Weirdhouse Cinema: In the Mouth of Madness

In memory of the late, great Sam Neill, Rob and Joe devote this episode of Weirdhouse Cinema to John Carpenter's reality-warping 1994 horror film "In the Mouth of Madness," co-starring Julie Carmen and Jürgen Prochnow.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:13):
Hey you welcome to Weird House Cinema.

Speaker 3 (00:15):
This is Rob Lamb and this is Joe McCormick. And
today on Weird House Cinema, we're going to be talking
about the nineteen ninety four supernatural horror film In the
Mouth of Madness, directed by John Carpenter, starring Sam Neil,
Julie Carmen, and Jurgen proc. Now this came about because
the actor Sam Neil passed away recently and Rob you

(00:37):
wanted to do one of his movies on the show.
We talked about a couple of options, but I was
really gravitating toward In the Mouth of Madness because I
remembered liking it when I first saw it a few
years ago. Wanted to watch it again and wow, it
was actually even better than I remembered. I think, because

(00:58):
it comes so late in John Carpenter's filmography, is in
nineteen ninety four, I mentally group it with later Carpenter
movies from the nineties that I'm personally not incredibly fond of,
like Escape from la and Vampires, Ghosts to Mars, that
kind of stuff. But on revisit Mouth of Madness really

(01:19):
punches hard. I don't know if i'd say it's like
top three Carpenter for me, but it is awesome and
I would definitely put it on the shell on the
same shelf, if that makes sense as my favorites like
the Thing in Prince of Darkness.

Speaker 2 (01:32):
Yeah, well, as we'll discuss, it very much belongs on
that shelf with those two films. Yeah, in the Mouth
of Madness has been one of my favorites since it
came out. It's generally listed as a ninety four film
because I believe it debuted a German film festival in
August of that year, but it was actually released to
US theaters in the dismal February dump month of nineteen

(01:53):
ninety five, so you know, not as many people saw it,
and I didn't see it until it came out on
home video for rental in July or maybe a little
after July. But I bet I was probably on top
of it, and that's because at this point in my
life I was already in love with John Carpenter films,
at least the ones that i'd seen. I had been

(02:13):
reading Stephen King books for years and I had fairly
recently discovered for myself the writings of HP Lovecraft. So
you know, a number of the key elements for just
really digging this film were already in place, and it
did absolutely blow me away, and I've I've kept coming
back to it over the years. I can easily say

(02:34):
it's one of my favorite films. I did a Halloween
costume one year or pictures of this.

Speaker 3 (02:38):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (02:39):
And in fact, if you go to the Instagram for
our show STBYM podcast, I'll make sure I put a
picture up of it is so you can see what
in the Mouth of Madness costume was from something like
nine years ago. Not many people got it, but the
people who got it really appreciated it.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
I think I got it. I saw you at the
Little Five Points Halloween Parade.

Speaker 2 (02:59):
Yeah, one of the ones who got not everyone did.

Speaker 3 (03:03):
Like the year was that the year I was Jack Torrance.

Speaker 2 (03:05):
Oh yeah, I think you were.

Speaker 3 (03:07):
Yes, yeah, yes, the burgundy jacket and the axe. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (03:10):
So yeah, this is This is long been one of
my favorites. I've owned it on home media a couple
of times over the years, and the film score is
one of a handful of CDs of compact discs that
I still have and still keep in my car.

Speaker 3 (03:24):
Oh boy, a nineties car CD. That's so like it's
an original one. It survived the whole time.

Speaker 2 (03:30):
Yeah, yeah, it survived the whole time. It hasn't been purged.
I mean, it certainly doesn't still have a case, but
it's still there, still playable, you know. I still throw
it in from time to time.

Speaker 3 (03:40):
Wait a minute, what's on that CD? Is it just
like the film score? Does it have like pop music tracks?

Speaker 2 (03:46):
It's just the score? Yeah, okay, yeah, okay, yeah, which
we'll we'll detail here in a bit once we get
into the credits.

Speaker 3 (03:52):
So I didn't really remember any needle drops in the movie,
apart from the carpenters.

Speaker 2 (03:55):
Which yeah, yeah. Aside from the carpenters, I think it's Yeah,
it's just the score, which, in my opinion's pretty terrific.

Speaker 3 (04:02):
Should we start with a basic plot summary or plot
set up? I guess. So. The story starts with the protagonist,
John Trent, played by Sam Neil brilliantly. By the way,
I think this is maybe my favorite Sam Neil performance
that I know of, though I know there are some more,
like I don't know, art classified films of his that

(04:24):
people really like. But as far as like pop horror
media goes, I think this is like my favorite.

Speaker 2 (04:30):
So.

Speaker 3 (04:30):
John Trent played by Sam Neil is a freelance insurance investigator. Basically,
he is a private detective who specializes in sniffing out
fraud in insurance claims, and his client comes to him
with an interesting case. They have underwritten a publishing house
called R. Kane Press, the publisher of in this movie,

(04:52):
the most successful author in the world, a horror novelist
named sutter Kane, who is positioned in many ways as
a fictionalized version of Stephen King, though King is actually
name checked in the movie as like some chump that
sutter Kane has massively outsold.

Speaker 2 (05:09):
Yeah, you can forget about Stephen King.

Speaker 3 (05:11):
Yeah, So, anticipation of sutter Kane's upcoming novel is off
the charts. Fans are ravenous, booksellers cannot keep up with
pre order requests. But there is a problem sutter Kane. Secretly,
the public I think doesn't know about this, but his
publisher knows that sutter Kane has disappeared. They can't find
or contact him, and he has stopped sending them updated

(05:34):
material for the novel. And like they need it soon.
So together John Trent and Kane's editor Linda Stiles take
up the case, hoping that they can find the author
and solve the mystery. All the while, in the background,
the world seems to be gradually going mad. There are

(05:55):
riots in bookstores where these crazed Sutter Kane fans like
mash windows and tear down the shelves. People seem to
be receiving strange, paranoid messages from the books, or even
like acting on what they believe to be psychic messages
from Kane himself. Sometimes they lose their minds and start
carrying axes in the street. Could it all be connected?

(06:19):
So you might start to guess from the plot description
there that this is one of those reality bending movies
where a lot of scenes are built around the question
is this really happening? Or am I somehow dreaming or
hallucinating this? This has come up on the show before,

(06:39):
but it's a type of plot that I can sometimes,
maybe even i'd say often find tedious. I'm not sure
exactly why that is. I think maybe it's because it
can make a movie feel like it's not fully committed
to its own premise or Sometimes it can just feel
kind of like a cheap, time wasting kind of exercise.

(07:02):
But other times it works. And this is a movie
where I think it really works. I really like it here,
and the movie is absolutely committed to its premise. That's
not a problem.

Speaker 2 (07:12):
Yeah, I would, I would agree with all of that. Yeah,
this Sometimes with a reality bending film, you know, you
can it can feel like, Okay, nothing I watched matter,
you know, nothing up to this point mattered. Or it
can feel manipulative or just outright gimmicky, where it's just
all about the twist and all about yeah, we're actually
just mice in the maze or something. But I think

(07:34):
one of the reasons that Madness in the Mouth of
Madness works so well is that the movie does a
great job of just spreading out those breadcrumbs of visually
doing it, plot wise, doing it throughout the whole film,
so none of it feels like a sudden deviation from
the plan. You can feel the dreadful gravity of the
conclusion tugging you towards it really from the very beginning,

(07:56):
and more to the point, when you watch it again,
all of this still feels honest. Whereas I can think
of examples that I'm not going to name, where you
watch it a second time, you know what the twist
is going to be, or you know when reality is
going to break, and everything just feels like a setup
for a joke, and the jokes on you the viewer.

Speaker 3 (08:15):
And to be fair, this movie is in a way
kind of a joke, but it's like a good joke
some reviewers I was reading what critics thought about this.
Critical opinion was of course divided, but there were a
number of critics at the time that it came out
who really liked the first half and did not like

(08:36):
the second half very much. And I think I can
see why. I think it's because the first half is
setting up a very serious, intriguing mystery. But at about
the halfway point, I would say there's a tonal switch
where this sense of irony and delight takes over and

(08:56):
it changes from being a sort of ark, frightening, serious
intriguing mystery into something that is just more a celebration
of weirdness and excess. And you do kind of know
where it's going once you get into that part of
the film, but getting there is still like funny and

(09:17):
morbid and bizarre and a lot of fun.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, it GE's very doomy, but at the same time,
and a lot of this comes down to the script,
the performances, and just the basic craftsmanship of the whole picture.
It doesn't feel like everything's on the rails at that point.
It feels like maybe there's a way out, even if
there isn't.

Speaker 3 (09:36):
Man, you were pointing this out before we started recording,
but it is quite pression that this really is a
movie about an apocalypse, like a doom end of the
world scenario brought on by people's reality testing mechanisms failing. Yeah,
it kind of almost feels like it would not really

(09:59):
have been impossible for you know, the people making this
movie at the time to imagine the world we live
in today. I don't know, maybe they could see pieces
of it, but it feels more relevant than ever I'll s.

Speaker 2 (10:12):
Yeah, yeah, almost like some sort of semantic apocalypse in
the words of our Scott Baker. But yeah, I was
thinking about this as I rewatched it, and I hadn't
watched it in several years. But yeah, I think it
speaks with a lot of clarity today as much as
it did back in the nineties, and maybe even more
with all of our reality warping technologies and our propensity

(10:34):
as a culture to value more and more lies over
truth and in the mouth of madness. You know, everything
centers on the idea that there is a tipping point,
there's a point of no return when it comes to
our collective belief, and if enough of us give into it,
if enough of us cross some dreadful threshold of belief,

(10:54):
then we're done for chaos in the form of the
Great Old Ones or something more mundane but equally has
a Kluznik floods into our world.

