I’ve decided to mix it up. I like pop culture, and I think I’ll dissect a piece of pop culture regularly: today, John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.
Content warning: There is some 80s horror movie stills inside. If you don’t like that - perhaps wait until the following newsletter. I think they’re pretty harmless, but there is some slight gore.
John Carpenter is a master. If you’re not familiar with his films, they tend on the side of science fiction and horror while straying into action occasionally. With titles like Halloween, Escape from New York, and They Live, everyone in North America has been exposed to the man’s ideas. He’s an auteur. He writes and directs - and composes the soundtracks to all his films. I love the album below. It’s great for when you want to put on something spooky and write. Autumn is coming up; it should come in handy.
Today, I’m going to discuss Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, the middle chapter of Carpenter’s Apocalypse trilogy. The three movies in the trilogy are The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and Into the Mouths of Madness. They’re called the Apocalypse trilogy because they tend on the dark side. Bad things happen to good characters and they are bleak movies. Which, I tend to like. I guess I’m a masochist because the darker the endings are in horror, the more I like them.
If you know horror at all, I’m a big fan of the movies The Descent and The Mist. If you want to take a walk on the dark side of things, watch those movies. They’re much better movies than POD.
The eighties, if you lived through them, were full of shitty movies. Also, if you lived through the VHS era, after a short time, you had watched all the ‘good’ movies, and you ended up staring at boxes, judging movies based on their box art. That’s how I came home with Microwave Madness, a shitty cannibal movie about someone that used an oven-sized microwave to cook up his victims.
POD isn’t that terrible. It seems like a dream - not quite fully formed - sitting on the base of your skull, barely ready to awake into the real world.
It is a movie where the victims are akin to the carnival clowns that get water shot into their faces, but when it happens to them, they get infected with the Devil. Or a devil. Or devils. I don’t know, it’s not clear.
The movie starts with this banger - a medley of synth and church choir.
The beginning is silent. You get introduced to the characters to come, Jameson Parker as the creepy Brian Marsh with his crooked moustache. He’s stalking Lisa Blount’s Catherine Danforth, silently ogling her from across a field on the college commons.
Cut to: a dead priest and the mysterious box that sits atop his corpse. Donald Pleasance, joining us from Carpenter’s Halloween, is Father Loomis. He finds and reads a shocking diary.
Cut to: Victor Wong, joining us from Carpenter’s Big Trouble, Little China, as Professor Howard Birack, professor of theoretical Physics. (I like that Carpenter uses actors he’s familiar with. I’m sure it made the set familial.) We get a monologue for the first real dialogue. He lays down the theme of the movie:
“Let's talk about our beliefs, and what we can learn about them. We believe nature is solid, and time a constant. Matter has substance and time a direction. There is truth in flesh and the solid ground. The wind may be invisible, but it's real. Smoke, fire, water, light - they're different! Not as to stone or steel, but they're tangible. And we assume time is narrow because it is as a clock - one second is one second for everyone! Cause precedes effect - fruit rots, water flows downstream. We're born, we age, we die. The reverse NEVER happens... None of this is true! Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level... into ghosts and shadows.”
Spooky pseudo-science. As a writer, if you don’t quite understand it, maybe it’s best that you write something you know instead of trying to form ideas around poems. Or - maybe you forge ahead and make Prince of Darkness? Poems, ahoy!
The credits roll for the first ten minutes of the film - acting as scene transitions.
Father Loomis finds a key in the box and ends up in the basement of a church.
Buzzing guitars.
Right from the get, you have this moody film without a lot of dialogue - and a buzzsaw of a soundtrack. For a movie with an hour and forty minute runtime - it takes its time to get you in the mood.
In the basement of the building - is a tube filled with green goo. It has been guarded by an ancient order of priests, the last who has died. Now, something is coming. Something bad.
Synth!
Father Loomis talks to the professor - giving the movie it’s premise.
Father Loomis : It's your disbelief that powers him. Your stubborn faith in, in...
[grasping for words]
Father Loomis : *common sense*. It allows his deception. He lives in the smallest parts of it. In the atoms... smaller... invisible... he lives in all of it. In the sum of its parts. We must translate this book. You must prove it scientifically... to convince the outside world.
