In the Mouth of Madness

(1995) ****

I had only ever vaguely heard of this movie; I knew it starred Sam Neill and involved something Stephen King-ish and "fiction comes alive"-ish, so I mentally glommed it in with The Dark Half and forgot about it. While discussing the Lovecraft movies I was watching last month, my coworker Alex asked me if I'd seen this. It's not based on a Lovecraft story exactly, but it is heavily influenced by his ideas.

We open with Sam Neill as John Trent, being thrown in an insane asylum and opting for the "dragged away screaming" method of entry. Shortly afterward he's visited by good old David Warner, a doctor hoping to gain clarity on Trent's condition and any possible connection it has with what's going on "out there." By that I mean the world at large, where by intriguing comments we're told things are rapidly deteriorating. In his cell, now decked out with crosses drawn in black crayon, Trent lights a smoke and tells his story, after knowingly observing "things are turning to shit out there, aren't they?"

What follows is a story far more interesting than one about a fictional serial killer coming to life. Trent is hired by a publishing company to find their missing blockbuster author, a horror fiction icon with the unlikely name of Sutter Cane. Worse than just plain missing, Cane's gone missing with his latest manuscript, which has the same title as the movie. This not only puts a lot of money at risk, but also means hordes of angry, rioting fans. I figured this idea was far more palpable after witnessing the fervor over the final Harry Potter book.

Before Trent even consents to take the job, he's threatened by an axe-wielding maniac who asks "do you read Sutter Cane?" while goggling at him with his malformed eyes.


Turns out the guy is Cane's agent, and the only person to have read more than a few chapters of the new novel. Still convinced he's being played as part of a publicity stunt, Trent takes the job and travels with Cane's editor Linda Styles to the fictional New Hampshire town of Hobb's End, the setting for most of Cane's stories. The fact that it's a fictional town is offset by the map Cane has concealed puzzle-style within the cover art for his books.

There's an amusing line when Linda Styles is talking up her star author: she says "forget Stephen King, Sutter Cane is yadda yadda." I was amused because this movie is an obvious valentine to Stephen King: the fictional New England town, the popularity, the name Sutter Cane -- even the font on the books' covers looks like King's books. At this point, the only H.P. Lovecraft influence is in some of the artwork.





Events in Hobb's End proceed more Kingish than Lovecraftian, as the citizens and the town itself exist exactly as in Cane's novels, down to a particular loose, noisy floorboard in the lobby of Hotel Pickman. When Cane himself finally appears, he gives his editor the skinny: his stories -- all his stories -- were not products of his imagination but rather dictations to him by hideous beings from an outer reality. In the Mouth of Madness is their final work, enabling their entry into our world on a gateway of collective human imagination. His readers' minds will go first, and then their bodies. The changes in the town's ficitonal populace are templates for this change; they all start wielding axes while gradually transfoming: first the subtle alteration of the eyes and faces, eventually into huge tentacled monstrosities in the image of their new gods. The events described in the book are the events we are seeing in the movie; eventually they will overwrite reality itself.

Here is where the Lovecraft influence is strongest. Not the fiction/reality part, but the idea of unthinkable beings lurking in the darkness outside of our universe. I was reminded of a passage from The Call of Cthulhu that describes the eventual return of the Outer Gods when the time is right:

"The time would be easy to know, for then mankind would have become as the Great Old Ones; free and wild and beyond good and evil, with laws and morals thrown aside and all men shouting and killing and reveling in joy. Then the liberated Old Ones would teach them new ways to shout and kill and revel and enjoy themselves, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom."

While not quite the masterpiece of Halloween or The Thing, I heartily recommend checking out this John Carpenter morsel. Watching it, I kept thinking what would've happened if the final Harry Potter was some sort of apocalyptic mind bomb; I for one would have been first in line for my axe, that's for sure.

The actress playing Linda Styles ain't so great, and while I really like Sam Neill I found his character's tenacious skepticism a little hard to buy. The few special effects on display are a teensy bit on the weak side, but that's offset by some clever cinematography that never gives you too long a look at any one thing. I was lucky to get this shot in one try, these critters are only in focus for a split second.


These are niggling points in an otherwise creepy and clever story. Because of how it plays out, the story has a high degree of self-awareness, yet that never got tired or annoying. At this late stage in self-aware filmmaking I consider that an achievement in itself.