Speaker 3 (11:02):
It really hit me hard because I just happened to
watch an especially mendacious reality disconnected speech by the President
of the United States last night. So yeah, I don't know,
and so like, this movie's on my mind the whole time.
I don't know. It felt like a really dreadful kind
of synergy of themes there.

Speaker 2 (11:22):
I was playing dungeons and dragons, so I was just
going to full into fantasy instead. Much better use of
your time. Yeah, who take my hand that sort of thing.
Let's see elevator pitch for this movie. I couldn't come
up with anything clever because the movie already is pretty clever,
and I honestly always liked its legitimate tagline which has

(11:42):
lived any good books lately, which is a little cheeky
but still solid.

Speaker 3 (11:49):
I don't know do I like that or not.

Speaker 2 (11:51):
It's hard to say. I know, it's like I kind
of don't like it. I kind of hate it, but
I also kind of love it. Hard to say.

Speaker 3 (11:57):
There is actually a tagline I like that. It's too
for a movie tagline, but it's the tagline on the
cover of the in universe fictional book The hobbs End
Horror by sob of Caine. Did you check this?

Speaker 4 (12:10):
Like?

Speaker 3 (12:10):
The tagline at the bottom of the cover says, if
this book doesn't scare you to death, you are already dead.

Speaker 2 (12:16):
I love that, a thinker. That's some William Castle energy
right there. Let's see for where you can find this film. Well,
it's widely available in all media formats, as is fitting
as we'll discuss when we get into the plot. And
there have been multiple special editions over the years. I
owned what I believe was the first special edition DVD

(12:36):
that came out in two thousand, which featured a commentary
track between John Carpenter, the director, and the film cinematographer
Gary B. Kibbie, and I believe there's also a track
out now that features Carpenter and his wife and also
the producer of this film, Sandy King, but that didn't
come out till like twenty eighteen. I haven't listened to
that one, but I did listen to the Carpenter Kibbi

(12:58):
track back in the day, and it's sometimes cited as
being more technical and less purely entertaining, because a lot
of Carpenter's Carpenter's commentary tracks are in general just really good. Generally,
he's gonna have somebody on there that he has a
cool vibe with, you know, especially with someone like Kurt Russell.
You know it's gonna it's gonna be it's gonna be insightful,

(13:22):
but also just kind of a fun hang. You kind
of get like a parasocial thing out of it. It's
like listening to a podcast, but before we really had podcasts,
and so some people were like, well, this one's a
little more on the technical side, but I remember enjoying it,
and you know, a lot of it is them talking
about like Carpenter asking Kidbi like, well, how would you
how did you do this? And you know, what were
the challenges of this particular seen from a cinematographer's standpoint,

(13:45):
that sort of thing. All right, let's get into the
folks behind this picture, starting with the top. At the top,
of course, with John Carpenter, the director born nineteen forty eight.
This is our second Carpenter directed film here on Weird

(14:06):
House Cinema, following our episode on nineteen eighty seven's Prince
of Darkness. But of course we also covered nineteen eighty
two's Halloween three season of The Witch, which he didn't direct,
but he was of course highly involved in, you know,
producer and also did the music on that one.

Speaker 3 (14:22):
It's really hard to believe we have only done two
John Carpenter movies on Weird House Cinema. I mean, but
it feels like he's kind of our patron deity. And yeah, yeah,
done less Carpenter than it seems like we might have.

Speaker 2 (14:35):
Well, I think we've discussed before. It can be a
little a little challenging to pick a Carpenter film because
I'm one. Hey, We've had people say, oh, you should
cover Big Trouble and Little China. I love Big Trouble
and Little China, but it's almost like it's too big,
it's it's there's some it has such a cult following,
like what can we say about it that hasn't been said?
Or I don't know, it would still be fun to

(14:57):
watch it, but I'd start having these thoughts when I
consider picking it.

Speaker 3 (15:00):
That's actually quite true. Yeah, I think I sometimes feel
hesitant at doing movies that are either one of my
favorite movies or a movie on which there is already
a ton of like interesting scholarship and information out there,
and I think, like, oh, do we really have the
time to, like, you know, consume all of this and

(15:21):
understand it and talk about it in the episode that
we got to record this week. I don't know. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Yeah, So it can be a little tough, but yeah,
And on another level, it is kind of surprising we've
only actually done done too. But yeah, He's absolutely one
of our favorites. And this film is often referred to
as Part three in his Apocalypse trilogy, which also includes
nineteen eighty two Is the Thing in eighty seven's Prints
of Darkness. So Madness was Carpenter's sixteenth directorial feature out

(15:52):
of what I think currently stands at twenty one, and
some argue that it's It's Carpenter's last truly great film.
Can't safely state that for myself, because I have to
admit there I think three period three pictures from this
period of his filmography that I have not yet seen,
so I can't really I would just be jumping on
the bandwagon with what other people have said, and I'd

(16:14):
prefer not to do that. But I do think that
In the Mouth of Madness is in my opinion, it
is a career high point for him, and certainly a
later career high point of his later films. I would
tend to agree this is my favorite now filmography wise,
just getting into the like where it fits into his work,
This one comes on the heels of A eight's They Live,

(16:37):
ninety three's Body Bags, and ninety two's Memoirs of an
Invisible Man, which you see interviews where Carpenter has talked
about Memoirs of an Invisible Man, and this seems to
be pretty much his least favorite of his films due
to a couple of its stars being arguably difficult to

(16:58):
work with due to studio interference. But apparently one of
the high points of Memoirs of Invisible Man is that
he got to work with Sam Neil for the first time,
who played the villain in that picture.

Speaker 3 (17:09):
Oh, I didn't know he was in it. So I
haven't seen Memoirs or Body Bags, but I've never felt
greatly motivated to see them. But if Sam Neil's in it,
maybe I'll have to check it out.

Speaker 2 (17:20):
Yeah, I mean, I remember liking it okay at the time,
you know, and I remember wanting to like it because
it was it was Carpenter. I think I saw it
after I saw In the Mouth of Madness, so I
was like, oh, you know, I like Sam Neil, I
like John Carpenter. I have no reason to dislike Chevy Chase.
Jump right in and see how it goes. But but yeah,

(17:41):
I don't think it's It's very highly regarded Otherwise. Now
as far as Body Bags goes, I've forgotten pretty much
everything about it except that John Carpenter of course, plays
the crypt keeper type character in this that's introducing the tails,
and that's that's pretty fun.

Speaker 3 (17:57):
That reminds me. Do you think John Carpenter was originally
planning to play the old man on the bicycle in
this movie? The other reviewers online have pointed out, like, wow,
that really it kind of looks like John Carpenter looks now,
I remember, this is the old guy with the long
white hair.

Speaker 2 (18:14):
Yeah. Yeah, I hadn't thought about it, but you know,
maybe maybe or it could have been, you know, kind
of an inside thing with the effects crew. I don't know.

Speaker 3 (18:21):
It just looks like John Carpenter riding his bicycle back
to Blockbuster to return a rented copy of NBA Jam.

Speaker 2 (18:29):
Well. Yeah, at any rate, In the Mouth of Madness
was again not a box office success. It did not
win the critics over but people like me loved it.
The cult appreciation for it has only grown over the years.
And you know, part of this might be that, you know,
looking up the film, you know, here in the week
or so following Sam Neil's death, I noticed that if

(18:51):
you rank Carpenter's films by popularity on letterbox right now,
In the Mouth of Madness stands at number five, so
just behind the Thing Halloween, They Live and Escape from
New York, and one ahead of Seminole fan favorite Big
Trouble in Little China.

Speaker 4 (19:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:08):
I don't know if I would change that much, except
I I really love Prince of Darkness, of course, But
I know a lot of people don't like that one
as much as I do, or as much as we do.
But yeah, yeah, I mean it's definitely up there.

Speaker 2 (19:21):
Yeah yeah, so so yeah, one of my favorites. It's
gonna be great to talk about it here today. I
also note that I mentioned Sandy King earlier. She was,
of course a producer on this film, and John Carpenter
and Sandy King's kid, Cody Carpenter, worked in the wardrobe
department on this movie. You know, kind of one of
those things you often see, I take your kid, sort

(19:42):
of take your kid to work movie, find something for
them to do. And of course Cody has worked with
John on a number of different musical collaborations in recent years.
All right, let's talk about the We'll come back to
John Carpenter but when we get to the music. But
let's talk about the screenwriter, who is also the executive producer.
Michael de Luca born in nineteen sixty five. DeLuca was

(20:05):
president and COO for New Line Cinema at the time,
a position he held for years, and he remains one
of the most powerful names in Hollywood currently as co
chair and CEO of Warner Brothers.

Speaker 3 (20:18):
Wow. I would not have pegged this as a script
written by a film executive.

