1994 Directed by John Carpenter
With the disappearance of hack horror writer Sutter Cane, all Hell is breaking loose...literally! Author Cane, it seems, has a knack for description that really brings his evil creepy-crawlies to life. Insurance investigator John Trent is sent to investigate Cane's mysterious vanishing act and ends up in the sleepy little East Coast town of Hobb's End.
John Carpenter's Die Mächte des Wahnsinns, 落入虎口, 完全魔鬼手册, 疯人之口, John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness, À Beira da Loucura, Ve spárech šílenství, В пасти безумия, Sto stoma tis trelas
Definitely had a few expectations going into this knowing it was John Carpenter but dude... what the hell? I was hilariously unaware of how psychological this was. But also so fun. But also so unsettling?? Still processing but I really dig this.
John Carpenter fuses lurking Lovecraftian madness with Stephen King psychological terror, resulting in this New England nightmare tentacle jam that’s, at least for me, totally perfect.
Equal parts cerebral and visceral with apocalyptic anxieties riding high, In the Mouth of Madness was a video store staple for me in my teens and very well may be my favorite horror picture of the 90’s, a dreamy ride into hellish paperback nightmare rhetoric—filled with goopy KNB effects, one of my favorite Carpenter scores, Sam Neill absolutely killing it as usual, and an ending for the ages as far as I’m concerned.
“Do you read Sutter Cane?”
Part fiction, part reality, all nightmare.
The new 4K scan on Scream Factory’s new blu looks damn fine and I couldn’t be happier this finally got the collectors edition treatment it deserves.
92
It's exhilarating to watch Carpenter utilize his skills as a peerless craftsman against a changing world of scare tactics and an evolving horror landscape. Like an old dog teaching itself new tricks. Terrifying and utterly engrossing.
Sometimes it just seems a director is given one film in which all his unique talents come together. For Carpenter In the Mouth of Madness seems to be that film.
I feel that Carpenter is masterful at two things. Creating suspense and giving his viewer great physical gorey effects. He perfected the first in Halloween and the second in the Thing. In the Mouth of Madness is an almost perfect amalgamation of the two.
The story feels like the bizarre love child of Stephen King and Lovecraft. It deals with Lovecraftian madness and monsters, told in a narrative that seems to come straight out of a King novel. And weaving through this all is the deft hand of one of…
"a reality is just what we tell each other it is."
"god's not supposed to be a hack horror writer."
the original "damn my life a movie." a metafictional cosmic horror story that starts as a small town gothic conspiracy (like Dead & Buried but paperback genre novelists instead of zombies) before bleeding into a series of italian nightmare logic horror setpieces that then fold in on themselves as they struggle with the contradictory nature of trying to contain cosmic horror inside an entertainment product.
Sam Neill is wonderful.
The editing, especially in the final act, is superb, skillfully collapsing the distinction between the real and the dream.
Although this is obviously an homage to both Lovecraft and Stephen King, it also works as a pointed critique of American mass media, of the way we senselessly open our minds to people who do not have our best interests in mind, and leave ourselves vulnerable to poisonous fantasies and harmful delusions.
[Pauses, looks around at the millions of Americans who have embraced QAnon.]
Yeah, that checks out.
John Carpenter has a half dozen or so masterpieces and this one is among them.
What stuck out to me most this time was Carpenter's critique of the horror genre, but it couldn't be more different than what he was presenting in Cigarette Burns. In Burns, Carpenter wrote an obituary to the genre. The bloodlust inherent within horror was undone by torture pictures like Hostel and in Burns cinema could literally kill. It's a vicious picture completely contemptuous of the audience that ran him off. Madness is the flip-side to that cynical take as it's brimming with life.
Carpenter made a statement on the diversity and humour within the schlock genre taking cues from Lovecraft, Stephen King and his previous…
No idea why this isn’t more highly regarded. Absolutely and completely rocks.
Sam Neill solid as a rock. Sutter Cane, the anti-Stephen King. Warped. Twisted. Demented. Trippy. A mind-fuck from the Horror Master John Carpenter.
Do you read Sutter Cane?
Well. You should.
During the 90s the self-referential horror film reigned supreme. After the release of Scream practically every horror movie had teenagers mentioning how the situation they were caught in was like Friday The 13th. A lot of this commentary serviced nothing. It stopped at 'people die in horror films for doing drugs or having sex' and similar shallow observations. Criticisms that were more glib than insightful.
In the Mouth of Madness is significantly different. It referenced horror fiction, but not as cheap nostalgia bait, or as a way to point out simplistic ill-defined tropes for the sake of being self-aggrandising. It was self-critical but it wasn't self-deprecating. It's a satire of structure and…
The widescreen compositions of the middle third are obviously quite striking, Carpenter and his DP giving his subjects so much space that they're dwarfed by their surroundings. The terrifyingly towering church and even the main street of the town itself, everything is domineering and suffocating and terrifying. What bumps this up to something truly masterful, though, is the editing in the final third. The film becomes this freakish whirlwind of unnerving nonsense, time and place disappearing and reappearing in the blink of an eye. Thrilling stuff. I didn't even mind the "meta" self-reflexive narrative trappings which so often like nails on a chalkboard to me. It's all executed so well. @TheHorrorMaster indeed.
