In the Mouth of Madness is a creepy underrated gem of a horror movie. And those always tend to be my favorites, especially with filmmakers like John Carpenter. I've always loved this film and Prince of Darkness. And I also think that it has a place in the through-line of our Scare U syllabus.

In The Thing, Carpenter first starts to address ideas of cosmic, Lovecraftian horror, even though they're differently expressed in this film, and also in films like I, Madman, and Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, in which the monsters that populate works of fiction and literature step off the page and into reality, or something like reality.

It's set up from the start like a Lovecraft story with what would appear to be an unreliable (by virtue of insanity) narrator, whose flashback would seem to comprise the bulk of the storytelling. But it is specifically this unreliability, which we are led to expect from this character, which throws all manner of doubt onto easily interpreting what's real versus what isn't.

What is real? Is Trent, strictly speaking, real? Reality is a pretty hefty topic with regard to this film, which functions on a deeply meta level. Unlike other films we've seen, which I have described as opening out and out and out to become larger stories and more complex studies, In the Mouth of Madness kind of collapses and coils onto itself to the point where multiple realities, or unrealities, or surreal realities seem to be rubbing up against one another. It becomes progressively more hypnotic and kaleidoscopic; questions arise about these ideas of reality versus unreality, objectivity, sanity versus insanity, and frankly, whose perspective is coloring our perception of the world of the story—even before we get plunged into the strange little town of Hobb’s End, which is peopled with unusual character actors turning in fantastic performances.

I think the cast is objectively great. You know, Sam Neill was fresh from Jurassic Park when this thing was made. It has Charlton Heston, and David Warner. And of course, Jurgen Prochnow is Sutter Cane. And I think, as much as he's inspired by Stephen King and the sort of fictional New England locations in which King characters get to play, he almost makes me think of the character of Claire Zachanassian in Durrenmatt's The Visit in a very specific sense, because he's seemingly taking root in his haunted little town and exacting some kind of punishment on the people who live there and then in the broader world. It makes me wonder if Cane is causality or a channel for something coming from a deep, dark place. I also really appreciate its use of liminal spaces, both internal and external. such as when Trent and Stiles are driving at night and they're enveloped in a black void. When they encounter the boy riding the bike, it's in a pure, black vacuum. This is something that we've seen in the work of William Castle, and in films like Insidious, and I think there's something to be said for narratives taking place in a psychologically liminal space.

I think that the concept of time and the events that transpire in this narrative would kind of seem to defy our logical understanding of the linearity of time and the concepts of past and present and future. Whatever happens to Trent in this story, which of course begins by his just simply brushing up against Sutter Cane's world, we have to understand that he's either fabricating the bulk of the story that he's relating, or the things that he's experiencing in objective reality are also being experienced by Linda Styles. At the end of the day, is it real? Is it a folie à deux?

To listen to our episode on In the Mouth of Madness, click here.

Bradford Louyrk