Speaker 2 (20:24):
Well, I think when you get into to this guy's history,
it's like he is his roots are in screenwriting and
in horror, and then he becomes you know, the COO,
he becomes the CEO, he becomes the studio head. But
his roots seem very authentically in the horror realm. And

(20:46):
you see that carry over into some of the film
not some, but not all of the films that he
ended up green lighting, and maybe you know, helped sort of,
you know, push along the way towards the finish line
because as an EP. His other credits include films like
Dark City, Blade, Hedwig, and The Angry Inch, which isn't horror,
but I still included here because I like it. Blade

(21:06):
to various other films, and yeah, his production credits just
includes so many different pictures and big pictures as well.
But he started out as a screenwriter in primarily one
working in horror. As a writer, he wrote a twelve
minute short film adaptation of Stephen King's The lawnmower Man

(21:26):
in nineteen eighty seven. He did not direct it, but
I'm assuming this, I'm pretty sure this is one of
those dollar baby films. One of those situations where you
pay Stephen King a dollar and you get to adapt
as a film student one of his short stories.

Speaker 3 (21:39):
Yeah, I would imagine that this was a more faithful
adaptation of the Stephen King short story.

Speaker 2 (21:45):
And that's my understanding.

Speaker 3 (21:47):
Yes, a groundskeeper who does pagan ceremonies about thing virtual
reality flowers for Algernon. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:55):
Yeah, so I haven't seen it, but that's my basic understanding.
But Michael de Luca really really begins to kick things
in a high year though. When he starts. He's writing
for the TV series Freddie's Nightmares in the late eighties. This,
of course, is a horror anthology show hosted by Freddy Krueger.
I remember watching some episodes, but I don't really remember

(22:18):
what they were like. Part of me wants to revisit
at least the first episode, but I have yet to
do it.

Speaker 3 (22:23):
I mean, exact same experience here. I've seen it and
I couldn't tell you what happens in it, so doesn't
bode well for it. Not super memorable.

Speaker 2 (22:31):
Around this time, he also served as EP on Leatherface,
Texas Chainsaw Massacre three that I haven't seen it in forever,
but I remember enjoying it for the most part, and
then he wrote and executive produced Freddy's Dead The Final
Nightmare in nineteen ninety one. Okay, I don't remember that one.

(22:54):
I'm not even sure if I've seen that one.

Speaker 3 (22:57):
Not one of my faves.

Speaker 2 (22:58):
Again, pretty much off to the races on the production
front at this point, and as a screenwriter, his credits
are limited to only a handful of other projects. At
this point. He mostly moves on into just you know,
full production work here and producer work, but his credits
simply His other writing credits include the TV series Dark
Justice ninety one through ninety three, and he has a

(23:19):
story credit on ninety five's Judge Dread, which is a
film I kind of want to come back to it at
some point because it's It's famously flawed in some key ways,
but as a as a Judge Dread reader, I have
to say I think it got a number of things right,
and I mostly have positive experiences from viewing it. It

(23:41):
doesn't do everything right, but it does some things really well.
He also has a story credit on a single episode
of Star Trek and Voyager.

Speaker 3 (23:48):
I'm always imagining on the set of Judge Dread was
the director or whoever was in charge tempted to declare
that they were the law on the set and quiet down.

Speaker 2 (24:00):
It may well have been a situation where different people
were claiming to be the law.

Speaker 3 (24:05):
Yeah, each asserting that they are the law. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:08):
Yeah, but I mean yeah, I mean that film has
such a terrific cast, has a great look, great effects.
Yeah you can. There's certainly some areas where it isn't
faithful to Judge Dread, but I would argue there's some
areas where it is more faithful to the Judge d
Read universe than the more recent film adaptation, which I
also really enjoyed. So I don't know. I'm just happy

(24:29):
to have a Judge Dread movie.

Speaker 3 (24:30):
I guess maybe I'll have to check it out sometime.

Speaker 2 (24:33):
We may spit on my list to reconsider, so maybe
one day. All right, But let's get into the cast
at this point. Starting with the star, it is, of
course Sam Neil playing John Trent. He lived nineteen forty
seven through twenty twenty six. Technically Sir Nigel John Dermott
Neil he was knighted, but yeah, I think he would
want us to call him Sam New Zealand actor probably

(24:56):
best known internationally for his association with the Jurassic Park
film franchise, having played the role of paleontologist doctor Alan
Grant in ninety three's Jurassic Park, two thousand and one's
Jurassic Park three, and he shows back up again in
a supporting role in twenty twenty two's Jurassic World Dominion.

Speaker 3 (25:15):
I'd say most remembered for the first one. I don't
know if as many people are thinking about the scene
in Jurassic Park three where he has a dream that
a raptor is talking to him.

Speaker 2 (25:24):
I forgot about that one. I remember enjoying dress. I remember, like,
you know, loving loving Jurassic Parks so much and loving
Sam Neil in it, and being disappointed that he wasn't
going to be in the second one, and then saying
he's going to be in three, and I'm like, thank goodness,
thank goodness that doctor Alan Grant has come back to us.

Speaker 3 (25:45):
Yeah. I think I had a feeling when I was
a kid that Ian Malcolm was a character that grown
ups liked more and I, for some reason, I was
a kid, and I'm like, we're Grant kids, you know,
where we're more into Grant and so I would have
been excited if he'd been in the second one, though

(26:05):
that's based on the book obviously, in which he's not
a major player in the book either. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (26:10):
So, Sam Neil's film career began in nineteen seventy one
with the City of no for New Zealand Television, and
his first big break came after that in seventy seven
with Sleeping Dogs, which was screened internationally, so it was
getting more more eyes on his acting and his performances.
And in nineteen eighty one he really expanded in two

(26:31):
different films into both Hollywood and into the European film
scene with roles in the Omen The Final Conflict, and
we'll come back to that in a second. You can
tell me about that, because I haven't seen it, but
I know you have, as well as the psycho sexual
horror drama Possession, and that is from Andrei Zuwawski, director
of a film we've talked about on Weird House Cinema

(26:53):
on the Silver Globe.

Speaker 3 (26:55):
Yeah, I've heard for years that that one is worth
checking out, though I think it's supposed to be not
an easy watch. It's like it's like a rough, intense,
very dark movie, but it has earned a lot of praise,
and a lot of people praise Samuel in it. Omen
The Final Conflict exactly the opposite. It's been a while
since I've seen it, but I remember that being a

(27:15):
ludicrous and pretty funny third movie in the Omen series.
So you know, it's the kind of thing where like
the Omens sort of invented Actually I don't know if
it invented it, it was an early pioneer that I'm
aware of, in that final Destination style of movie where
just strange, elaborate mechanical deaths occur to people. You know,

(27:39):
oh look, you know, a spire fell off the top
of a church and hit somebody. And so that's a
lot of what you're looking for in the Omen movies,
like what weird stuff is going to happen to somebody
so that they are punished by Satan's wrath. And it
also is a weird thing to have Satan grow or
the Antichrist grown up in the third movie, because like

(28:00):
the whole point of the Omen as a premise is that, like,
what if the evil thing were a child? And so
when the third movie is not a child anymore, it's
just grown up.

Speaker 2 (28:10):
Sam Neil does am I right in in this does
he become president?

Speaker 3 (28:14):
Is that the Yeah? I think that's right. Something like
that happens.

Speaker 2 (28:18):
Does he is he using his his authentic New Zealand
accent or is he doing an American accent?

Speaker 3 (28:25):
You know, I don't recall. I'd imagine he's doing an
American accent. He could do one fine, I think.

Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I have to say I do. I
like it best when Sam Neil uses his New Zealand accent,
though you know, I don't know it's it's not about authenticity,
it's about I don't know, it's just a nice accent.
I just like it. I prefer it. I prefer it
in his film roles.

Speaker 3 (28:46):
It's always interesting to me when they have Sam Neil
playing a villain because and he does it well. I mean,
you know, I think the third Omen movie is quite silly,
but he has villainous moments in the mouth of Madness,
which he's very good. Obviously, he's you know, he's a
villain and other things, and he's great when he does it.
But I think Sam Neil really excels at projecting just

(29:11):
such a calmness and a reassuring presence. He has this
in moments as Alan Grant when you can like in
the scenes some of the more emotional scenes in the
movie where you know, he's portrayed as a as a
guy who doesn't like kids, but then he has to
provide comfort to children in the movie, and he's very
good at it. He suddenly can bring on this kind
of calming, reassuring fatherly presence. Yeah, and he's so good

(29:35):
at that. So it's a really funny thing that often
a lot of the roles we really like, or when
somebody was like, let's have you play a deeply disturbed
and you know you're gonna be talking about how we
don't need eyes to see where we're going.

Speaker 2 (29:47):
Yeah, Yeah, he had. I always had, I think, a
great balance of energies in its performance, so he could
play that likable and relatable, that calming and reassuring character
that you're talking about. He could certainly play play the
sinister villains. And then I think often by necessity it
is certainly in something like Event Horizon, he's able to
also play this place in between where he is he

(30:09):
is tormented like he can can and certainly we see
this in this film as well, where he is able
to sew entertainingly and believably express like extreme emotional states,
but while also still grounding everything in this you know, this, this,
this everyday reassuring demeanor.

Speaker 3 (30:29):
So so he had all of these tools but also
being funny. I mean, I really want to highlight that
about in the mouth of madness, he brings a lot
of humor. It's understated humor, but it's it's great.

