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The Appropriate Tune - "At The Mountains of Madness" by H.P. Lovecraft
There has been a common refrain that I’ve seen over the years about how H.P. Lovecraft’s stories are unfilmable. They point to the relative lack of commercial success Lovecraftian films have seen over the years and major studios’ unwillingness to put money into those types of films and rest their case. Or they go the other route and say that a proper Lovecraft film would be impossible as no film could capture the sheer mind-bending horror of these monsters, that only one’s own imagination can do it justice. The former can be dismissed as the anarchy of capitalism; there are plenty of bombs that studios dumped buckets of money on and plenty of good films that didn’t get the recognition they deserve because the people with the money don’t actually care about the art and are just playing a guessing game hoping to get the most money. The latter reeks of purity tests and gatekeeping and is better off discarded. Did Mary Shelley describe word for word how Frankenstein created his Modern Prometheus all those years ago? No, James Whale and Universal took a shot in the dark, and now everybody who knows Frankenstein knows it’s about a guy who sews body parts together and zaps it to life with lightning. H.P. Lovecraft is not some insurmountable, inscrutable thing, he was a dude that wrote good horror stories. All it takes is the right eye behind the camera and the script to get it done.
For a time, I would say that John Carpenter was that eye. After all, wasn’t The Thing a Lovecraftian story? Sure it’s a remake of another film and an adaptation of a book, but it is a story about people confronting an alien presence which is not only inhuman in form but undermines the very essence of humanity in context. The characters are more competent than your typical Lovecraft protagonist, granted, but their relative effectiveness is there to heighten the feeling of dread and panic as things become increasingly dire and they are repeatedly outmaneuvered. So The Thing certainly qualifies as a Lovecraftian film to me, but then years later I found out that Carpenter had put out a film that was directly inspired by pulp fiction's creepy uncle. Then a couple years after that I finally bit the bullet and decided to review it. Now he we are.
Released in 1994, In the Mouth of Madness was directed by John Carpenter, written by Michael De Luca and produced by Sandy King through New Line Cinema. We begin with a man (played by Marathon alum Sam Neill) being committed to a mental institution. A man named Dr. Ren, as played by David Warner (another Marathon alum, arrives at the hospital and believing the man might be playing up his psychosis asks him for his story, which he then provides. The man is John Trent. He was a freelance insurance investigator, and a damn good one at that; He took great pride in uncovering scams and busting con artists. One day, after almost being murdered by an axe-wielding maniac, John is hired by publisher Jack Harglow (Charlton Heston, yet another alum) to find the author Sutter Cane, who has been missing for some time. Sutter Cane is the most popular writer on the planet, a billion dollar cash cow whose novels of monsters, madness and other nameless horrors are so effective that it is driving people toward acts of violence. His latest novel, In the Mouth of Madness, is set to take the world by storm, and so finding Cane is of the utmost importance. Or rather, finding his manuscript.
Trent was skeptical, believing the whole disappearance was a hoax made up by the publishing company to increase sales, but agreed to help find him. After days of research, Trent finally stumbles upon it: clues hidden within Cane’s previous books which form a map to Hobbs’ End New Hampshire, a town which doesn’t exist. Now convinced even more that it is all an elaborate publicity stunt, Trent and Cane’s editor Linda Styles decide to take a drive to this nonexistent town and find Sutter Cane and his latest book. This would be the worst mistake Trent ever made in his life.
What is the essence of Lovecraft’s writing? It’s not squid monsters from outer space, it’s outer space itself: the nagging doubt of the conception of man as this special creature which had fueled Manifest Destiny and much of the foundation of the American myth. We can see this expressed, although perhaps not intentionally, in The Thing, where the rational scientific minds are undone by something beyond their comprehension and which preys upon human limitations. So it is again with In the Mouth of Madness, but rather than the characters questioning the nature of life they are now forced to question the nature of reality. The misdirects, the blurring of dream sequences and ‘real’ sequences, the repetition of certain scenes, Carpenter constantly assaults his character's ability to separate fantasy from reality, and by extension the audience. We’ve seen this type of thing before in films, eXistenZ and Jacob’s Ladder and so on, but this is the first time in a while where I’ve seen it done in such an aggressive manner. It’s like a horror movie rollercoaster.
Which isn’t to say it’s all mind-tricks and modernist subtext, this is a horror movie and Carpenter is here to bring that spooky stuff to the screen. To be honest though while the film is on the whole unsettling when it tries to move into outright scary it’s a bit of a mixed bag. The simpler scenes are effective and even deeply disturbing, but when we turn the corner and start getting into the gorey and Lovecraftian stuff it falters. The makeup on the whole tends to look rather simple, and unfortunately the monsters I feel end up showing their limitations rather quickly. They still look good, Industrial Light & Magic put in good work, and Carpenter does his best not to overexpose them, but once you notice it you can’t unnotice it and overall it’s not as strong in that department as what Carpenter delivered with The Thing or Big Trouble in Little China.
I also wasn’t a fan of the theme music here, which sounded less like the opening to a Lovecraft movie than it did entrance music ripped from WWF No Mercy. Perhaps by ‘94 the synth-centric soundtrack was considered outdated, but this heavy metal they've chosen to replace to go with isn’t an improvement. I felt the same way with David Lynch throwing Rammstein on Lost Highway’s soundtrack, it’s way too angry and high energy and doesn’t mesh well with the energy of the film at all.
Historically though, and by ‘historically’ I mean the films that we’ve reviewed so far Carpenter’s films have succeeded when it comes to casting, and it’s no different here. It’s hard to think of an actor, besides Jeffrey Combs, that so perfectly nails the ideal Lovecraft actor than Sam Neill, even at the beginning at his most composed and charming he has the look of a man who has one foot constantly dangling over the edge. Julia Carmen as the Mulder to Neill’s Scully was also rather good, I don’t think I’ve seen her in anything else but she reminds me a bit of Rosario Dawson. Jurgen Prochnow as Sutter Cane is okay but not as much of a presence as the film builds him up to be, seemed like a role you’d write for Udo Kier. Plus you can never go wrong with a bit of David Warner.
I’ve also praised John Carpenter’s films on a cinematic level for a while now, and In the Mouth of Madness is no different either in that regard. I don’t know quite how to describe the feel of it...Retro-Hollywood? It’s not like they’re filmed in technicolor or cinemascope or anything like that, but the way the shots are composed feels very film-like, or unreal might be the better word. I got much of that same feeling when watching Last Action Hero, where the intent is this sense of heightened reality, that the audience knows that they are watching a film. Which in this case I would say is an ingenious move on Carpenter’s part, but since several of his films since Christine have had this same look I’ll settle for just calling him a good director.
The story out of pop culture is that after his boom period in the 1980s John Carpenter lost his touch and subsequently faded into relative obscurity. After Village of the Damned I might have seen a touch of truth in that statement, but I think In the Mouth of Madness proves that the man hadn’t lost his touch. I wouldn’t say it’s my favorite of his films that I’ve covered but it is his most adventurous, and he takes risks in this film that I’ve rarely seen attempted in contemporary horror cinema. An easy recommendation for Halloween and otherwise; Whenever you decide to bring that pretty young abomination from the outer reaches of space you met at work over for a romantic dinner, pop this in the VCR and see where the night takes you. Make it a double feature with Re-Animator if you want to get saucy…
