“It really is Old Scratch knocking at the door.”
In the early 1980s, director John Carpenter began what he called his Apocalypse Trilogy; it consists of The Thing, Prince of Darkness, and In the Mouth of Madness. Of these films, the first and third are among his best, most essential works, and Prince of Darkness is almost startlingly okay. It’s definitely second-tier Carpenter, but there are some big ideas at work here, and some imagery that will make your skin crawl, so it’s far from being a disaster.
Events get in motion right away. A priest named Father Carlton is found dead, a small silver chest on his body. Inside the chest is a key. Another unnamed priest, played by Donald Pleasance (IMDb trivia tells us that his name is Loomis, Pleasance’s character’s name in Halloween, but Prince of Darkness credits him just as Priest), gets in touch with a physics professor named Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and wants to show him something. In the basement of a seemingly abandoned church is a cylindrical container; within it is a swirling cyclone of green mist. The priest says nothing about it, save for that it is a “secret that can no longer be kept.” Before long, the church is teeming with physicists and linguists, trying to understand the contents of the container and decipher an eons-old book to search for clues.
Combining religious horror and quantum mechanics makes for an interesting juxtaposition: here is a team of people who have dedicated their lives to understanding and quantifying the living world, and they’re face to face with something that defies description or comprehension. Before long, the translator Lisa (Ann Yen) discovers that the container was buried in the desert by “the father of Satan.” Its contents: Satan himself.
The team of scientists is mostly boring and nondescript. Our two ostensible leads, Brian (Jameson Parker) and Catherine (Lisa Blount) share precious little chemistry, in spite of the fact that they’re supposed to be falling in love. The choice of Walter (Dennis Dun) as comic relief is a poor one, and beyond that Brooklyn Nine-Nine‘s Dirk Blocker makes for a very distracting casting choice. Blocker is an everyman actor, and he looks more like a janitor than a physicist (if anything, it’s remarkable how much he looked like Scully, his character on B99, even back in 1987). There are some pretty gross gender politics at play here, which might have been funny thirty years ago, but now serve to date the film. (To Carpenter’s credit, all his women characters have zero patience for any casual sexism.)
Prince of Darkness is more successful in its imagery than its character work. Insects abound, and Carpenter gets a lot of mileage out of a swarm of ants, or a cup full of maggots, or a window clouded over with worms. In one of the film’s most gruesome deaths, a man is killed, then made to walk upright by slick black beetles.
Homeless people start amassing around the church, encroaching in ever further, and as they stand completely still, staring into the windows, it becomes nicely unsettling. The drones are led by Alice Cooper, another distracting casting choice, although I can see the appeal. The loss of control is a common theme for Carpenter; apart from this film, he explores it in The Thing, They Live, Village of the Damned, and In the Mouth of Madness. Few horror directors visualize it better.
In the Mouth of Madness understands H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos better than most movies, which makes it doubly impressive that its an original script. On the flip side of that, Prince of Darkness is almost a beat-for-beat adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu,” just transported to a single location. The container is Carpenter’s version of that story’s bas relief, the drones outside are the Cthulhu cult, and dreams become increasingly important. Carpenter is often denigrated to B-movie status, but he has a keen understanding of cosmic horror. In that way he’s a real auteur, even if he doesn’t always fire on all cylinders.
The main problem with Prince of Darkness is that it’s not as tense as it should be. Most of it recreates the plot of The Thing – one person gets possessed, then either possesses or kills another. If you’re alone, you’re vulnerable. It gets repetitive after a while, especially because most of the victims are minor characters – Catherine and the priest, for instance, each disappear for long stretches of the film. Most of the film is a locked-room mystery where the killer is the devil.
Prince of Darkness succeeds most when it overreaches. This is a film that can’t quite fulfill all of its lofty ambitions, but it can be very fun to watch Carpenter try. His coolest innovation, and the most memorable part of the film, is the low-key inclusion of some science fiction. Everyone in the church is having the same dream (in a nice touch, it’s filmed on video, then was recorded off of a TV), and it’s discovered that it’s not a dream at all, but a broadcast, filmed in the future and transmitted to them all through tachyons, particles that travel back in time. It’s a risky, last-minute addition to the story, one that works surprisingly well. It puts Prince of Darkness on a huge scale, which contrasts nicely with its intimate setting (almost the entire film takes place in the church).
The film should be applauded, too, for its bleak ending. Catherine sacrifices herself to prevent Satan from coming to earth, making this the second film this month that ends with a woman going to hell. Brian starts experiencing the dream-broadcast again (some kind of…dreamcast, perhaps?), but the dark figure in the church’s doorway isn’t Satan anymore; it’s Catherine. There is frustratingly little explanation for this, but the point is clear: the apocalypse hasn’t been prevented, just delayed.
Prince of Darkness is not a must-see John Carpenter film. It’s interesting to watch him play with the ideas that would crystallize in They Live or In the Mouth of Madness, and even here Carpenter retains his eye for gruesome imagery. It’s more interesting as an interstitial film: think of this as a well-made demo tape.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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