Non-Fiction > Film > Penny Blood
John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy
If horror fans can agree on one thing, it is their lowly place within the hierarchy of genre. We are a disrespected lot, cast into the slum of the art world, labeled as either maladjusted teens playing out frustration by ogling the slaughter of nubile coeds, or lonely gore-hounds with social anxiety and traumatic childhoods. The prevailing opinion is that any director can create horror—toss a ball of butcher knives into a crowded room and there’s your scary movie; keep a few people alive and you have a sequel.
But horror fans know how difficult it is to create that perfect poison. We have our kings, even if these kings are largely ignored, and when rare praise filters down through the rank and file of critics, it arrives with conditions. A great horror director is rarely deemed a great director without horror used as a reminder of his or her place. Which brings us to John Carpenter.
Critics are ambivalent about John Carpenter’s rank in cinematic history. He is not quite the director Hitchcock was, not quite the writer Polanski is, and like his hero Howard Hawkes, Carpenter violates artistic law by dabbling in multiple genres. The man that brought us 1978’s proto-slasher flick Halloween also gave us the sci-fi heartbreaker Starman , and the made-for-TV Elvis , starring Kurt Russell, Carpenter’s soon-to-be muse. It took a gentler movie like 1984’s Starman to give Carpenter his entry into the big-budget mainstream. Just as two years later it took a big-budget failure like Big Trouble in Little China to give Carpenter his walking papers, and put him back where he ostensibly belonged: as king of the horror slum.[1]
Style is a funny thing with directors, often portrayed as the opposite of substance , as though the two can’t happily co-exist. One could argue—and one will—that the style of a horror movie is its substance; imagine Halloween without its cinema verite elements, without the underlighting, without the slow, inevitable pans, or the bleak Carpenter score. Accusations of stylistic theft from Bob Clark’s Black Christmas are understandable (Clark’s slasher film predated Halloween by four years), but Carpenter’s signature style expanded in subsequent movies, making its original appearance in Halloween a harbinger, rather than a one-note imitation.
And what of Carpenter’s style? Carpenter is one of those artists that have slipped into the collective unconscious—you know his directorial watermark even if you don’t know his name. Even when the dialogue is strained (it often is) and even when the acting is mediocre (sometimes), a Carpenter film remains visceral. And visceral is all we horror fans really need. Carpenter accomplishes this by remaining straightforward. His style is his lack of directorial flourish. Again, the Hawkes influence is clear: Carpenter makes movies to tell a story, not to feed the auteur myth. His films trade in scary—they make us look under our beds and check the front door locks.
In particular, three John Carpenter films do that to us: The Thing, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness . These three films comprise his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” yet this trilogy is unique in that none of the films are directly connected. They are brothers in nihilism, the machinations of doom offering us three scenarios for the end of the world: The Thing by way of alien invasion, Prince of Darkness by way of Satan, and In the Mouth of Madness by way of Lovecraftian Elder Gods.
*
Released in 1982 to cranky critics and an apathetic public, The Thing is considered Carpenter’s best work. Not purely horror, or sci-fi, or psychological thriller, it consumes the best elements of those genres and discards the rest. The plot is simple, taken from the John Campbell novella “Who Goes There?”: a shape-shifting alien invades an outpost in the South Pole, and picks off the men, one by one. The gory special effects—by the now-legendary Rob Bottin—and relentless tension shoved the Thing into the sci-fi/horror section, a box office death knell during a year when the only acceptable aliens were loveable strays (E.T. ). But to call The Thing science fiction or horror is an incomplete categorization. The Thing is, like its monster, a gruesome hybrid of multiple parts.
The Thing is Carpenter’s lone entry in his Apocalypse Trilogy that does not involve good vs. evil. The shapeshifting alien is not evil—it is a survivor. Just as its victims are not portrayed as saints—they are unlucky scientists, thrust into the bizarre and doing whatever they can to survive. Kurt Russell is one of the unlucky scientists, as is Wilford Brimley, yet this film is not about individual actors. The characters soon become interchangeable parts of the same paranoid group. Traditional horror techniques that give the audience comforting exposition (the wise old man, the research scientist, etc.) are tossed aside. We don’t know who, or where, the alien is. We become a part of that doomed outpost.
At its heart, The Thing is about bad luck.[2] Bad luck implies a chaotic universe, unfettered by morality. Bad luck reduces us to an existential speck, and reminds us of our frailty on a cosmic scale (a frailty later explored in both Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness ). If bad luck is the father of terror, than its child is the Jungian shadow; what do we fear most if not our darkest impulses? Carpenter has never claimed profundity in his work—if anything he has relied too much on self-deprecation, a charming character quirk that helps explain why mainstream Hollywood turned on him so quickly. But if there is any profundity to be uncovered in Carpenter’s work, it can be found in The Thing. The Jungian shadow-self is given graphic detail in the form of the alien shape-shifter, hiding within its victims, eventually turning nerdish scientists into mewling, tentacled monsters. Simply put: Carpenter shows us the monster, and it looks exactly like us.
