| 2nd | Top film director and cinematographer collaborations |
| 71st | Top film noir |
| In the Mouth of Madness | |
|---|---|
 theatrical poster |
|
| Directed by | John Carpenter |
| Produced by | Sandy King |
| Written by | Michael De Luca |
| Starring | Sam Neill Julie Carmen Jürgen Prochnow David Warner John Glover Bernie Casey Frances Bay Wilhelm von Homburg |
| Music by | John Carpenter Jim Lang |
| Cinematography | Gary B. Kibbe |
| Editing by | Edward A. Warschilka |
| Distributed by | New Line Cinema |
| Release date(s) | February 3, 1995 |
| Running time | 95 minutes |
| Country |  United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $14,000,000 |
| Gross revenue | $8,946,600 (USA) |
In the Mouth of Madness (also known as John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness) is a 1994 horror film directed by John Carpenter and written by Michael de Luca, who was at the time in charge of New Line Cinema. The film is the third installment in what Carpenter calls his "Apocalypse Trilogy", preceded by The Thing and Prince of Darkness.
Contents |
The story follows private investigator John Trent (Sam Neill), whose specialty is insurance fraud. At the opening of the film, John has been committed to an insane asylum. After being visited by Dr. Wrenn (David Warner), who is an agent of an unidentified group, he recounts his story. After closing a case of fraud, he is meeting with his contractor to discuss the next claim, when he is attacked by a man with a fire axe. The man, who is bleeding from the eyes, asks very calmly, "Do you read Sutter Cane?" before attempting to kill John. The man is then shot by police. John is called in by Arcane Publishing, and the director Jackson Harglow (Charlton Heston) asks John to investigate the alleged disappearance of the phenomenally popular horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow). Having vanished with his most recent novel unfinished, Cane's publisher asks Trent to retrieve the work at stake. Trent thinks the whole thing is a publicity stunt but agrees to take the case. He is paired with Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), who represents Arcane.
After reading some of Sutter Cane's novels, John begins to have vivid nightmares, and also encounters several readers of Cane's, who act listless and trance-like. Styles remarks that Cane's work has been known to affect "less stable readers," and has caused disorientation, memory loss, and severe paranoia. Upon inspecting the covers of his books, John notices a series of intricate red lines, which assembled, form the shape of New Hampshire, and identify one town, which is alluded to be Hobb's End, the fictional setting for many of Cane's works. John believes the town to be real, and remote enough to not be listed on a current map.
Styles and John depart, searching for Hobb's End. Along the way, Styles passes a young boy riding a bicycle, who she passes a second time, though his visage significantly changes. Upon seeing the bicycle rider a third time, she strikes him with the car. He gets up and walks away, astounding John and Linda. The next length of the journey takes place, and Linda notices the yellow road lines vanish. After rolling down the window and looking outside, she appears to be driving over thunderhead storm clouds. She begins to panic when she finally finds herself driving through a rustic covered bridge, and comes out right next to a sign for Hobb's End. John, asleep for this entire time, compliments Styles for finding it.
Linda and John check into a hotel, also famous in Cane's stories, and meet Mrs. Pickman (Frances Bay), a famous Cane character. Mr. Pickman is later shown shackled to his wife's ankle, starving to death and in obvious pain. The main article of interest is The Black Church, described in many Cane books as the font of evil that's polluting the entire town. John and Linda approach the church when a group of townspeople attack, wielding shotguns and torches, demanding Cane to return. The children of the town have mysteriously vanished, and Johnny, one of the children, appears in the Church, supplanted by Cane himself. After being briefly revealed, the townspeople are set upon by attack dogs and driven off.
John, enraged by what he believes to be a choreographed event, is preparing to leave when Linda suggests that the events described in Cane's works are really happening, and John laughs this idea off as insane. Linda steals John's car keys, preventing him from leaving. Linda enters the church to confront Cane, and is exposed to Cane's ultimate work, the titular "In the Mouth of Madness."
