograph which clearly reveals that Pickman isn’t painting from his imagination, but from real life. There’s more to it, of course; such as the implication that Pickman himself may not even be human. Or there’s the metafictional possibility that the story is meant to be about Lovecraft himself.

Lovecraft was a fairly interesting writer who tends to be neglected academically in favor of other American authors who are easier to digest, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Robert E. Howard; which is a shame, really. A lot of it has to do with the fact that Lovecraft made life terribly difficult for himself both personally and professionally. He obviously followed his own path, and in doing so, he created an incredibly rich body of work that literally has no commercial appeal. Poe not only had C. Auguste Dupin, but a wealth of short stories that are psychologically compelling while remaining brilliantly compact, so he’s easier to translate to other media. Plus, due mostly to his bewildering death, Poe is viewed as being mysterious and romantic, again making him more interesting. Outside of Herbert West, Lovecraft did not create any character that has really withstood the test of time. In fact, his most popular creation is probably the Necronomicon, a book that has appeared in numerous movies such as Evil Dead and Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday. His writing is dense, the English he used was archaic when it was originally published, and while he would be perfectly fine with describing a wall or a tree for two or three pages, when it came time to describe the monster, he would simply explain that it was too horrible for words. And because he was a prolific letter writer – he wrote over 80,000 letters in the last 25 years of his life – we tend to have a little too much information about Lovecraft, such as his racism and anti-Semitism – which I’m sure his Jewish wife really enjoyed.

I can see why I loved In the Mouth of Madness back in 1995. Lovecraft has had a subtle influence on modern horror cinema and it was rare to see such a mainstream horror movie really swimming in his larger themes. Most movies like to throw a wink and nod in Lovecraft’s direction with a Necronomicon here and a Miskatonic University there. And while it’s great for those who catch the references, most fans of Lovecraft have been waiting for a movie to really explore the mythos he created. And while we’d see this later with films like Dagon or even Hellboy for that matter, seeing Carpenter really run wild with Lovecraft’s ideas In the Mouth of Madness was pretty groundbreaking for its time.

The only bad thing I can say about In the Mouth of Madness is that it can’t possibly live up to its own expectations. You see, while it’s easy to laugh at Lovecraft’s dismissive way of describing his monsters, he probably understood all too well that any description he provided would be disappointing. Stephen King wrote about it in his book Danse Macabre:

Nothing is so frightening as what’s behind the closed door. The audience holds its breath along with the protagonist as she/he (more often she) approaches that door. The protagonist throws it open, and there is a ten-foot-tall bug. The audience screams, but this particular scream has an oddly relieved sound to it. “A bug ten feet tall is pretty horrible”, the audience thinks, “but I can deal with a ten-foot-tall bug. I was afraid it might be a hundred feet tall.”

The artistic work of horror is almost always a disappointment. It is the classic no-win situation. You can scare people with the unknown for a long, long time but sooner or later, as in poker, you have to turn your cards up. You have to open the door and show the audience what’s behind it.

It’s extremely rare when it works. The most recent successful example I can think of is the fantastic short story “Best New Horror” by Joe Hill, who happens to be King’s son. In the story, a jaded horror editor receives a terrifying short story submission that renews the editor’s faith in horror stories. Hill is careful to establish how the story affects the editor and dances around the details of what makes the story so frightening. In doing so, the readers’ imagination is in overdrive. However, Hill then goes on to actually tell you the story. While this reveal would be a tragic mistake for most writers, Hill makes it look easy by making the story within the story extremely unsettling. And to make it even better, that’s not the best part of Hill’s short story.

Well, Carpenter has basically the same problem with In the Mouth of Madness. We are told that Cane’s book drives those who read it insane, the same way Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret does in real life. The best way to approach this would to not reveal anything from the book itself; however, Carpenter shows us glimpses of the book that, sadly, are not scary. To make matters worse, near the end of the movie, Trent enters a cinema to see the movie adaptation of Cane’s “In the Mouth of Madness”, which is essentially the movie you’ve been watching. Now the metafiction at work here is great, it’s just too bad it falls so short.

And then I wrote the most frightening ending to a column you’ve ever read.

This was Too Soon.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 4th, 2008 at 7:21 pm and is filed under Movies, Too Soon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.