I’m completely enamored of the ongoing efforts from Shout! Factory’s Scream Factory line, bringing cult classic horror to Blu-ray in definitive editions almost on par with Criterion Collection.
While I applaud their addition of John Carpenter’s The Fog, They Live and Assault on Precinct 13 (slated for November), I can’t believe Prince of Darkness made it into the factory before In the Mouth of Madness.
Released, nevertheless, by New Line this week for the first time on Blu-ray, Carpenter’s 1994 spook-fest is worth picking up.
Written by then-New Line executive (and massive horror movie fan) Michael De Luca, the movie is not only a triumphant return to the genre for Carpenter, after the disastrous Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and is part three of his self-described “Apocalypse Trilogy,” of which The Thing and Prince of Darkness preceded.
At the risk of pissing off a lot of Thing fans, Mouth of Madness is the best of the three.
I love the fact that the film starts out with a fairly traditional narrative (after an intensely scary prologue), then digresses into a psychedelic tailspin of terror.
The plot mainly revolves around the search for a suddenly absent horror novelist who combines the popularity of Stephen King with the body of work of H.P. Lovecraft.
What starts as Film Noir set-up, a la Laura, turns quickly into a labyrinth of horror themes, monsters and madness.
Carpenter clearly had a lot of fun exploring it all, and his direction hasn’t been as tight since.
Unfortunately, the film was largely unseen in initial theatrical release, and critics were generally indifferent to it. But the fact, that auteur theory-loving Cahiers du cinéma placed the movie on their top ten list of the year is a testament of sorts.
That fact alone justifies the full title as John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness. Carpenter truly takes another person’s screenplay and makes it his own film.
Sam Neill also makes something of his own in John Trent, the insurance-investigator lead character. We know he’s going to break at some point in the film because the prologue is essentially a flash-forward, or wrap-around devise to the main film’s flash-back storytelling.
Neill, like Carpenter’s muse Kurt Russell, keeps one foot clearly in the school of not taking the material too seriously. It gives the film a comic edge to counteract some truly spooky moments. I love him in this movie.
But a word about the sound design.
If you have a good surround audio set up, crank up the audio on this one. Of course you get the usual John Carpenter score, with the participation this time of Jim Lang, which is more heavy metal than prog-synth, but it’s during the asylum scenes that things really get fun.
Sound design is something that’s all too often cheated in horror films, with false scares in favor for atmosphere and tone. In the Mouth of Madness has a sound design that ironically works volumes during the more quiet moments. Veteran sound effects mixer Ron Barlett was most recently Oscar nominated for Life of Pi, but he has countless exceptional credits.
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