At The Mouth Of Madness: John Carpenter and HP Lovecraft Canoodle and Make One Creepy Baby

Is it possible that John Carpenter is even more of a pessimist than HP Lovecraft, the horror writer whose fictional cosmology held that mankind was a feeble spark in a sputtering candle in a losing battle to beat back the cosmic darkness that sought to snuff it out?  Maybe.  Let me explain...

First off, hats off to scriptwriter Michael De Luca, who wrote In The Mouth of Madness.  Reading his background, he is the nerd made good, with a childhood love of comics and science fiction made into a film career.  He did indeed capture the Lovecraftian vibe of this creeping reality bending horror that opens up with Bernie Casey as Robinson, an insurance company exec having a meeting with John Trent (Sam Neil), a freelance investigator specializing in fraud cases.   He is really good and sniffing out people trying to con his clients.  Trent is a hard nosed "realist" with a somewhat dark view of humanity, in that everyone has something to hide, everyone has an angle.  It is all about finding out what that angle is and bang, case closed.  Robinson has a big case for Trent.  Seems that his biggest client is a book publisher whose biggest author is Sutter Kane (Jurgen Prochnow), a popular horror writer who has vanished on the verge of his new novel being published.  The company has an insurance policy against this possibility and Robinson wants to make sure he is not being ripped off.  Their meeting is interrupted by Kane's agent.  Who has an axe.  And really weird eyes.

Trent takes a meeting with Jackson Harglow (Charleton Heston, I did mention this script attracted a rather star studded cast, right?  David Warner is in this thing, too), Kane's publisher and is hired to track Kane down.  The trick is, Kane is supposedly in a town that only exists in his books.  Yea, waddafuh?  But ok, a tough case, they are paying him a lot, and with the weird starting already, Trent smells just a big ol' con with imaginations running free.  He teams up with book company editor Linda Styles and goes on a road trip to find this town and to find Kane.

Then things get really weird.

This is a pretty amazing story, with classic cosmic horror about our assumed reality teetering at the edge of something cosmic, inhuman and indifferent to our well being.  In fact, in this case, this whatever seems to take some kind of pleasure, some kind of "nourishment" in our suffering.  It demands a gateway.  It is even darker, though, in the sense that in most of Lovecraft's stories, the human investigators are plucky heroes hopelessly outclassed against the menaces they face, endangering their bodies, minds and very souls.  But still, they struggle on, achieving a nobility in their willingness to fight this fight.  And though it might well be temporary, their fight does matter.  There is virtue to be found in banding together and confronting this menace. In this story, said virtue is not quite as clear.  Trent is a skilled investigator, and even brave and tough.  But he is purely a pragmatist and not particularly motivated by compassion.  At first, he is just a hired gun, and later, his motivation grows into his determination to find an explanation for the madness and darkness beginning to manifest about him.  In fact, his pragmatism renders him the perfect example of the barrier that can't bend, and it's inflexibility means that he is probably destined to break.

The world breaks before he does, but that is probably not a favor for him.

Bleak, don't watch if you are depressed.  But if you are looking for an ultra dark spin on Lovecraftian atmosphere, watch this.  Watch it with a friend, though.