Although it’s now receiving the accolades it deserved all along, John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy--The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness--has been through some rough times. Part of the blame rests with The Thing, a critical darling and, to be fair, one of the greatest horror movies ever produced, remake or not. It’s a bonafide classic, with all the hallmarks of a classic; and whether the technical aspects of Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness measure up to it or not, it can’t be denied that all three movies are pieces of a singular vision, one that owes as much to H.P. Lovecraft as it does to the westerns John Carpenter so loves to emulate, and whose mix of Wild West grit and gooey existential horror even feels, at times, like a spiritual ancestor to Stephen King’s Dark Tower series. Prince of Darkness is at once the silliest and most mysterious entry in the trilogy, and far more deserving of praise than its reputation suggests. Whether or not Carpenter knows what he wanted to say or do with its witches’ brew of theology, mathematics, and eschatology, it’s a novel and absorbing concoction only let down only by tough sell of a plot--although, amid the movie’s aura of intrigue and those ominous synth-strikes on the score, its outlandishness doesn’t really set in until after that haunting final shot. Prince of Darkness is the story of a group of university students brought together to study and decipher a series of mathematical and audiovisual phenomena occurring at a local church. These phenomena, we discover soon enough, are caused by a glowing green canister in the basement of the church. This canister is...Satan. Carpenter never directly adapted Lovecraft, which is a shame: he nails the point of his fiction that we discussed back in Re-Animator. Prince of Darkness isn’t out to make us afraid of some green slime--the horror comes from its dramatic reframing of Genesis, positing that Jesus Christ and Satan were aliens, creatures of unknown origin whose feud defined our evolution, but wasn’t necessarily intended to (sound familiar?). It implies our existence is accidental, trivial, and unimportant, which is a horrifying prospect all on its own. It doesn’t need recurring dreams, body horror, or Alice Cooper as the leader of the horde of zombie-like Satan-worshippers that surround the church as night falls--but they certainly don’t hurt! -Brian L.
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