Cosmic horror without the Lovecraft
This month, just in time for Halloween, the Criterion Channel launched a John Carpenter retrospective. I took the opportunity to revisit 1994's In the Mouth of Madness, one of the strangest John Carpenter films... and I feel like that's saying something.
Fresh off of Jurassic Park in 1993, Sam Neill went to work for John Carpenter, playing insurance investigator John Trent. We meet Trent ranting and raving as orderlies at an insane asylum drag him into a padded room. The next morning, when asylum psychiatrist Dr. Wrenn visits Trent to get his story, he opens the door to find Trent has drawn symbols all over his room, clothes, and face, and he begins to unfold his tale of madness.
John Trent was not always the raving maniac Dr. Wrenn sees before him. No, indeed. Trent was once a successful, can't-bullshit-a-bullshitter insurance investigator. The popular horror author Sutter Cane, Arcane Publishing's biggest literary star, has disappeared, and Arcane wants Trent to find him. Trent reluctantly accepts the assistance of Cane's editor, Linda Styles, but believes from the start that this whole thing is a fakeout—an elaborate publicity stunt designed to generate headlines for Cane's new novel, In the Mouth of Madness. Trent tries to do his research, grabbing copies of all of Cane's novels, but they're too scary. They wind up getting inside his dreams, and maybe even into his waking reality. Maybe everybody's waking realities. A spike in violent crime seems to be tied to people who read Cane's books. And it comes home for Trent while he sits at a restaurant and a man wielding an axe smashes through a plate glass window, coming for Trent before the police shoot the attacker. It turns out this madman was Cane's agent, and right before he raised the axe over Trent's head, he asked a question everyone seems to be asking:
"Do you read Sutter Cane?"
In the same way that Stephen King sets much of his work in the fictional town of Derry, Maine, in the film Sutter Cane sets his work in the idyllic New England town of Hobb's End. Trent realizes that design elements consistent across Cane's various novel covers fit together and form a map to the fictional town. So he and Styles set off to follow the map and see where it takes them. After trading off behind the wheel, Trent falls asleep in the passenger seat, and while Styles drives, things get weird. A figure looms up out of the darkness, the road seems to vanish, the figure returns, but different, then again, then there's a crash, or is there? The radio distorts, goes out, the night seems to bend around Styles, and then... poof. It's daytime and they're in Hobb's End.
That's all the plot summary you get, because after that, the film begins playing with reality in very interesting and increasingly labyrinthine ways. If you haven't seen the film, I don't want to take any of the fun out of it. But extremely telling is the exchange about Cane's books that Trent and Styles have on the road right before he hands over the wheel:
Trent: What's to get scared about? It's not like it's real or anything.
Styles: Well, it's not real from your point of view, and right now reality shares your point of view. What scares me about Cane's work is what might happen if reality shared his point of view.
Trent: Whoa, we're not talking about reality here. We're talking about fiction. It's different, you know?
Styles: But reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places if the insane were to become the majority.
I have to be honest: that line hit a little closer to home these days than it probably did in 1994. I do remember renting this movie (on VHS!) when it came out, and when it ended, I felt so perplexed, so surprised by the final moments of the film, thinking that I must have missed something, that I rewound it back to their arrival in Hobb's End and watched it again. Watching it this time, having vaguely remembered that experience from 30 years ago, I was a little more prepared to simply go on the journey that Carpenter and writer Michael De Luca wanted to take me on.
If you are a fan of Carpenter and/or Stephen King, this movie is a ton of fun. Carpenter throws in a number of signature visuals that are reminiscent of The Thing, and the movie really nails the Stephen King vibe, not only with the setting but down to the author font on the paperbacks. But one of the most enjoyable aspects of the film is the way it manages to give the viewer a full-on cosmic horror experience without H.P. Lovecraft. Sure, there are a ton of homages to Lovecraft, but it's not his mythos, not his settings, and not his baggage.
Like many people, I can no longer enjoy the work of Lovecraft—certainly not the way I could at maybe 13 years old, reading paperbacks with evocative titles full of odd, elliptical stories that hinted at a hostile cosmos and latent dangers outside of the realms of our perception. But Lovecraft's racism and eugenicist views, which revealed themselves in tropes I wasn't equipped to fully understand at that age, make the experience of reading him one I can no longer find much joy in. And while there are a couple of good ones, Lovecraft film adaptations tend toward the schlocky and cheap, as name-recognizable IP in the public domain might lead you to believe.
So I'm grateful to John Carpenter for In the Mouth of Madness. It scratches the cosmic horror itch in a satisfying way, and wraps it in something of a puzzle box narrative that's akin to a film like Mulholland Dr. but very much in the horror genre. I'm happy to recommend this without having to caveat it.
In the Mouth of Madness is currently streaming on the Criterion Channel (October 2025), and Tubi with commercials.