Speaker 2 (30:41):
Yeah, yeah, And I'm to understand, you know, like part
of that is also how he was. He was a
humorous guy. He was an easygoing guy. Carpenter compared him
to Kurt Russell in his sort of mix of easygoingness
and also consummate professionalism. Always great in a professional in
death or when you are yourself a professional and you

(31:02):
show up and you know your lines and you're devoted
to doing the job. I'll also add that, you know,
obviously he had leading man looks, you know, very handsome,
Chap had the acting chops to back it up. But
in rewatching man is one x. This is just an
extra little thing, you know, that's not the reason for anything.
But I took special note of the childhood scar that

(31:25):
runs down his forehead, not so pronounced that it's visible
in every scene. But it's one of those little facial
feature details that if the filmmakers are using just the
right lighting, it can be accentuated in such a way,
and I get the feeling. I've never seen an interview
where he's talking about this, either, but I feel like
Neil himself is maybe able to lean into that a

(31:45):
little as well, And this one physical trait can just
sort of heighten a particular expression, add an air of
like a good natured trickster or even the devil to
whatever he's doing on the screen. So I always admire
that as well.

Speaker 3 (32:01):
There are absolutely scenes in the Mouth of Madness where
he becomes a trickster and he doesn't start that way. Yeah,
So it's a thing he has to toggle on and off. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:12):
So his subsequent nineteen eighties rolls included Let's see a
whole bunch of It, And I'm not going to list
everything that he did, but he did a nineteen eighty
two Ivanhoe TV movie. He was in a nineteen eighty
two spy thriller called Enigma from the director janeau Schwark,
who we talked about because he directed Santa Claus the
motion picture. Oh oh yeah, that guy. He had the

(32:35):
real the lead role in the eighty three mini series
Riley Ace of Spies. He was in the eighty seven
the eighty seven mini series America with a K. It's
not called America with a K, but it's America spelled
with a K. It's like a sort of an alt history,
all future kind of thing about the Soviets relationship between
the Soviet Union and the United States. And then, of

(32:57):
course he's in the excellent nineteen eighty nine thriller Dead
Calm that, of course, co starred Nicole Kidman and Billy Zane.

Speaker 3 (33:04):
Is it like a sailboat thriller.

Speaker 2 (33:06):
Yeah. A lot of the action takes place yet just
on this little sailboat, and a lot of it's, you know,
very performance driven. It's been a long time since I've
seen it, but I remember thinking it was pretty good.
I'll see. And then in the nineties, I'll see. In
nineteen ninety he did the Hunt for at October, and
in ninety two he worked with Carpenter for the first
time on Memoirs of an Invisible Man, followed by the

(33:28):
supporting role in the nineteen ninety three Award Winner of
the Piano, and then came Jurassic Park in ninety three,
and we're only a year out at that point. Basically
from in the Mouth of Madness.

Speaker 3 (33:38):
Oh that's funny. He went from Jurassic Park to the
Mouth of Madness. Yeah, Jurassic Park first. Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (33:47):
It's always curious how these things line up with each other.
And in the years that followed, Let's See appeared in
ninety four as The Jungle Book, ninety five's restoration, Great book,
great film, Place the King. He's in ninety seven No White,
a Tale of Terror opposite Sigourney Weaver, which is a
film that I still have never seen. It's one of
those that every time I am reminded that it exists,

(34:08):
I'm like, this looks great. It's like a horror fairy
tale with Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neil. But I've never actually,
you know, popped it in.

Speaker 3 (34:15):
I like that pitch. For some reason, the title doesn't
attract me. I think it's because it's snow white colon something. Yeah,
that kind of repels me, but I don't want to
hold that against it. I should try. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (34:29):
Then we get Event Horizon in ninety seven, which you
know we've talked a little bit about on the show
and might come back to in the future at some point.
But obviously that's a film sci fi horror that came
about it just the right time for a lot of
us out there, so a lot of us, I think,
have have fond experiences of certainly seeing it for the
first time and maybe coming back back to it at

(34:49):
various points later on.

Speaker 3 (34:51):
Yeah, it's a film I associate with, Like, if you
like this movie, you also played Doom on a floppy disk?

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah, definitely, definitely, And it's a you know, it's a
film that its influences are painstakingly obvious, but if if
you're willing to let that go, it's a pretty good time,
pretty influential as well. And Sam Neil is great and
he gets to play a little of everything. He used
to be the reassuring, calm guy who's explaining everything, he

(35:20):
gets to be the traumatized guy, and he gets to
be like a cinepite king of health essentially, So good stuff.
Let's see after this. The TV mini series Merlin in
ninety eight, bi Centennial Man in ninety nine, and the
rest of his career consisted of numerous film and TV projects,
roles small and large. Some of the standouts include TVs.

(35:41):
The Tutors two thousand and nine s Daybreakers, which is
like a sci fi vampire movie. That is also one
that I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen TV's Peaky Blinders,
which I just found out I've been I thought this
show was called Pinky Blinders. I've never watched it, but
it's just I kind of read it and then it
gets filed in my head as Pinky Blinders, and I'm like,

(36:03):
that sounds like Cockney lingo, right, But no, it's Peaky
twenty sixteen's Hunt for the Wilder People, which which is excellent,
and I haven't seen this. But he also played the
role of Lord Carnarvon in the twenty sixteen mini series
tut In Common. That's, of course a historic figure that
we've talked about Lord Carnarvon as well as Student Common,

(36:27):
but we've talked about them on the show before. And
he has at least two twenty twenty seven films that
are in states of post production right now, including I'm
not sure how we are intended to say this out loud,
Godzilla times Kong, Colon Supernova, or maybe it's Godzilla x
Kong colon supernova.

Speaker 3 (36:45):
I think that's an equation. So wait, hold on, you
divide by Kong and that gives you super Nova over Kong. Okay? Yeah?

Speaker 2 (36:53):
Or yeah, if you multiply Kong by Godzilla, is it
the same. It's the same either way. You can multiply
Godzilla by Kong and it's still going to equal super
They should change it to.

Speaker 3 (37:01):
That god Zilla equals super Nova divided by Kong.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
Okay, Yeah, But I mean, anyway it sounds. I'm sure
it's going to be. Yeah, kind of dumb and maybe
kind of awesome, and hey, you know, as of a
good a way as any to cap it all off.

Speaker 3 (37:16):
Right, whoa, hey, reality warping incidents. Suddenly I had headphones on.
I just my earbuds were hurt in my ear I
had to change different headphones. That's why I look different now.

Speaker 2 (37:26):
Oh, no worries. All right, Well, we'll have more to
say about Sam Neil's wonderful performance as we go on,
but let's talk about the rest of the cast. Linda
Styles we mentioned already, the editor of Sutter Kane, who's
part of the adventure, is played by Julie Carmen born
nineteen fifty four. American actress, dancer, and now apparently licensed psychotherapist.

Speaker 3 (37:47):
Her first feature.

Speaker 2 (37:47):
Film role was in the nineteen eighty thriller Night of
the Juggler, which I haven't seen, but I think video
Drome here in Atlanta was like stirring up excitement for
this and a screening of this maybe in the last
couple of years, so maybe I should check it out.
It's got to check it out good. It's got a
good cast. It looks like it's maybe a bit gritty,
but I think it's supposed to be good. And she

(38:08):
followed this up with Gloria nineteen eighty, Fright Night Part
two in eighty eight and Cold Heaven in ninety one.
Remained active on TV till at least twenty twenty two.

Speaker 3 (38:18):
I like her in this movie, and I wonder several
things like did she perform her own demonic crack spine
exorcist crab walks or was that Do they get a
different performer or some kind of puppet to be oh
the crab walking head upside down.

Speaker 2 (38:34):
I didn't check the credits on this, but I assume
that's got to be a stunt worker, a contortionist or something.

Speaker 3 (38:40):
But very well dancer, though she's a dancer.

Speaker 2 (38:42):
Maybe true, that's true.

Speaker 3 (38:44):
Okay, they're looking for somebody who can both play this character.
You can act and you can do a demonic crab
walk where your head's upside down.

Speaker 2 (38:51):
Yeah, yeah, it's a good point. I think she's really
good in this, whether she's doing the cat the crab
walk or not, particularly during the middle part of the movie,
where you know, she almost becomes our sort of substitute
protagonist for a little spell there. Yeah, and then she
gets to also act crazy and possessed, so fun stuff
all around.

Speaker 3 (39:11):
Well, I like that. In the part of the movie
where she's acting crazy and possessed, you get these moments
where she's like kind of explaining like I'm not sure
why I'm doing this, you know, or he's just writing
me to do this, so I have to do it,
which is very funny.

Speaker 4 (39:29):
But yeah, yeah, I like her a lot, all right.

Speaker 2 (39:41):
And then of course we have Sutter Kane himself, played
by Jurgen Procknow, German actor whose big break out role
was of course that of the captain in eighty one's
The Boat Doss Boat or Doss Boot however you end
up saying it. But yes, this is the German U
boat movie The German Submarine, and we of course previously

(40:01):
discussed this actor in our two parter on David Lynch's Dune,
in which he played Duke Leto.

Speaker 3 (40:06):
The first that's hard to remember. Wow, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:11):
And he's good in the role. I mean, tremendous face
first of all, just a great face lighted anyway you
want a lot of topography there, I love it, and
great presence overall, really good at playing as far as
I know. These are the I mean it's certainly more
nuanced in the Boat, but in general he plays ends
up playing a lot of these roles, especially in his

(40:32):
Hollywood era, where he's playing somebody that's very stern, very serious,
and maybe a bit distant and in this case maybe
not even entirely human anymore.

Speaker 3 (40:42):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:42):
So his filmography is all over the place, but a
few notable points include Michael Mann's The Keep in eighty three,
Twin Peaks, fire Walk with Me in ninety two, Judge
Dredd in ninety five, and The English Patient in ninety six.

