{"id":27840,"date":"2025-10-27T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-10-27T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/?p=27840"},"modified":"2025-10-26T19:28:00","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T02:28:00","slug":"the-dread-and-doom-of-in-the-mouth-of-madness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/the-dread-and-doom-of-in-the-mouth-of-madness\/","title":{"rendered":"The Dread and Doom of In The Mouth of Madness<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

In the Mouth of Madness<\/em> came at a weird moment for John Carpenter. His most recent feature, 1992\u2019s Memoirs of an Invisible Man<\/em>, had been an unsuccessful attempt to branch out of his horror box; there had been four long years between that and his previous picture, They Live<\/em>. We now think of that as quintessential Carpenter, but reviews and box office were mixed. So who knows, maybe JC wasn\u2019t <\/em>worried about his career when he got an offer from New Line Cinema\u2014to direct a script written by Michael De Luca, then rising through the ranks at the company (he would soon become its President of Production). But it probably seemed like a smart move, all things considered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sam Neill, then hot off Jurassic Park<\/em> (and boy, really truly GOING FOR IT), stars as John Trent, a hot-shit insurance investigator first seen being dragged into a loony bin, and into the care of John Glover\u2014and folks, when John Glover<\/em> is the sane guy, you\u2019re in trouble. (This cast includes character actors out the wazooooo\u2014Glover, David Warner, Bernie Casey, Jurgen Prochnow, and, well, Charlton Heston.) \u201cYou think he\u2019s one of\u2026 them?\u201d Glover asks, as our hero is thrown in a padded room; this is Carpenter at his most baroque, going for a real throwback, Val Lewton vibe. Soon enough, Warner shows up to hear this crazy man\u2019s story, and off we go.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trent is the film\u2019s lead, but he\u2019s not the focus; everyone is talking about Sutter Cane, a truly great movie name. Sutter Cane is missing, you see, and Sutter Cane is the best-selling horror author on the planet (the name even sounds<\/em> like Stephen King, whose Christine<\/em> was made into a movie by Carpenter a decade earlier), but he\u2019s gone missing, and his publisher (Heston) hires Trent to do what he does: \u201cI need to know if he\u2019s alive or dead, and I need that book.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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That\u2019s your set-up, and your plot, such as it is; Trent thinks he\u2019s tracked Sutter Cane to Hobb\u2019s End, New Hampshire, which is basically Cane\u2019s Castle Rock, and equally fictional. But Trent and Cane\u2019s editor (Julie Carmen, so delightful in Night of the Juggler<\/em>) drive there anyway, allowing Carpenter to indulge in some of the most genuinely odd and experimental imagery in the film\u2014or in any Carpenter film, to be honest. This is probably what\u2019s best about De Luca\u2019s mostly pedestrian screenplay; its hold on reality and narrative is tenuous enough to allow Carpenter plenty of opportunities to simply go buck wild. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s a kind of gleeful unpredictability to even the early passages, to the drawn-out, doomy image the guy with the axe coming at Trent and Bernie Casey through a diner window, and that scene establishes a kind of nightmare logic in the way it unfolds. Nothing makes sense, but it doesn\u2019t feel random either; it\u2019s all a fever dream. Once they\u2019re in Hobb\u2019s End, Carpenter ramps it up. There are creepy kids (foreshadowing his Village of the Damned<\/em> remake the following year), random passages of weirdness, glimpses of our guy being chased through pages by monsters, or waking up in the intersection of a nowhere country road. \u201cThis place makes my head hurt,\u201d Trent says, and it\u2019s hard to disagree.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the Mouth of Madness<\/em> has its problems; it\u2019s 95-minute running time feels slashed and burned, especially early on, where big chunks of set-up seem to have been eliminated. And the third act feels similarly rushed; no filmmaker this good should hustle this quickly through \u201can apparent epidemic of paranoid schizophrenia.\u201d <\/em>But it\u2019s the best film of Carpenter\u2019s wildly uneven \u201890s, and many of its flaws fall away in the face of one of the filmmaker\u2019s all-time great endings, which has been so thoroughly memed to death that it shouldn\u2019t work anymore. But it sure does. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

“In the Mouth of Madness” is out tomorrow in a new 4K UHD edition from Arrow Video<\/a>.<\/em> It’s also streaming on the Criterion Channel<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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