In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
In the Mouth of Madness (1994), directed by John Carpenter.
quote
I'm sorry about the balls. It was a lucky shot.
It's a good setup: man hauled into an insane asylum, raving. Staff say: "It's getting bad out there, isn't it?" Meaning his ravings might have meaning. Could be the end of the world but we still have to keep the loonies on the path.
And it has a deliriously memorable self-referential ending, in a movie theater, of course.
The big middle is a problem. A horror film needs more than "then a bunch of weird things happen".
To be fair, there is a design. Horror writer "Sutter Cane" (much bigger than Stephen King) crafts novels that drive people murderously insane. They are entering his fiction as a new reality. He says he is channeling instructions from indescribably awful beings from outer dimensions who will now rule, consume, define, or destroy us in nightmare settings.
This is legitimately Lovecraftian. Nowadays people tend to think Lovecraft means "tentacles", which is not the point at all. He wrote about the inability of the human mind to cope with a cosmos which is indifferent to us, where we are tormented as a side effect of Elder Gods pursuing ends we cannot understand.
Carpenter makes clever allusions to Lovecraft and Stephen King. "Hobbs End" is also the location of Quatermass and the Pit (1967). His humor does not fit with Lovecraft, who has almost none.
Sam Neill does his usual fine work. In the last horror film I saw him in he was the antichrist in Omen III: The Final Conflict (1981).
Rich supporting cast: Julie Carmen, Jürgen Prochnow, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, Charlton Heston, Frances Bay.
Available on Blu-ray from Shout Factory.
