Filmpocalypse #5: In The Mouth Of Madness

"A reality is just what we tell each other it is."

I hate loving Lovecraft.

While H.P. is responsible for modern horror as we know it, I must respect and loathe him in equal measure. Firmly rooted in the idea of cosmicism, he believed the universe was too gigantic to care about humanity, much less be understood by us. Hence, his work operates around the central device of terror too incomprehensible to be committed to words. Each monster "indescribable," the ever-present dread "unknowable," the crushing weight of universal truth "unrepeatable." At points, his characters are even to frightened to describe architecture. Architecture. It all reeks of a cheap trick to lazily avoid definitions. Such a hack move, he'd be laughed out of any writing workshop.

Cthulhu-damn him for making it work.

Leaving the nightmare-creating duties to the darkness in the reader's mind, Lovecraft's stories are more frightening today than they were in 1917, if only because his readers have an extra century of insanity in their blood. Doesn't matter if you see the turn coming from a mile away, "The Music of Erich Zann" still keeps me sleepless in a way the works of King, Koontz, Poe, Barker, and Matheson never have. Does this reveal too much about the frightening functionality of my own internal process? Yeah, maybe. But it applies to the rest of you in equal measure. The bump in the night is automatically your greatest fear, whereas the tangibly-defined murderous automobile in Christine is laughable.

Rounding out his Apocalypse Trilogy (preceded by The Thing and Prince Of Darkness), John Carpenter approached 1994's In The Mouth of Madness with the goal of distilling the oeuvre of H.P. Lovecraft into a single work capable of transcending forms (on several levels). With the greatest actor of this or any generation, Sam Neill, in the lead, Carpenter crafts a literary love letter to the Grandfather of Terror — simultaneously presenting weighty issues about the consumption of media and, I believe knowingly, asking us to laugh at the entire production.

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Author: Brock Wilbur