Professor Howard Birack : The outside world doesn't want to hear this kind of bullshit. Just keep it locked away. You've already managed that for two thousand years.
Father Loomis : No prison can hold him now.
No real explanation. The devil is coming, and you best be scared.
I admit, ten minutes in, I was curious. What were a physics professor and a priest going to do to combat the antichrist?
Get a bunch of co-eds together in a church - and let the carnage begin. Sounds a bit like Friday the 13th, but churchy-ier.
Cue the eighties romance. Brian and Catherine sit down after they’ve been drafted for the weekend by their professor for a war against an ancient evil they haven’t been told about.
Brian: “Some things aren’t changed by quantum physics though.”
Catherine: “Such as?”
Brian: “Well, for instance, every theoretical physicist I know wonders why it is that no one that looks like you ever seems to settle down in our end of the building.”
Catherine: “That’s not true and that’s an extremely sexist thing to say.”
Brian: “Confirmed sexist and proud of it." [Pause.] “Hey, I was just joking.”
Four scenes later, they’re sharing a bed. Somehow, in my mind, that’s isn’t a plausible scenario after this conversation. But, eighties movies think that this is bit of dialogue is a major turn-on.
Even for the time, that’s a clunky bit of writing. If this was a man’s idea of courting in the 80s, how are we alive as a species? Well, onto the coming of the end.
Homeless people with ants on their faces are staring at the sun, the moon (which are both in the sky at the same time) - and the church they’re all arriving at. If there was ever a time to leave - its now.
I guess, if you live on the street, you have a closer relationship with the devil? It is a weird connection - but the visual a group of people staring at you is evocative.
Inside the church, scientists (mostly students scientists) have arrived. Thing is, they don’t have any idea why they’re there. So much for transparency. Professor and Priest have decided to keep the coming of the antichrist a secret.
You need victims in a horror movie, right? Might as well be science students.
So, the men start theorizing while the women do the work. They carbon date the goo-tank and translate a book that tells them evil shit is about to happen. It’s only a matter of time before someone dies.
One of the guys doesn’t like being in the middle of a supernatural warzone and leaves. He gets murdered by the homeless crowd outside.
Why? I don’t know. They had to do something other than stare into the abyss and have ants crawl all over them.
He returns later, a zombie, leaking beatles out of everywhere until his head falls off. Why beatles? Who knows? Why did his head fall off? Who knows! It is a highlight of the movie - something weird just for the sake of weirdness.
This isn’t Hereditary, all right?
Half the cast is turned into minions - by the water squirting technique I discussed earlier - and one deadly kiss.
It’s a cheap way of making baddies for the film. Slap white foundation on them - and voila! Bad zombie people now inhabit the building. Best watch out science people.
There’s a lot of fluff. People walking around hallways aimlessly. Then, people being chased around the hallways.
The movie feels directionless until:
The antichrist picks a host, Kelly. She gets infected the strangest way I’ve ever seen - she falls into a computer and gets a bruise. That bruise turns into a mark - a swollen pustule with an ancient rune in the middle - and then - she gets pregnant.
Because - she going to give birth to the antichrist, right? No. She’s just pregnant because, why not?
And then her possessed friends make her drink A LOT of green water from the ancient vial. Looks cool, right? At least the liquid is the right color in this scene.
From here, there’s a lot of chasing.
The remaining students try to get out of the building, but the rabid homeless people are outside.
Father Loomis goes into hiding. He’ll emerge later - a changed, braver man - for absolutely no reason. It makes me wonder if they cut a scene where he finds a reason to be brave. Probably not. Probably just poor planning on the script level.
Why did Carpenter, under a nom de guerre, write this movie? What was he afraid of?
Or maybe he just needed a movie to place this sick soundtrack on.
Choir chanting!
From here, Kelly’s belly deflates - she stops being pregnant and starts losing her skin.
She didn’t morph into the antichrist because they didn’t have the budget - so they used a couple hundred dollars to make it look like her skin was falling off.
