4. In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
As time moves on the apparent understanding of when John Carpenter’s career slump occurred seems to move back further and further, although I can’t quite see a radical re-appraisal of Ghosts of Mars being on the cards just yet. At first it seemed to be the consensus that things started after Big Trouble in Little China but then everyone realised that They Live and Prince of Darkness were actually awesome. So now it seems to be from 89 onwards but then in recent years people have started to praise the relatively ignored film he made released in 1995 that hasn’t been available on disc for a while. Michael De Luca’s script revolves around an insurance investigator named Trent (Sam Neill) who is sent to the small town of Hobbs End to find the whereabouts of popular novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) and his latest manuscript. After being attacked by a manic fan, Trent starts to discover that Cane’s work seems to warp the less stable fans and that the things he writes about may actually be real as there is an evil at work in Hobbs End. Carpenter calls this the third in his ‘Apocalypse Trilogy’ after The Thing and Prince of Darkness and it has elements of both of those films.
It has the surreal, nihilistic atmosphere of Prince of Darkness and some of the creature effects recall The Thing as well as the written work of HP Lovecraft from whose work the title is derived. At the time of release In the Mouth of Madness was dismissed as the work of someone who had lost their creative mojo but if anything this is the work of Carpenter at the top of his game and the self parody of Escape from L.A was still a year or so away. The film died at the box office with a paltry 8 million take but picked up more fans on home video. What works is that the film has an anything can happen momentum from the first half hour onwards and is one of the few bright spots in horror in the 90s with its genuinely creepy atmosphere and effects. It was also a film way ahead of its time with Meta aspects including the film adaptation of the events we are seeing being a part of the film. This kind of thing was unheard of in the early 90s but seems commonplace now. The film has just been re-released on Blu-Ray stateside so should get some more fans and hopefully a UK re-release is forthcoming.