Speaker 3 (40:56):
You were talking about the expressiveness of his face. I
just had the thought because we were recently talking about
actors who had their faces accentuated to play a character
in Dick Tracy. I can't believe you're gon prop now
wasn't in Dick Tracy. I know it seem like he
should have been.

Speaker 2 (41:12):
Yeah, we have a couple of actors in this film
who could be Dick Tracy characters. Yeah, Or you're thinking
of Prince Vigo. Yeah, yeah, we'll get to him in
a minute or two. But definitely he has you know,
he's a former boxer, so he has a he has
a face like a Dick Tracy film, for sure, totally.
So one thing I was thinking this is one of
those things I'd casually tossed around a little bit in

(41:34):
the past when watching this film or thinking about it.
But and that is, of course the fact that this
is a German actor and they and he has a
very pronounced German accent, and he's playing an author who
is seemingly writing his books in English, and his very
popular English language author. And I was thinking about how

(41:55):
in Carpenter's films we often have this case where everything
is kind of interestingly at scent blind in a way
that I kind of love. Like in Escape from New York,
we don't like no amount of screen time is spent
explaining why an obviously British Donald Pleasants is the president
of the United States.

Speaker 3 (42:15):
Yeah, in that case, you can almost I mean, I
don't think this is really the reason, but you can
imagine there's some kind of political explanation that the movie
doesn't go into. Maybe the United States and Great Britain
have somehow merged in that movie. Like it's like in
It's a Cyborg movie, we talked about Nemesis where suddenly like, oh,
we realized that the United States in Japan are one country.

(42:38):
Now yeah, yeah, maybe it's something like that.

Speaker 2 (42:42):
Yeah, yeah, so, but you know, and I think Donald
Pleasants has had said in interviews that he had come
up with reason, like he had he had to have
that answer in order to play the part. But Carpenter
was like, was not as concerned with it.

Speaker 3 (42:55):
Oh my god, no, Wight. I just thought of a
great one. It's he's actually American with an america An accent,
but he thought it'd be better for him to get
elected if he fakes a British accent.

Speaker 2 (43:04):
Why not. But you know, in the same way, we
don't have any any explanation, nor do we need one
in this film. Why John Trent is you know, obviously
from New Zealand, and he's working as this in this
professional capacity in the US, and so likewise it's more
about like the right actor playing the role. So here,
you know, we're not really concerned with the fact that

(43:25):
this is, you know, a German Man that is writing
in English. I think, uh, in my most recent rewatch,
I couldn't help but kind of compare him a little
bit to German author Michael Inda, who who to be clear,
wrote in German but also covered you know, this sort
of interplay of fantasy and reality. And then on a
practical level, I think having a German actor here, having

(43:49):
procnow in this role serves as a nice way to
firmly differentiate Kine from Stephen King and from HP Lovecraft.

Speaker 3 (43:59):
Yeah, I mean there are some things that make me
think Cain is supposed to be linked to King in Lovecraft.
I mean Lovecraft in the flavor of the mythos. Yeah,
it's very love Crafty and just in the types of
beings and the types of doom that are forecasted in

(44:20):
the film.

Speaker 2 (44:21):
Uh.

Speaker 3 (44:22):
And it's very Stephen King in that it's like a
very popular author who has these you know, his paperbacks
look like Stephen King paperbacks, a popular twentieth century author
who is from New England, who in this case it's
not a Maine, but it's New Hampshire. I think it's
New Hampshire. And is it vermonern No, it's New Hampshire.

Speaker 2 (44:40):
I'm gonna have to cut up on my paper book
backs and find out. Yeah, I could remind me.

Speaker 3 (44:45):
But yeah, clearly, I think there are intentional nods to King.
But I see what you're saying. I think they also like,
while they're on one hand pointing to King, they're also
saying like, but he's not Stephen King. Yeah, and that's
like the line in the movie where they're like, who's
the Stephen King? You know, he can't he can't compete
at all with Sutter Kane. And also yeah, he's got
a German accent, so you're really not confused.

Speaker 2 (45:07):
Yeah, in this case, like the the author as we
experience him is like a fitting extenuation of the ideas
that he is. We're to understand he writes, whereas you know,
Stephen King's you know, like he's a fun, fun seeming guy.
He's a little bit goofy in real life. You know,
and in the best of ways. So it's it would

(45:29):
be weird if you had it would be a very
different film if you had someone like Stephen King instead
of like a stoic face of horror, which we have here. Yeah,
I think you could have had someone like a Vincent
Price and a younger Vincent Price played the roll and
it would have also worked really well, you know, you
need somebody sinister.

Speaker 3 (45:46):
Yeah, Now it's funny. We we have watched movies on
a weird house before, where Stephen King plays in the
movies as an actor, and you could have gone that route.
Remember when he's the he's the cemetery keeper in Sleepwalkers,
Who's like, I can't be troubled of every weirdo and
horny kid who comes in here.

Speaker 2 (46:04):
Oh God, I love Stephen King, but hey, how bad
would it have been if he played sutter Kane. I
don't think King would have wanted that.

Speaker 3 (46:12):
Either, sutter Kane with Jordi Verel energy.

Speaker 2 (46:15):
Yeah all right, well let's get into the supporting cast here,
a number of our favorite show I mean, this film's
cast is really really something else, you know, maybe not
Dune level of deep, but still some great talent here.
And we have David Warner, who lived nineteen forty one
through twenty twenty two, playing doctor Wrenn. Somehow, this is

(46:37):
only our second David Warner film. We previously talked about
him in our episode in nineteen seventy nine's Time After Time,
in which he played a time traveling Jack the Ripper.

Speaker 3 (46:47):
I would have thought we would do more David Warner.
I love some David Warner.

Speaker 2 (46:52):
Yeah, well, we'll inevitably do more. But yeah, terrific and
varied filmography that includes such films as seventy six is
the Omen, eighty one's Time I'm Bandits, eighty two's Tron,
eighty four is the Company of Wolves, Let's see ninety seven,
Scream Too, which I did not know he was in,
as well as of course Titanic.

Speaker 3 (47:11):
Oh, I definitely remember him in Titanic. I don't remember
what he is in Scream Too, and maybe it's a
maybe it's a minor role that I'm more, Yeah, don't.
He plays one of my favorite devils ever in Time Bandits,
So he's not exactly the devil, but he's evil. He's
a devil like figure, but he's clueless about and yet

(47:33):
obsessed with technology, He's always like he's trying to get
this magic mirror to tell him, tell me about subscriber,
try dialing.

Speaker 2 (47:45):
Yeah, he was so good, and here he has a
he has a great little role. He is a very
worried and I'm not even sure what he exactly is.
We get the idea, you know, correct me if I'm
wrong and I'm missing something here, but I don't think
we know if he's a government agent, a government doctor,
or some of their kind of official. I think Trent

(48:05):
says something like, it must be pretty bad out there
if you guys are involved, But we don't get a
zoom in on that name tact to see who he's
associated with, right.

Speaker 3 (48:14):
I think it's actually Sapristine played by John Glove. When
he arrives, he's like, yeah, if they're sending y'all here,
he doesn't say y'all. He's not Southern like us. If
they're sending you guys here, something must be getting really
bad out there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:27):
Yeah, So it's a great performance here and then moving
on to Sapristine. Sapristine is played by John Glover for
nineteen forty four terrific American actor of stage, screen and
TV who often brings that impish quality to the characters
he plays. We previously talked about him at some link
in our episode on nineteen nineties Grimlins Too, the new
batch in which he plays Daniel Clamp, Yes, Daniel Clamp, the.

Speaker 3 (48:56):
Sort of the alternate universe, much more silly and benign tromp.
There you go.

Speaker 2 (49:02):
Yeah, with a little Ted Turner in there as well.
As we discussed in that episode, it's it's far from
just a Trump parody. It's something much more nuanced, and
thank goodness because it makes Grimlins Too so much more rewatchable. Yeah,
but yeah, John Glover's terrific number of number of great
performances over the years. He shows up in RoboCop two.

(49:26):
He's an Annie Hall five time Emmy nominee and two
time Tony nominee, and he won the Tony for Waiting
for Godot in two thousand and nine. So great impish
energy here. This dude certainly reads Cetter Kane. I think
it's even from the get go you can tell this
guy reads Setter Kane well.

Speaker 3 (49:46):
I like his energy is very much like a nervous
kindergarten teacher. He like over enunciates all of his lines
and speaks very slowly as if he's speaking to children.
But it's not just because he plays a doctor in
like a mental hospital. Like he sort of talks that
way to David Warner as well.

Speaker 2 (50:05):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, so great, great weird little performance here.
I love it all right. Some of the smaller roles
that are supporting here, we also have a number of
other repeat customers here from Weird House Cinema. We have

(50:26):
Bernie Casey playing all Right Robinson. Bernie Casey lived thirty
nine through twenty seventeen. This is our third Bernie Casey film.
We previously discussed him in our episodes on seventy two's
Gargoyles and seventy six is the man who fell to Earth.

Speaker 3 (50:40):
In this movie, he plays John Trent's the main guy
that John Trent works for Trinsett. He's independent, he's a freelancer,
but this is like his main client. He's an insurance
underwriter and he's the guy who has written the bond
for the publishing house that lost track of their star author.

