In the Mouth of Madness review
In the Mouth of Madness was released thirty years ago today. Our look back at John Carpenter’s last great movie.
Classic movie reviews will contain spoilers.
In the Mouth of Madness
Directed by John Carpenter
Written by Michael De Luca
Starring Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jurgen Prochnow, Charlton Heston, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey and Peter Jason
In the Mouth of Madness Review
Ranking a director’s filmography is a very personal experience. If you don’t believe me…look at how annoyed you are if I say that The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the best of Spielberg’s Indiana Jones films. I don’t believe that, of course…because it’s an insane thing to think. The Last Crusade is. See…now a little more than half of you are annoyed again…only this time I might mean it. We get defensive and protective of our favorites because we care so deeply about them. We connect with certain films in our lives…and screw anyone who ranks something we don’t above it. This brings us to the only somewhat controversial opinion this thirty year look back at In the Mouth of Madness is centered around.
In the Mouth of Madness is John Carpenter’s last great film.
Ok…so there was no ranking involved. Take a breath fans of Halloween, The Thing, Escape From New York or whatever other Carpenter classic whose hill you’ll die on. I’m not saying it’s his best movie. Having never seen The Thing…I don’t feel qualified to even comment on that subject. (But it’s probably Halloween). What I do feel qualified to comment on is a modern view of In the Mouth of Madness through the eyes of someone who lived through the dead era of horror that it sprouted from…and every renaissance since. Apologies to anyone who really loves Escape from LA or Vampires or Ghosts of Mars…In the Mouth of Madness was the last truly great film Carpenter has directed.
The arguable part of that statement for most of the last three decades is whether In the Mouth of Madness was, in fact, a great movie. It received mixed reviews at the time of its release. But I’m going to throw contemporary reviews of the horror genre in 1995 straight into the trash where they belong. No offense to the hard-working film reviewers working in the mid-90s…but I don’t trust you covering the genre. In an era where it took a degree and a newspaper to hire you for your “on paper” expertise in film study…well…no one went through all that time, money and effort to extoll the virtues of Jason Goes to Hell.
Times change…and so has film coverage. There are plenty of places to find people more than willing to break down genre films with the respect they deserve. I like to believe that you are looking at a website that does that right now…but, as I’m on my fourth paragraph of not talking about In the Mouth of Madness, I’ll accept a dissenting opinion. Carpenter’s 1995 Lovecraft inspired film was covered a bit on our recent Thanksgiving podcast episode. On it, I publicly debated with myself whether this was a great movie. I ended up on the side that it was…a point I am now ready to commit to.
Let’s travel back to 1995 for a minute. 1996 was a big year in horror. Scream was coming and the genre was about to find itself thrust back into the spotlight. Studios would remember that horror movies could make money…and a generation of filmmakers were about to see a movie that made them want to make their own. The technology was about to get cheap enough to let many of them do it. But…what was happening in 1995? For starters…the 80s slasher era was going out with a whimper. Chucky hit a wall in 1991. Jason Voorhees in 93. Freddy Krueger left on a high note in 94. Michael Myers limped to a strange conclusion in The Curse of Michael Myers in 95.
Now…you may be asking yourself…why is he bringing up slasher movies? In the Mouth of Madness isn’t a slasher movie. That’s correct. But…from about 1978 until 1995…slashers dominated horror. They were pop culture icons and populist success stories. Those reviewers we don’t trust dismissed a lot of quality films because they were so sick of slasher movies. Everything horror had the stink of the repetitive slasher movie on it. Even ones that weren’t slasher movies. Take 1992’s great Candyman as an example. It’s an investigative horror movie and a tremendously original piece compared to the series we’ve just named. It created a slasher icon…in a movie that isn’t even a slasher movie. It’s just the only thing people knew…and the only way they knew to express something.
What happened to all the great horror movies of the early to mid-90s you ask? They were called thrillers. The Silence of the Lambs can’t be a horror movie! It’s great and I took film theory in college! We’ll just call it something else and keep a perfect track record. What about the non-slasher movies that we don’t think are Oscar worthy? Those can still be horror movies…so we can give them a thumb in the middle at best and leave it to drown at the box office Scream hasn’t come along to save yet. Such is the case with Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness.
Of course…none of this explains why it’s a great movie. It’s been 800 plus words of complaint about how horror was covered at a specific point in time. So, let’s finally get to it.
What makes In the Mouth of Madness a great movie?
I honestly don’t know.
And it’s not because I didn’t major in film theory or get a job at the Wabasha Gazette. It’s because the movie has always been difficult to pin down. Not in a, this is brilliant, I’ve never seen anything like this before, Possession (also starring Sam Neill) way. In an “I’m not sure how much of this story holds together…but it’s good as Hell” way. Carpenter isn’t crafting an influential masterwork like Halloween. He isn’t having the fun of Escape From New York. He isn’t mastering paranoia and creature effects like The Thing. He’s barely keeping In the Mouth of Madness on the tracks. But it’s almost as impressive as any of those other accomplishments that he managed to do so.
It’s narratively ambitious…especially for the era it arrived in. Effective horror imagery and an imaginative plot with the usual great performance from Sam Neill. It both absolutely nails the Lovecraftian apocalypse in the finale and fails to land a final thought that brings everything together. The kind of movie that seems to ask you to seek deeper meaning only to throw confounding answers at you when you do.
Neill plays John Trent…an insurance investigator tasked with finding the missing author, Sutter Kane (Jurgen Prochnow). Kane writes like H.P. Lovecraft…but lives like Stephen King. Lovecraft was never a best-selling author in his lifetime…Kane (like King) is the most famous of his era. Trent (and his companion Styles played by Julie Carmen) end up in Kane’s fictional town of Hobb’s End. Despite both Lovecraft and King writing about northeastern towns…Hobb’s End is assuredly more Castle Rock than Innsmouth.
The trick here is that the things happening to Trent and Styles are occurring just as they are laid out in Kane’s new book. A book that is driving people mad. Reality is subject to the reader…and the movie is due out soon. Yes…the very movie that we are watching. Complete with John Trent as a character in said movie.
Like I said…it’s ambitious for a 1995 horror movie. Carpenter makes it work against some long odds. His biggest struggles seem to accompany his more ambitious swings…but Madness manages to remain as intriguing as it was the day it was released. Carpenter finds a way to box in the weirdness in a way that is mostly understandable…even if it’s often hanging on by a thread.
It’s not a difficult movie to understand…it’s difficult to know if the movie understands itself. Which makes it fascinating most of the time. In the Mouth of Madness feels like it could drop off the spectrum at any given moment. Carpenter manages to ride the edge of logic and sanity long enough to make your questions feel important. To sit you in a theater next to John Trent as he discovers that he’s a character in the movie he’s watching. A movie, by the way, directed by John Carpenter. Both in the film’s universe and in our reality. Because what is reality? That’s the central question of In the Mouth of Madness. And what John Carpenter’s last great movie makes us wonder the entire time.
Scare Value
Reception was mixed to In the Mouth of Madness when it hit theaters in 1995. Possibly a product of coming out in the most down bad period for horror movies ever. Whatever the reason…a lot of people were wrong on this one. In the Mouth of Madness stands as a great film…the last great film directed by its acclaimed director. Sam Neill is excellent. The Lovecraftian aspects are among the best ever put on film. And I’m only as certain about what’s happening as it wants me to be every time I watch it.
4/5
In the Mouth of Madness Links
Rent/Buy on VOD from Fandango at Home and Amazon
Buy on Blu-Ray from Amazon
