In the Mouth of Madness
With Sam Neill, Julie Carmen, Jurgen Prochnow, David Warner, John Glover, Bernie Casey, Peter Jason, and Charlton Heston.
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Significantly, throughout these shifts Carpenter never lost the distinguishing characteristics of his earlier phases; these new genres merely constituted a widening pool of resources. In fact, all the stages of his career outlined above are present in some way in his new feature. Carpenter’s interest in certain auteurs comes through when the hero, John Trent (Sam Neill), expresses his preference for “professionals” over “amateurs,” alluding to the familiar rhetoric of Howard Hawks (both on-screen and off), or when Trent tugs at his earlobe, recalling Humphrey Bogart in Hawks’s The Big Sleep. There’s plenty of gritty action here a la Escape From New York as well as special effects a la The Thing, not to mention suspense, metaphysical pretensions, and repeated swipes at the gullibility and conformity of the masses. Carpenter is also exploring new kinds of material, including a literary form of paranoia and a taste for the occult fantasy world of H.P. Lovecraft–purple prose, Poe derivations, and all.
The literary paranoia that interests Carpenter is found not in the tales of Lovecraft but in other pulp fiction published during the 40s and 50s–among other pieces, L. Ron Hubbard’s Typewriter in the Sky, Philip K. Dick’s Eye in the Sky, Lewis Padgett’s “Compliments of the Author,” and works by Fredric Brown including What Mad Universe, “Don’t Look Behind You,” “Come and Go Mad,” and “The Angelic Angleworm.” In most of these stories the hero finds himself caught in an absurdist fantasy world that is essentially a literary creation, either his own (patched together by his unconscious mind) or someone else’s. Here he’s buffeted about by the idle whims or bad writing habits of the unseen author-god (in the Padgett story, however, the hero possesses a magical book containing all-purpose maxims explaining how he can get out of various scrapes–until he arrives at the final page, which reads only “The End”).
Piecing together portions of Cane’s book jackets, Trent discovers a map that, placed over a map of New England, seems to point the way toward Hobb’s End, Cane’s obscure last address. (As Carpenter pointed out to Bill Krohn in an interview for the forthcoming March issue of Cahiers du Cinema–an invaluable source of information on the movie–the name “Hobb’s End” has an obscure source in the 1967 British SF feature Quatermass and the Pit.) Accompanied by Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), Cane’s editor, he drives off to New England in search of this village.