Speaker 2 (50:57):
Yeah, yeah, and yeah. It's a small role, but it's
really good and it's the only time that Carpenter worked
with him. But he had only great things to say
about him in this part of the film too early
go into the film. It's about establishing what Trent does
in the real world, his work, and also his his
sort of core values, his independence. You know, he's a
freelancer baby, and also he doesn't he doesn't trust nobody.

(51:20):
He's looking for the scam anywhere you look. There's a
lot of gumshoe energy, a lot of you know, really
kind of like noir energy to Trent as he's initially
laid out.

Speaker 3 (51:29):
Yeah, totally.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
We get this great scene where he's busting an amateur
con artist, mister Paul, played by frequent Carpenter and Walter
Here Walter Hill casting selection, Peter Jason.

Speaker 3 (51:43):
We talked about him in Prince of Darkness because he
plays one of the scientists. He's he always like whistling
or something.

Speaker 2 (51:50):
Yeah, yeah, he's he's a little bit of a trouble maker,
but yeah, he's in Prince of Darkness. He also was
on the commentary track with Carpenter on that one and
that one is one. It was a lot of fun,
like clearly two guys who get along really well, you know,
just shooting the ball about this film from years back
and in addition to Prince of Darkness and a number

(52:10):
of other Carpenter films, he was, like i say, repeat
performer with Carpenter. He also pops up in ninety five's Congo,
which has been featured in Weird House Cinema and Mortal Kombat.
You remember he has a very brief role in that
as well.

Speaker 3 (52:24):
What is is he like Johnny Cage's agent or something?

Speaker 2 (52:27):
Yes, and then we find out no, it's shenksin the
whole time.

Speaker 3 (52:30):
Yeah that's right.

Speaker 2 (52:32):
Yeah, so technically he has played shnsin Oh Perfect.

Speaker 3 (52:36):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:37):
Yeah, he's also an eighty four's Dreamscape, eighty eight Alien Nation, Yeah,
twenty sixteen's Hail Caesar, and he's also in a Jurassic
Park film. He's in twenty eighteen's Jurassic World Fallen Kingdom.

Speaker 3 (52:49):
Okay, well here he's like a he's a slimy, sweaty
guy who's getting getting caught up in all of his lies. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (52:57):
Yeah, it's a small role, but really fun.

Speaker 3 (53:00):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (53:00):
Then we also have Jackson Harglow. He's he's the head,
he's like the main publisher, the head of this publishing
house that is hoping to publish this new book from
Sutter Kane.

Speaker 3 (53:12):
He read Horror by the way, Yeah it doesn't read it.

Speaker 2 (53:14):
You don't have thiscom for it. He's all business and
he's played by Charlton Heston, who lived nineteen twenty three
through two thousand and eight. This is our actual first
Chuck Heston movie. He keeps coming up because if somebody's
been in a film with Charlton Heston, you know, tends
to be the kind of thing you mentioned. But this
is the first time we've actually discussed one of his movies.

Speaker 3 (53:34):
Yeah, that's kind of surprising to me. I guess we
haven't done any of the early Planet of the Apes movies,
despite the fact that they were the punchline of a joke.
I remember thinking the last time I saw a Planet
of the Apes that it's a pretty great movie.

Speaker 2 (53:48):
Yeah, I mean I remember being blown away from way
by it. I think when I actually saw it, I
somehow not had the ending spoiled for me, like I
caught it early enough on TV before I could watch
you know, too much Simpsons or something, you know, and
have it spoiled by pop culture. So it's quite good.
And I enjoyed some of the sequels as well. So

(54:09):
this is obviously late career for the nineteen sixty been
her Oscar winner Charlton Heston. He was coming off of
I think smaller roles and you know, little supporting roles
and things like ninety three's Tombstone, ninety four is True Lives,
True Lives rather and he'd continued to work here and
there in small ways for much of the next decade,
including playing an ape called Zayas in two thousand and

(54:32):
one's Planet of the Apes.

Speaker 3 (54:34):
Oh how the tables have turned?

Speaker 2 (54:36):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, he plays like a wise old ape
who also has a gun.

Speaker 3 (54:43):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (54:43):
I remember that. That was kind of like a weird
end joke because of his association with what the NRA
at the time.

Speaker 3 (54:49):
Yeah, what a strange choice. Yeah. I ever saw that
two thousand and one Planet of the Apes.

Speaker 2 (54:55):
Yeah, yeah, but I did. And it has a great
cast and it has some great ape of but that's
the main thing I remember about it. But I have
a feeling we'll come back to Charlton Heston later on
in weird House cinema, because if nothing else, I think
we'll end up having to watch the Omega man.

Speaker 3 (55:11):
Yeah, there we go.

Speaker 2 (55:12):
Yeah, all right. Other supporting actors Francis Bay plays Missus Pickman,
who you know, first just seems like you're, you know,
slightly weird, you know, old woman running an inn. But
then we find out that, you know, there's a much
more sinister streak here.

Speaker 3 (55:29):
This af feel like I'm sorry to interrupt. She was
in every single nineties movie that had a sweet old
lady in. Yes.

Speaker 2 (55:36):
Yes, she made a career out of a multi decade career.
I think playing sweet old ladies, playing different. She was
everybody's auntie and everybody's grandpa from like, you know, seventy
six through twenty eleven.

Speaker 3 (55:50):
Wow.

Speaker 2 (55:50):
Yeah, So she pops up in things like just to
name a few, eighty Three's a Rose for Emily, eighty six,
is Blue Velvet, nineteen nineties, Wild at Heart, ninety one's
three Stuart Gordon's The Pit in the Pendulum from the
same year, ninety two, Twin Peaks, Firewalk with Me, Single
White Female, and also nineteen ninety six is Happy Gilmore.

Speaker 3 (56:12):
Yeah, Happy Gilmore. You know that could almost be a
weird house cinema movie. Yeah, it's about that weird, but yeah,
I really remember her from that, from like my elementary
school days.

Speaker 2 (56:24):
Yeah, all right, we alluded to this guy already, but
we have Wilhelm von Homberg. This is a I forget
what his birth name was. This is kind of a
show name. Plays the character Simon in this dooms townsperson
in the town of hobbs End. This actor lived in
nineteen forty through two thousand and four. German pro wrestler

(56:47):
turned boxer turned character actor, active on TV as early
as sixty four in an episode of gun Smoke. Appears
uncredited in Hitchcock's Torn Curtain in sixty six and basically
found a some sort of a career playing heavies and
with a face like this, you know, former boxer, it
makes makes perfect sense. His other credits include sixty eight's

(57:09):
The Devil's Brigade, sixty eight's The Wrecking Crew, Werner Herzog's
Strozik in seventy seven, He's one of the Goons, and
die Hard in eighty eight, and of course in Ghostbusters two.
In eighty nine, he plays Vigo the Carpathian. But it's
not his voice, that's right. Apparently he like, you know,
he voiced the character when they filmed it, but his

(57:32):
you know, as we hear him in this film, this
is his actual voice. They wanted something like a little
more regal, and so Max Sooncito did the voice over
for him. And I've read accounts that this actor was
I didn't find out about it till the screening, and
you know, and was offended by it and stormed out.
But I'm like this, you know, goes for the podcast
as well. If you replaced my voice with Max Doncito,

(57:54):
you know, fair enough, that's a great voice. I can't really,
I don't really have room to complain.

Speaker 3 (57:59):
I'd put a star that and I'd say I wouldn't
mind being replaced by real Max von s. Yes, they're
going to bring in an Ai Max von Set, I'd say, no,
thank you.

Speaker 2 (58:07):
That would to bother me. No thank you to that. Yes,
but yeah, this guy, this guy, I'm not going to
get into it. This guy has a really complex and
at times disturbing bio, and I would just say, if
you want to learn more about him, look around. I
was reading a dead Spin article from twenty fifteen called
the Hateful Life and Spiteful Death of the Man who
is Vego the Carpathian. Oh yeah, I had no idea. Yeah,

(58:30):
there's a there's a lot there. So if you're in
for that sort of thing, go for it. Otherwise I'll
just say fun small character role in this picture. You know,
he does a good job playing a haunted, doomed character.

Speaker 3 (58:45):
Yeah, maybe best to let Peter McNichols speak for him.

Speaker 2 (58:50):
Yes, Okay, there's just so many great little roles. I
you know, I can't give him all justice, but I'll
just say in Passing early on, we get an axe
maniac with weird eyes, and he's played by a Canadian
screen and TV actor named Conrad Bergschneider. And he's he's
really good in this role, in great creepy presence. And

(59:11):
it should come as no surprise that he also has
a role in twenty twelve Silent Hill Revelation, because it
seems like just based on this one film that I've
seen him in the Mouth of Madness, Like, yeah, this
is a guy that should play someone in Silent Hill.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
Yes, you get the feeling if you walk around with
this guy, you would get to like dead end streets
that are just a bunch of you know, blankets hanging
over something, so scaffolding with sheets.

Speaker 2 (59:35):
Yeah yeah, yeah, really good, really good, good performance here
he brings his fog with him. Yeah, I'll just mention
in passing that the paper boy who pops up in
the film is played by Hayden Christensen, a young unknown
actor at the timehood yet to fulfill his destiny.

Speaker 3 (59:53):
And then I haven't even discovered yet his feelings about sand.

Speaker 2 (59:55):
No, no, that's yeah, that's right. And then also playing
fan in bookstore, we have Jim Fife, TV actor, best
known for his role as Kimmy the Geek on The
X Files and The Lone Gunman.