I’m a fan of practical makeup effects.
After her skin falls off, Kelly, starts to get curious about mirrors. Why? Because, that’s how you did different dimensions in the 80s - mirrors. Watch House to see another version of a mirror dimension in a horror movie.
This is how she discovers the other dimension.
There is a larger mirror in the room and Kelly’s attention turns to that. Our climax has come.
It’s the big finale. Brian’s wrestles a zombie while Catherine and Father Loomis watch Kelly land her glowing mirror. Shit is going down.
Guitar squeal!
Because because, that’s why. At this point, Carpenter doesn’t need pseudo-science, he’s letting loose, hoping that gore, a fist fight and interesting visuals will make you forget about physics.
That’s filmmaking - do what you can with what you have. I get the feeling that Carpenter wasn’t working with a big budget here. It feels like he had an idea - everything went wrong - and he did what he could to make a cohesive movie.
Kelly reaches into the mirror - and behind it - is a swimming pool.
I got excited here. What lay behind the mirror? Some kind of Cthulhu creature? I love that shit. I had been waiting the whole movie for the hand of a nebulous creature from the abyss to appear.
But, as it emerges into the real world - its just the goddamn devil.
At which point, Cathy loses it and charges Kelly, tackling her into the swimming pool dimension.
Wherein, Father Loomis finds his courage - and an axe - and shatters the mirror, trapping Catherine in the pool dimension forever.
What a moron.
After doing hiding the whole film - the priest saves the day.
I can’t think of a worse way to end this movie. The cowardly priest - after realizing nothing - is the hero.
I mean, Catherine sacrificed herself to save the day, she’s the real hero, but this guy was sequestered in a closet reading a bible the whole movie - and then he emerges with an axe like Christian Bale in American Psycho.
Brian is bummed out about Catherine’s death.
Like, super bummed.
She had told him earlier that she was in love with him and now he realizes - he was in love with her too.
They’ve known each other for three days. I’ve loved a Snickers bar more than they loved each other.
Prof says, “She died for us.” Did she? She died for someone.
The movie ends with a weird dispatch from the year 1999.
The final scene: Brian wakes up from a dream about skinless Kelly and walks to his mirror.
There is what looks to be a bruise on his face.
He puts his hand out — THE END.
This movie is a 5/10 at best.
That doesn’t mean I didn’t enjoy it. Carpenter spit polishes this turd with absurdity and weird creepy moments like the headless beatle boy to keep my ADHD in check. That puts it firmly in the movies-I-enjoyed-I’ll-never-watch-again-but-might-come-up-in-conversation-with-people-that-enjoy-shitty-movies column.
To me, the biggest error POD makes: the script is half-baked. None of the characters have motivation, wants or desires - beyond Brian wanting to shag Catherine. There is no focal character beyond the antichrist.
Maybe I’ve got it wrong. Maybe the movie’s protagonist is the antichrist? He has motivation - he wants to break the barriers between worlds.
That’s too kind. The movie could use a main character and more structure. POD relies on boring kills and dark fantasy tropes to get you to the finish line.
That said, the idea is interesting - the cross-section of dark fantasy and science could yield frightening horror.
This ain’t it. POD is amusing, cheesy horror.
Synth. Wailing guitar!
Why does this movie endear?
Carpenter had so many hits. Halloween. It Lives. The Thing. His resume speaks for itself. I’m not a completionist, but people continue to talk about this movie years after it was made, and that made me curious.
Prince of Darkness is associated with one of the world’s greatest minds for science fiction and horror. Of course I want to watch it. Every creative has made a slip-up, or phoned it in, at some point. It might have been a hard year emotionally. The movie might have had shitty producers.
Whatever the case, it wasn’t as tight as some of Carpenter’s other projects.
Would I recommend it? If you’re a fan of Carpenter, of course. It has enough bizarre content in it that it will reward you.
If you haven’t watched The Thing or Into the Mouths of Madness, watch them instead. They’re stellar.
What are your thoughts? Have you seen POD? Why do you love it? What’s your favorite Carpenter film? Let me know in the comments.
Until next time,
Martin John