The monster-disguised-as-humans is a tired plot device now, and it was a tired plot device in 1982 (the 1978 remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers contributed to the fatigue). But Carpenter made it seem fresh by reducing the scale and upping the intensity. Rather than start in the cities, world conquest begins in a remote Arctic outpost, and when the alien reveals itself it isn’t with white contacts lenses and piercing screams. It happens in full, three-dimensional glory. Heads sprout spidery legs and walk across the floor, lashing tentacles burst from stomachs, and necks split and blossom into gaping maws with rows of bloody teeth. It’s the audacious stuff of genius, confirming Rob Bottin is the Mozart of gore to Savini’s Liszt.
The Thing also terrifies because Carpenter and screenwriter Bill Lancaster refuse to comfort the audience with exposition. Early in the film we are shown a massive hole in the ice, evidence of an unearthed space ship site. That is all we are given. Standard questions (what is this thing? why is it here? how do we defeat it?) are left for the men to ponder, provided those unfortunate men have the time. Which Carpenter does not give them—clinical discussions of the alien are interrupted by gruesome deaths, and we soon realize we will never know, that for all our intelligence we still cannot outthink death. So we continue to ponder…but we do so while watching these men run for their lives.
*
Prince of Darkness was Carpenter’s second film in his Apocalypse Trilogy, and it remains—even after twenty forgiving years—an intriguing disappointment. It is the only film in Carpenter’s trilogy written by Carpenter, and its blend of physics and Satan falters under its own ambition. But the film is worth watching if only for the set-up, and the atmosphere of dread that persists despite the flaws.
We begin with a church, a team of physics grad students (including Carpenter favorites Victor Wong and Dennis Dun), an old priest (the reliable Donald Pleasance), and a cylinder of green liquid in the church basement. The students are brought to the church to research the nature of this green liquid that displays several reality-bending properties (it drips upward and pools on the ceiling, for example), and we eventually discover the origins of the green liquid via the usual narrative devices: translated ancient manuscripts, theological discussions, and the revelations of an old priest. Dream sequences play an important role in Prince of Darkness , an ambitious device because conventional artistic wisdom states that people don’t care about the dreams of fictional characters.[3]
We later learn these dream sequences—in which a shadowy figure tells the protagonist he is a visitor from the future, and is here to give warning about the green cylinder—are indeed messages from the future, transmitted subconsciously. The dream sequences are unsettling (helped by Carpenter filming the entire movie with a distorting anamorphic lens) and they transcend the pedestrian scares that populate the rest of the movie. This is an important point: making fictional dreams scary is damn hard (does anyone believe Hitchcock’s Spellbound is better with such scenes?) and it reveals Carpenter’s technique of teasing out exposition.
The green liquid is eventually revealed to be Satan, foreshadowed by insect swarms, worms on the windows of the church, a throbbing synth soundtrack, and shuffling hordes of homeless people falling under Satan’s power (including Alice Cooper in a remarkably creepy performance). Satan escapes by possessing one of the students and the possession spreads, turning Prince of Darkness into a locked-house battle of the unpossessed vs. the possessed. It is obvious that Carpenter loves a good siege movie (i.e. Assault on Precinct 13 ) which translates to Carpenter loving a good zombie movie[4] , and while there is nothing wrong with zombie movies, Prince of Darkness takes too much time and technical mumbo-jumbo arriving at such a simplistic climax. We expect something more, but Carpenter makes us momentarily forget our disappointment by reverting to his tried-and-true standards. Much like The Thing , nerdish scientists become vessels of doom. Once again, the monster looks like us.
The denouement almost makes up for this disappointing climax, taking a unique theological tack by revealing Satan to be the son of a greater evil, an “Anti-God” that needs Satan to usher him back to our world. A mirror is designated as the gate to hell, and just as one of the possessed characters is about to reach into that mirror and pull out the Anti-God, the protagonist’s girlfriend saves humanity by throwing herself at the mirror. Glass shatters, the girlfriend disappears, and we last see her floating in the netherworld, trapped on the other side of the glass in a pool of hazy water, fading into the darkness like Persephone.
For everything that’s wrong with Prince of Darkness , it still works. I recall a greasy terror after watching it the first time, and even now certain scenes keep their effectiveness: beetles pouring from a man’s mouth, Alice Cooper impaling an unfortunate soul with a sharpened bicycle frame, and murder by way of garden shears. Weak dialogue, a jumbled narrative, and pacing problems ultimately place Prince of Darkness among Carpenter’s lesser work. But it’s still scary, proving that even when Carpenter isn’t at his best, he’s good enough.
*
H.P. Lovecraft’s fiction has proved to be nearly impossible to translate into quality cinema—dreck like From Beyond and Re-Animator emphasize the unintentional camp of Lovecraft’s writing—yet the Lovecraftian ethos of man squashed beneath the scaly thumb of ancient, omnipotent evil is at last realized with Carpenter’s final film in his Apocalypse Trilogy. The result is In the Mouth of Madness , a giant wink interspersed with moments of genuine terror, played straight by the never-disappointing Sam Neil, and a cameo by Charlton Heston thrown in for good measure.