Speaker 3 (01:00:06):
Now I had to look this guy up to see
if you meant that he was one of the three
the Lone Gunman from the X Files and Lone Gunman.
He's not. This is not for the supporting character. To
the supporting character. Yeah, because for a second I was like, oh,
did I miss fro Hickey in all right?

Speaker 2 (01:00:24):
And then finally I mentioned Gary B. Kibbi, already the
cinematographer of nineteen forty one through twenty twenty this let's see.
His first film as cinematographer was Carpenter's Prince of Darkness,
and we mentioned him in that, but ended up working
with Carpenter a bunch more and again he and up
through at least Ghosts of Mars so longtime collaborated with Carpenter,
and definitely if you want to hear his thoughts on

(01:00:45):
putting this film together, check out that commentary track and
then the music. The music is always an essential part
of any John Carpenter film. Carpenter does have musical credit
here for the score, but he shares it with Jim
Lang Born nine, Team fifty. So Jim Lang's musical credits
go back to a seventy eight episode of PBS's Nova,

(01:01:07):
the science series. I didn't have a time. I didn't
have time to actually look up the episode of it's
called the insect Alternative, which alternative to what? I don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:01:16):
I'm not sure.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
Maybe I don't know if it's about eating insects or
replacing them with robots. But something that we're talking about
in seventy eight, about.

Speaker 3 (01:01:23):
This insects could be the alternative to you're right, like
meat maybe, or about cars? Cars, you know, make cars
out of insects, Yeah, travel by insects, cigars, I don't know, perfect, yeah,
instead of tobacco. Yeah, we're just saying, consider it whatever
it is. But he also worked a considerable amount of TV,
especially children's TV, particularly the series Hey Arnold, which I

(01:01:46):
believe he did the theme song for. Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:01:48):
Carpenter had previously worked with Laying on the nineteen ninety
three TV horror anthology Body Bags, and on this one
the score in general, Carpenter notably went for a hard
rock feel in parts of the score, something that you
know he'd already I guess experimented with a little bit
in eighty six is Big Trouble in Little China. There's
some definite like rock guitar vibes in that score, and

(01:02:11):
then of course he would go all in on this
for two thousand and one's Ghosts of Mars, which I
don't know we may eventually cover, but that's one where
he goes there's a lot of new metal vibes there.
But apparently Carpenter initially at some point was interested in
licensing Metallica's Inner Sandman for In the Mouth of Madness,
but it was too pricey, and so instead he worked

(01:02:33):
with Laying as well as guitarist Dave Davies of The Kinks,
to create the driving main track of In the Mouth
of Madness, which I have to say I've always been
a fan of. I love this.

Speaker 3 (01:02:48):
I'm going to say It's not my favorite of Carpenter's
musical work, but I do like it. I like it
in the movie. I'm quite surprised to hear Dave Davies
here because it just doesn't sound like Dave Davies or
like the Kinks at all. It sounds like more kind
of eighties or eighties early nineties style hard rock.

Speaker 2 (01:03:06):
Yeah. Yeah, and I'm not sure on what his full
contribution was, but he is credited for that for just
that one track. The rest is all credited to laying
a Carpenter. And to be clear, like not everything that
you hear in the score for in the Mouth of
Madness is guitars. Like a lot of it is more
I think identifiable as that, you know, the creepy Carpenter,
dark ambient kind of vibe. Yeah, Now, Joe, I don't

(01:03:30):
know much about Dave Davies born nineteen forty seven or
honestly the Kinks. I mean, I know, Lola, and I
know you really got me, But I'm to understand he's
often credited is playing a key role in the birth
of what we've come to know is hard rock. Is
that is that accurate?

Speaker 3 (01:03:45):
Yeah? So you had a note about this, I ended
up writing too much about this, so apologies if I'd
go on too long. But you can't really say that
any one person invented hard rock. I don't think that
there's really an answer there, because it's like atty fuzzy category.
And there are a lot of songs in the fifties
and the sixties that arguably meet some of the criteria

(01:04:06):
and people would point to. But one of the main
features defining the sound of hard rock is heavily distorted guitars.
Where you know, that means the top of the waveform
is squared off. This is called clipping, and today people
get distorted guitar tones either by using pedals or digital processing,

(01:04:27):
or I guess the more natural ways. They turn their
amplifiers up to the point where the signal gets overdriven,
meaning that the amp circuit runs out of what gets
called headroom. This means the waveform is naturally squared off
because the amplitude is too great for the circuit of
the amplifier to pass it along faithfully.

Speaker 2 (01:04:46):
So max headroom is a reference to this.

Speaker 3 (01:04:49):
Well, max headroom would refer to a style of amplifier
that you could turn up very loud without getting any distortion,
and in fact, this was how they used to try
to make you know, some amplifiers still go for this today,
where you want a lot of headroom, you want to
be able to turn it out, turn it up loud
without getting distortion. And that is how that used to
be the standard for basically all guitar amplifiers. So that

(01:05:13):
is the kind of amplifier apparently Dave Davies was dealing
with in this story from nineteen sixty four. There are
different versions of it, but basically it goes that in
sixty four, Dave and his brother Ray Davies were practicing
the song you Really Got Me a Girl, You Really
Got Me Going Now, and he was trying. Dave was
trying to get a harder, harsher sound out of his

(01:05:34):
guitar and amplifier, but distortion and overdrive pedals weren't really
a thing yet. I think I looked it up and
I think there might have been like one early fuzz
pedal out at this point, but Dave didn't have one.
And as I said, most amplifiers at the time were
designed specifically to avoid distortion. You know, the engineers thought,
you don't want distortion, it's a bad thing. So Dave

(01:05:55):
is trying to get the amplifier to distort more, and
he got the idea to try destroying the speaker cone
on the amplifier, so he was slashing it with a razor,
among other not recommended practices. And there's also an account
that he was like running one amplifier into another amplifier,
which is something you should not do. Ok. But anyway,

(01:06:17):
after this, the sound that came out was very harsh,
very distorted, and that's allegedly what you hear, at least
according to one of these tellings on the classic recording
of You Really Got Me. And this is one of
the early songs that people flag as like a you know,
a sort of proto example of hard rock or even
a precursor to punk.

Speaker 2 (01:06:35):
All right, so base, So it makes sense that Carpenter's like,
I want this to be hard rock. I need to
contact somebody. I need a console from someone who knows
how to make something hard rock. Let's get Dave Davies in.

Speaker 3 (01:06:47):
Here, somebody who could think to slash open a speaker
cone and dangerously, you know, wire up amplifiers in a
way that you shouldn't. Yeah, but yeah, I'll just say
as a side note. You know, Ray Day is the
main singer and wrote a lot of the songs of
the Kinks, but I really like a lot of Dave
Davies stuff. Dave Davies wrote the Kink song Strangers from

(01:07:09):
nineteen seventy. Do you know that one?

Speaker 2 (01:07:11):
Ooh, not by name. It's maybe one of those that
if I heard it it would ring a bell.

Speaker 3 (01:07:17):
But strangers on this road we are on, we are
not two, we are one. It's beautiful song. It's one
of my favorites.

Speaker 2 (01:07:22):
Okay, all right, I'll look it up after we're done
recording here, but at any rate, yeah, I really like
the music. And in the Mouth of Madness, And I
should also point out that that main track, the title
track from In the Mouth of Madness years later on
one of the releases has come out in recent years.
Carpenter and his son Cody end up like doing and

(01:07:44):
I'm sure some collaborators end up doing like a new
version of it, which also sounds pretty good.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
I would like to hear that.

Speaker 2 (01:07:49):
Yeah, all right, well, let's let's get into it. Let's
get into the plot. Let's let's let's enter the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:08:06):
Now full disclosure, we were rushing to get ready today.
So there's a part in the middle of my plot
notes here where notes get very thin. Rob, you're gonna
have to help me sort of improvise and talk through
it when we get to that point. I've sort of
got more thicker notes at the beginning and ending. But
as for the opening, I like the choice of what
they did here. So you get this metal track right
at the beginning of the or maybe not metal, hard rock,

(01:08:28):
whatever you call it, at the beginning, and I thought
it's funny that you you've probably heard of heavy metal
parking lot, but this movie brings you heavy metal printing press. Yeah,
we don't think of the printing press as and especially
metal or hard rock subject, but it is here, and
it kind of works like the you see all the
parts kind of clattering and clacking and all of the

(01:08:51):
you know, the sheets moving really fast as they go
through the printer, and somehow it fits. It fits with
the hard rock theme.

Speaker 2 (01:08:57):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's chugging along. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:09:00):
And once of course we know the themes of the movie,
this will have additional sinister implications because it's just like,
look at the rate and the volume at which this,
you know, mind rending materials being produced, so after the credits,
the action begins with an ambulance arriving at a mental hospital,
with the first meeting of John Glover as Sapristine. He

(01:09:21):
has this very funny energy that I mentioned earlier, the
kind of nervous kindergarten teacher. He's anxiously fiddling with his buttons,
he's over enunciating the words he speaks. Sapristine and his
colleagues line up to meet the new patient coming in,
who is dragged in in a straight jacket by a
couple of orderlies. And this is Sam Neil as John Trent,

(01:09:43):
our protagonist. When we first meet him here, he is
not looking too hot, not your standard dapper Sam Neil.
He's got, you know, dark circles under his eyes. His
hair's all greasy and messed up. He looks like he's
been having a rough times. As the orderlies are bringing
him in, a fire breaks out, in which Trent lands
a brutal kick to the crotch on one of them.

