Day 042 || In The Mouth of Madness

In The Mouth of Madness, 1994

Dir. John Carpenter

"Even if everything else I've said is completely Looney Tunes, this book will drive people mad."

In The Mouth of Madness was one of several films I've caught a small glimpse of back in my youth from flipping through cable channels, aimlessly trying to find something to hold my interest. The brief bit I saw featured a disturbing scene involving a possessed woman crawling out of a car with her head completed twisted around. It was reminiscent of the scene in The Exorcist when Linda Blair's character comes down the stairs doing an inverted crab walk. For some reason just the thought of both of those scenes have stuck with me, for some odd reason or another. It's not exactly haunting, but it's something that doesn't even leave your head.

This film is about ideas like that. It's about the imagination of humanity and how something so shocking and revolting, something so evil is more likely to stay with us, than something good. How more people buy into fantasy or horror, than reality. It's about the very essence of reality, albeit hidden in a John Carpenter effects-heavy horror film.

To say In The Mouth of Madness is a typical horror film, or that it's depicts a cliched battle between good and evil, would be borderline ignorant. It's a deep and interesting film, that often times loses its focus, but does so much right that all of the smaller flaws are easy to forgive.

Sam Neill plays the lead character, a no nonsense detective who is hired to track down a missing novelist, Sutter Cane, who is in the same genre as Stephen King or Dean Koontz, but outsells and reaches a broader audience than both. All the clues John Trent (Sam Neill) finds lead him to a town that's not on any map and no one has ever heard of. It seems But Trent soon finds himself questioning reality and his own existence when he  finds the town and it's strange inhabitants. Something is rotten in Denmark indeed.

For the most part the film succeeds in creating a very paranoid, atmospheric thriller, and some scenes border on disturbing. There's quite a few that I'm sure will linger with me for a long time, including the scene I described at the beginning of the film. Some of these involve some great practical creature effects, and some are as simple as a group of children who seem to be possessed talking about "mother's day". It's the atmosphere that keeps the film afloat, along with a very likeable Sam Neill, who plays the character with just the right amount of attitude, wonder, and disbelief that keeps him grounded and relatable. Even amidst all the bizarre and larger than life events happening in the world that he inhabits.

The film manages to get lost quite frequently when it tries to reach for something deeper, and ultimately ends on a confusing and slightly disappointing note. I think it would have been more effective had they really nailed down some of the psychological and philosophical points that were trying to be conveyed earlier in the picture. As it's a film  from the early 90's, there are also some questionable make-up effects, a boy on a bike aging, for instance, and some of the acting really hams it up. All that said, In The Mouth of Madness is still an enjoyable and haunting film, that I would recommend to anyone who is a fan of horror genre or John Carpenter.

4 out of 5