Jason Bailey
In the Mouth of Madness came at a weird moment for John Carpenter. His most recent feature, 1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man, 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. We now think of that as quintessential Carpenter, but reviews and box office were mixed. So who knows, maybe JC wasn’t worried about his career when he got an offer from New Line Cinema—to 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.
Sam Neill, then hot off Jurassic Park (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—and folks, when John Glover is the sane guy, you’re in trouble. (This cast includes character actors out the wazooooo—Glover, David Warner, Bernie Casey, Jurgen Prochnow, and, well, Charlton Heston.) “You think he’s one of… them?” 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’s story, and off we go.
Trent is the film’s lead, but he’s 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 like Stephen King, whose Christine was made into a movie by Carpenter a decade earlier), but he’s gone missing, and his publisher (Heston) hires Trent to do what he does: “I need to know if he’s alive or dead, and I need that book.”
That’s your set-up, and your plot, such as it is; Trent thinks he’s tracked Sutter Cane to Hobb’s End, New Hampshire, which is basically Cane’s Castle Rock, and equally fictional. But Trent and Cane’s editor (Julie Carmen, so delightful in Night of the Juggler) drive there anyway, allowing Carpenter to indulge in some of the most genuinely odd and experimental imagery in the film—or in any Carpenter film, to be honest. This is probably what’s best about De Luca’s mostly pedestrian screenplay; its hold on reality and narrative is tenuous enough to allow Carpenter plenty of opportunities to simply go buck wild.
There’s 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’t feel random either; it’s all a fever dream. Once they’re in Hobb’s End, Carpenter ramps it up. There are creepy kids (foreshadowing his Village of the Damned 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. “This place makes my head hurt,” Trent says, and it’s hard to disagree.
In the Mouth of Madness has its problems; it’s 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 “an apparent epidemic of paranoid schizophrenia.” But it’s the best film of Carpenter’s wildly uneven ‘90s, and many of its flaws fall away in the face of one of the filmmaker’s all-time great endings, which has been so thoroughly memed to death that it shouldn’t work anymore. But it sure does.
“In the Mouth of Madness” is out tomorrow in a new 4K UHD edition from Arrow Video. It’s also streaming on the Criterion Channel.