Framing horror as flashback is risky, especially if the flashback is told by the protagonist, because it reveals to the audience the protagonist survived to tell his tale. But Carpenter and screenwriter Michael de Luca work around this problem by twisting reality enough to keep the audience guessing. Sam Neil plays insurance investigator John Trent, and we first meet Trent in an insane asylum, his room—and his face—covered in crosses drawn with black crayon. A law enforcement agent of undetermined affiliation visits Trent, and asks him to recount what happened during his search for the horror author Sutter Cain. With cigarette lit by a shaking hand, Trent begins his flashback.
We learn that Sutter Cain’s publisher hired Trent to find their wildly popular horror author, who had disappeared before submitting the final draft of his novel In the Mouth of Madness. Trent plays the skeptical agent well, yet his skepticism is tested by a series of nightmares. These nightmares are played straighter than the staccato visions in Prince of Darkness , but their effect is powerful. A deformed cop beats a homeless man; shadow-clad alley dwellers are revealed to be mutants; an axe chops flesh and blood spatters across an alley wall.
Trent’s journey takes us to the town of Hobb’s End, a place we discover exists only as a figment of Cain’s work. Sutter Cain imagines it, therefore it is. This follows the theme of fiction creating reality, prefaced by Cain’s editor telling Trent that Cain’s work has an unusual effect on its readers, turning many of them into paranoiacs. Carpenter introduces one such paranoid via one of his all-time best shot sequences: early in the film Trent and his friend have lunch in front of a giant window, and through the window we see an axe-wielding man in a trenchcoat. The man crosses the busy city street, walking toward the camera while people run in terror, and Trent and his friend remain unaware even as the man kicks aside the diner’s patio tables and holds the axe aloft. Cut to the window shattered by the axe, a rain of gunfire courtesy of the police, and later we are told the would-be axe murderer was Cain’s agent. Cain’s agent, it seems, has read In the Mouth of Madness and learns Trent will unknowingly usher in the end of the world.
And how does the world end? By Lovecraftian Elder Gods, of course. Trent eventually finds Cain in the hall of a Byzantine-spired black church, and Cain reveals that what he writes becomes reality, by virtue of his millions of readers. It is collective imagination taken to the extreme; if enough people believe something, it becomes true. Trent is merely a character in Cain’s book, used to bring his final novel to the world, and all of Trent’s actions are the result of Cain’s words. But Cain also reveals he is not acting from imagination—he is the conduit for those Elder Gods, who seek to return to the earth through the power of Cain’s fiction.
Sound confusing? It is, but Carpenter weaves these existential threads into enough horror and shock moments to make it all seem logical. Trent realizes his role too late—as much as he tries to burn the manuscript and prevent it from reaching the publishers, he cannot. The story is set and sealed. Trent will deliver the book, and the book will deliver the apocalypse. Perhaps this is the closest Carpenter will get to boasting, delivering the message that artists have the power to influence perception and thus reality. But I detected satire more than anything; Carpenter condemns those critics who give horror more power than it deserves. As if cinematic violence leads to violence in real life. As if all our fascination with monsters will one day unleash real monsters, not including the real monsters that walked among us long before cinema.
*
Though the past fifteen years have seen Carpenter’s status as “master of horror” fade into the realm of honorary, his style remains unique. We have yet to see another director from the “Carpenter school,” while Hitchcock has spawned numerous imitators, Fulci remains a working influence, and remnants of Dargento and Bava remain. This may have less to do with influence than with current horror directors’ inability to decipher just what it is about Carpenter that works.
Perhaps it is the earnestness in Carpenter’s work that makes his style difficult to imitate. Much of post-modern horror is either steeped in ultra-realistic yet sanitized gore (rather than amp the realism, the clinical vividness adds to the unreality) or done with a nod to the audience. It’s as though horror has yet to fully recover from Scream —a brilliant scorched earth take on horror and all its clichés—and directors are still searching for terror without irony. Watch a John Carpenter film and you are reminded that there is something to be taken from the past, that what used to work still does. His Apocalypse Trilogy proves the lie that true horror is easy. It also proves that true horror is the product of genius, even among the slums of the art world.
[1] Never mind that
Big Trouble in Little China was twenty years ahead of its time.
[2] Bad luck all around: That these men were given this particular assignment at this particular outpost, that the alien chose their outpost to invade, etc. I’ve always felt that randomness is crucial to effective horror, evident in the terror we feel when we hear news of a random shooter, picking off victims with no motivation other than homicidal urge. In contrast, we don’t find crimes as scary when the perpetrator knows the victim. There is some comfort in believing violence follows a pre-determined trail.
[3] The Sopranos notwithstanding.
[4] All zombie movies are, at their core, siege movies. The opposite also holds true. Yes, that means I’m calling Straw Dogs Dustin Hoffman’s only zombie movie.
Originally published in Penny Blood January 2009