Back in town, John is in a nearby bar drinking, when one of the townspeople from the church approaches, and begins to question his existence, thinking himself to be a character in a book. John compliments the man's acting ability and the level of skill displayed by their group theatrics, but the man persists. John, driven beyond all tolerance, screams that this is reality and not a Sutter Cane story. The man comments that reality is not what it used to be, and commits suicide with a shotgun, saying "I have to, he wrote me this way," when John attempts to stop him.
Fleeing the bar, John sees a group of townspeople, obviously mutated and monstrous in appearance, approach him with shotguns and torches. John returns to the hotel, and discovers Mrs. Pickman and Linda have been similarly altered. John attempts to flee using the car, but is repeatedly teleported back to the center of town in front of the mutant mob. He eventually crashes after attempting to run the crowd down and swerving to avoid hitting Linda. He awakens in a Catholic confessional, and Sutter Cane, sitting on the other side of the divide, begins to talk about his eventual plan, to free a race of ancient beings to reclaim the Earth for themselves, with him as a new deity. This forces John to experience intense hallucinations and visions, before bringing him to his studio, where he has just completed the book. He informs John that he is nothing more than a character in one of his stories, and he has no choice but to return the manuscript and begin the destruction of humanity.
After giving John the manuscript, Sutter Cane tears open his face like a piece of paper, ripping a hole that leads into darkness. John flees, appearing near the highway, dirty and torn, clutching a copy of the manuscript. As he returns to New York City, he repeatedly receives and burns new copies of the manuscript. Finally arriving at Arcane, he finds that he apparently delivered the manuscript months ago, and that the book has been on sale for weeks, and that a movie is shortly being released.
John has a total mental breakdown, and murders several people with a fire axe, which leads to him being arrested. The agent dismisses him as insane, and leaves. John wakes the following day to find his cell door torn from its hinges and the residents of the asylum slaughtered. He departs, hearing over an ambulance radio that the rest of the world is suddenly overrun with mutant creatures and outbreaks of suicide and psychotic mass murders. After seeing himself on a movie billboard, John enters a theater running the movie adaptation of In the Mouth of Madness. John laughs hysterically as he watches the meta-film (identical to the real film) showing him everything he has just experienced, and as it "catches up" to his current situation his laughter becomes insanity-laced sobs of despair.
The exterior of the Black Church seen in Hobb’s End is actually the Cathedral of the Transfiguration. It is a Slovak Byzantine Rite Roman Catholic cathedral located in Markham, Ontario.
The film was released on February 3, 1995. It grossed nearly $4 million the first weekend and garnered nearly $9 million total in revenue during its run.[1]
The film received mixed critical reaction, with 14 positive reviews out of 29 tallied by Rotten Tomatoes for a score of 48%, indicating a less than favorable assessment by film critics.[2]
The film pays tribute to the work of seminal horror writer H. P. Lovecraft, with many references to his stories and themes. Its title is a play on two of Lovecraft's tales, The Shadow Over Innsmouth and At the Mountains of Madness, and insanity plays as great a role in the film as it does in Lovecraft's fiction. The opening scene depicts Trent's confinement to an asylum with the bulk of the story told in flashback, a common technique of Lovecraft's. Quick reference is made to the Old Ones of the Cthulhu Mythos, as well as to Lovecraftian settings and characters (such as Mrs. Pickman). As read on-screen, Sutter Cane's writings even incorporate direct passages from his work.[3]
All of Sutter Cane's novels have similar titles to H.P. Lovecraft's books (e.g., The Hobb's End Horror in reference to The Dunwich Horror).
The film can also be seen as a reference to Stephen King, who also writes horror fiction set in New England hamlets.[4][5]
The film also makes reference to the BBC Quatermass serials, which heavily influenced Carpenter at a young age. Hobb's End is named after a fictional London Underground station where something terrible is unearthed in Quatermass and the Pit.
|
|||||||||||||||||
   | ''In The Mouth of Madness'' at theofficialjohncarpenter.com - John Carpenter: In the Mouth of Madness |
| | In the Mouth of Madness (1995) - In the Mouth of Madness Movie Reviews, Pictures - Rotten Tomatoes |
| | IMDb.com Listing: In The Mouth of Madness - In the Mouth of Madness (1994) |
|
|
Wikis
Quiz
Map
Search
