John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness may well be the greatest pure cosmic horror film of all time. As a difficult genre to pin down by definition, cosmic horror (sometimes called weird fiction) often features the emergence of vast, powerful, sometimes reality-altering forces into our world, usually provoking an apocalyptic-grade threat. Much of cosmic horror is traced to the early 20th century writers H. P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers and their influence on authors like Stephen King, Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, or Laird Barron is crystal clear. But on the big screen, you could say cosmic horror’s biggest influences began with John Carpenter’s The Thing. In the 1982 sci-fi horror movie, a group of American scientists in a remote Antarctica research station stumble upon an alien of untold powers that can take over a biological body with little more than a molecule of its own. The apocalyptic threat this poses is clear, and the fact that it landed in the mostly unpopulated regions of Antarctica is a blessing — until it’s not. In its depiction of inhuman entities that threaten to escape its isolated locale and destroy all of global civilization, The Thing would set the stage for future apocalyptic cosmic terrors in the likes of Prince of Darkness, Event Horizon, The Void, Annihilation, and Underwater. While The Thing is clearly Carpenter’s most influential work in this vein, it’s 1995’s In the Mouth of Madness that most completely renders the elements of cosmic horror on the silver screen. The rampage of cosmic terrors that come to reclaim our world, driving protagonist John Trent (played by a brilliant, anxiety-ridden Sam Neill) to the brink while warping reality into an apocalyptic hellscape, is straight out of Lovecraft (whose At the Mountains of Madness clearly inspired the title of Carpenter’s Madness). Even better, the film’s finale sees Trent realize Sutter Cane’s power has fully subsumed Trent’s own life and every event we’ve seen, making Madness the boldest exemplar of the genre’s reality-bending tendencies in film history. It’s a masterpiece — but one that doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It was far ahead of its time when the film premiered three decades ago, and it’s still at the forefront of cosmic horror film history. To celebrate the film’s 30th anniversary, Inverse spoke to producer Sandy King Carpenter and members of the cast and crew to tell the story of In the Mouth of Madness. (Sam Neill and director John Carpenter declined to participate.) Read our full oral history of In the Mouth of Madness here. |
