John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is a strange film. It was filmed in thirty days, utilized a few Carpenter regulars (Donald Pleasance, Victor Wong and Dennis Dun) and appears smack in the middle of Carpenter’s filmography. Thus, one may either view Prince of Darkness as a career peak, or a career valley: the holy top of Mount Everest, or the prehistoric floor of the Mariana Trench.
Apparently, Carpenter decided to make the film after reading about theoretical physics and atomic theory. He also felt that horror films had become derivative. Redneck Zombies (Lewnes, 1987), Jaws: The Revenge (Sargent, 1987) and Silent Night Deadly Night: Part 2 (Earle, 1987) are all pretty awful.
(Note: SNDN 2 features the amazing, “Garbage day!” murder scene.)
Then again, Hellraiser (Barker, 1987), Evil Dead II (Raimi, 1987), The Lost Boys (Schumacher, 1987) and Peter Jackson’s debut Bad Taste all came out that year as well, so it wasn’t entirely derivative.
This, in a way, sums up Prince of Darkness, though. It is a film that manages to be both highly complex and moderately original. Fans of H.P. Lovecraft will throw up their hands at the mere mention of P.o.D., I’m sure. An ancient, prehistoric evil stored at the bottom of a church, which is then overrun by archeologists, most of whom succumb to the evil’s (in this case, a tube of green water) power? Sounds like a Lovecraft plot to me.
There’s another influence in the background as well, though I’m sure it was equally influenced by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft. The Quatermass series, or Quatermass and the Pit (Baker, 1967) to be precise. Once again, prehistoric evil pertaining to an explanation of how human beings came to inhabit the Earth as the result of an alien intervention and/or invasion (viz. Who are the real aliens? Hmm?), etc.
Same old shit. But it’s the good shit. In fact, Lovecraftian shit is perhaps the most interesting in the annals of Horror. There is something about an artist’s articulation of how little the universe cares about mankind that manages to get under everyone’s skin.
But, crucially, Carpenter had done this type of material before: The Thing (1982) is an extremely Lovecraftian film. In fact, filmmaker and Mexican Santa Claus-impersonator Guillermo Del Toro argued that Carpenter’s film was a direct rip-off of Lovecraft’s story At The Mountains of Madness (1931). Given that the writer died in 1937, I don’t think he cared much about what the chain-smoking Carpenter was getting up to in 1982: the year in which the first computer virus was found in Apple II computers; teacher-beatings were outlawed by the European Court of Human Rights; the Falklands war began and ended; Chariots of Fire (Hudson, 1981) won Best Picture at the Academy Awards; the People’s Republic of China adopted its current constitution; and Ciabatta bread was invented in Verona, Italy, against all odds, by a baker.
What I’m getting at here is that it’s hardly surprising that the filmmaker John Carpenter made Prince of Darkness. By his own admission, there are two basic stories that cement the bedrock for all of his films.
“If you imagine,” he says, and for the record, I did not interview John Carpenter, “we’re all sitting around a campfire in the old days. The medicine man is standing there. We’re a tribe. And he says, ‘Let me tell you where the evil is. It’s out there beyond the darkness. It’s the Other. It’s the other tribe. The beasts in the woods. That’s the evil.’”
So that’s one. The evil from outside.
“Same situation,” he goes on, his hair sifting the light, “we’re sitting around a campfire and the medicine man, the holy man stands up, and says, ‘I’ll tell you where evil is. It’s right in here,’” J.C. notes while poking his left breast, “‘It’s in our human hearts. It’s in us.’ That’s evil on the inside. Two stories,” which, given the way he points his index- and middle-fingers, would be interpreted by the English as, “That’s the evil on the inside. Now fuck off.”*
Prince of Darkness is (as I mentioned) a strange combination of those two, however. Yes, you have the Anti-Christ, or, “Anti-God,” as he/she is described in the film. But the Anti-God also possesses people by squirting itself into their mouths, which constitutes some pretty kinky body horror, I must say.
So while we have the Out There, we also have the In Us.
The main thing going for Prince of Darkness is its general mood. The cinematography by Gary B. Kibbe is beautiful, the production design (sets, effects) is top-notch, and there are, despite script-related circumstances, some good performances. Donald Pleasance, like Anthony Hopkins, has that wonderful ability to deliver shitty dialogue in a way that it utterly captivating. I’m not saying that the entire film is underscored by terrible dialogue (more so by Carpenter's thronging music); rather that the dialogue would be better suited to a short story, or novel. It is Lovecraftian dialogue, full of scientific terms and ruminations on the spirit of man. I don’t mind it, but it does get in the way sometimes.
The film lends itself, for the first time Carpenter’s career, I think, to visuals as opposed to story. I can imagine Lucio Fulci having made Prince of Darkness, but with more discipline and more gore. Adding to that, it is a film that can be watched with the sound off à la Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers (1994) or The Fisher King (Gilliam, 1991).
It may be John Carpenter’s best film, for the same reason that Jackie Brown (1997) is Quentin Tarantino’s best film: it is the least Carpenteresque film John Carpenter has ever made. The ideas in Prince of Darkness, in contrast to his other films, are looking up at the stars, instead of running riot in our veins.
*Mike Mendez, John Carpenter Masters of Horror, online video recording, YouTube, 9 June 2008, <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ve2Nd43qWyk> [accessed 2 April 2019].
Comments