(01:10:05):
They eventually subdue him and take him to a padded
cell while he screams. And here we get I think
a somewhat famous line among fans, the part where he yells,
I'm sorry about the balls. It was a lucky shot,
that's all. And Trent, after they leave, he's yelling out
through the window in the door. He yells out that
he is not insane, and then all of the other

(01:10:25):
patients in the rooms all down the hall begin yelling
about how they too are not insane, and then Sapristein
reacts to this by playing over the loud speakers some music.
It is We've only just begun and Trent as the
music comes on and some of the other patients starts
singing along with it, and then Trent says, oh no,
not the carpenter's too, and he sings to the floor

(01:10:47):
in despair as everybody's singing along to the song. But
then in the middle of the verse to the song,
the lights in the hospital begin to flicker and dim
and the hall becomes silent, and behind Trent we see
a figure move in the dark. Trent turns to face
the figure. He says, this is a rotten way to
end it. The figure says, we're going to hear a

(01:11:09):
German accent here, So I think you know, if you
have some meta knowledge, you know who this is. The
figure says this is not the ending. You haven't read
it yet. And suddenly a monstrous hand smashes through the
glass to the window to Trent's cell, and there's a
rush of images. We see things like a gold sort
of lined mosaic tile, mosaic of Christ. We see a

(01:11:32):
fire axe covered in blood. We see a Byzantine church
with black minarets, a child with a monstrous mutated face,
creatures with piranha teeth illuminated by lightning, and just maniacal laughter,
somebody laughing in the darkness, and Trent collapses on his mattress.

(01:11:52):
Later that night, we're to assume, I think it's supposed
to be the same night. A psychiatrist or somebody psychiatry
adjacent named doctor Wren played by David Warner arrives at
the hospital. He briefly talks to Sapristine. It seems Trent
is displaying the same symptoms as other people that they're
both aware of, and they say things like you think
he's one of them, And soa Pristine says, things must

(01:12:14):
be getting pretty bad out there to bring you fellas in.
Warner asks did he have any requests? And so Pristine says,
just one a single black crayon, and then David goes
in for an interview with Trent and Rob. Can we
describe here the iconic set of Trent's Trent's now decorated
and you might say like apatropeized, apatropee magicized, padded room

(01:12:43):
and his self, his body and his clothing.

Speaker 2 (01:12:45):
Yeah, he's taken. He's apparently used that black crayon just
all the way down to the nub and then into
and just you know, used it all up in order
to draw crosses, variety of different types of crosses, all
over the walls of the cell, on the floor of
his cell, and of course all over his clothing and
all over his face. So you know, he seems a

(01:13:08):
bit calmer, like he's done all that he can and
maybe this is in his mind anyway, giving him just
a little bit of protection and a little bit of
breathing room against all of the growing darkness out in
the world.

Speaker 3 (01:13:22):
Yeah, it's a very cool look. I like it a lot,
especially that not all the crosses are the same. You
get the different shapes and sizes and all that. Anyway,
as the doctor comes in, Trent explains that he has
changed his mind. He no longer wants out of the institution.
He's decided it's safer in here. They have an exchange
where Trent says, you're waiting to hear about my them,

(01:13:44):
aren't you, and Wren says, no, I want to know
how you got here. There's more general illusion during this
conversation to the fact that something is going very wrong
in the world outside, but Ren steers the conversation back
to Trent's story. So here we flash back to New
York City earlier that year, and now we get to
know Trent while he is in full form, before he

(01:14:08):
has you know, before whatever change that brought him to
this other place. And so we're gonna meet him at
a scene where he is interrogating and busting an arsonist
and fraudster played by oh, I forget the actor's name now,
but the guy who was also in Prince of Darkness,
Peter Jason. Peter Jason, that's right. Yeah. So he's playing
the fraudster here and and it's a great grilling where

(01:14:31):
he's you know, sort of breadcrumbs him along to you know,
to kind of get in over his head, commit to
too much, and then he like shows him these pictures.
He's like, look, we know that, you know, you actually
saved all these goods that you said perished in the
fire that you're trying to get cash for, you know. So,
so he busts this sleazy guy working for Bernie Casey here.

(01:14:53):
Of course, generally, let's see thinking about ways to describe
the character of John Trent as he's first presented. He's
very smooth, like he's a sharp dressing, good looking guy.
He's well spoken. He's wearing I think what was, you know,
very cool looking outfit at the time, which was a

(01:15:14):
double breasted suit with like a striped shirt on underneath,
and like, yeah, that man, people don't dress that way anymore.

Speaker 2 (01:15:20):
This suit looks a little dated by today's standards. Most
of the film, though, he's going to be wearing like
jeans and a jacket and in that like like, I
don't know that that feels less stuck in the nineties.
But yeah, his suit here is very nineties.

Speaker 3 (01:15:34):
Double breasted suit. Yeah. But so he's a lot like
a noir detective like you were talking about earlier. He
has a grim sense of humor. He's funny, he's smart, methodical, skeptical,
and cynical. He doesn't come off as an especially good
nor an especially bad person. He seems kind of morally
somewhat neutral, kind of down the middle, but has a

(01:15:57):
low view of human nature, low in trust.

Speaker 2 (01:16:00):
Yeah, and I'd say there's a little bit of cockiness there,
like not so much that it's like hateable or feels
like a real, real, full fledged flaw in his character.
But you know, he's a guy who feels like he's
got it all figured out and he's not afraid to
say so.

Speaker 3 (01:16:15):
Now, from here, we go to a scene that is
very memorable. I think a lot of people if they
remember one thing from the movie, it might be this scene,
which is the axe attack scene in the diner. So
Trent and Robbie are there in the diner and they're
discussing you know what comes up next. We're sort of
getting the pitch on the setup for the main plot,

(01:16:37):
I believe in this where he's being told about the
publishing house and the author who's disappeared. But the whole
time our main subjects are talking. In the background behind them,
we can see out the window across the street from
this diner where a man, a disheveled, kind of strange
adult looking man, comes out of a door way holding

(01:17:01):
an axe in a long coat and walks slowly across
the street, approaches the window and then smashes the window
with an axe and attacks attacks John Trent AND's like,
what's this about? I think? What is it? He says
to him in the scene.

Speaker 2 (01:17:18):
Do you remember he says a couple of things, like
he asks, I believe he asked if you read Cetter Kane.
That is a frequent refrain from people who have seemed
to have come under the power of these books. They
want to know if you read Cetter Kane. And then
he says something else that we hear echoed by other characters.
He says, he sees you, which is which is? Which
is great and creepy and kind of brings the idea

(01:17:39):
of like some sort of a divine presence into the scenario.
He sees you, and we get a close up on
his eyes and his pupils are undergoing something like mitosis.
They appear to be in the process of like splitting
into two pupils, which is tremendous. This would, I'm yes thing.

(01:18:00):
This may have partially inspired some of the iconography that
was used by Tool in their album that Would come
out in just a couple of years. But also, as
we've discussed in the show before, this may also refer
back to, at least visually to some elements in mythology
with individuals that had more than one pupil in their eye.

Speaker 3 (01:18:21):
Yeah, but it's not fully two, Like, it's just they're
starting to split. You can see. It's like going into two.

Speaker 2 (01:18:28):
Like body horror mythos body horror. Stage one seems to
be taking place, and it's just enough where you're like,
that's not right, that's not right at all.

Speaker 3 (01:18:37):
It's funny. Yeah, the difference between just there being a
monster and body horror, Like, if you're closer to the
monster side of things, it doesn't really read as body
horror anymore. It's just a monster now. Stage one transformation
from human into something else is the body horror zone.

Speaker 2 (01:18:55):
Yeah, yeah, full fledged Brundlefly is not nearly as disturbed
as the phases we have between.

Speaker 3 (01:19:04):
So after this we meet a couple of characters. John
Trent goes and takes the meeting with Jack Harglow, the
publisher at Arcane Press, and also meets with Linda Styles,
the editor who has been working with Sutter Kane. Does
John Trent express any interest in these books. Not really,
He's kind of dismissive of them. He's like, yeah, who
reads this garbage? And that seems to be the publisher's

(01:19:25):
attitude too, except he makes a lot of money on it.
But yeah, So he gets the pitch that Sutter Kane,
the author has disappeared and has stopped sending new chapters
of his books. So they're going to need to have
this draft very soon. They don't have it, and they
are trying to enlist Trent to help them find their
missing author, and I guess the implication is that also

(01:19:48):
if they can't find him, they're going to file an
insurance claim, so you know, like double incentive for Trent
for multiple parties to find this guy.

Speaker 2 (01:19:58):
Yeah, and he's very suspicious, like, especially in the early
stages here, that they may be trying to play him.
He's being brought in not to investigate a legitimate insurance situation,
that instead is being brought in to sort of prop
up some sort of grand publicity stunt that is all
about promoting this new book.

Speaker 3 (01:20:19):
He's afraid that he has fear of being a sucker,
which is a real type of fear, a common fear
people have, but like he it's especially acute in Trent
as a personality trade. He doesn't want to be the dupe,
so he's always trying to play defense against being duped
by somebody, and in this case he especially fears that

(01:20:39):
they are trying to pull one over on him and
make him sort of the media figure who will vouch
for this scenario they have set up where the author disappeared,
when in fact they're just going to reveal him later, like, oh,
here he is and here's the book. So yeah, he's
got those those skepticisms, but he does take the job.

(01:21:00):
And oh and he learns. He learns along the way
that the last person who spoke to sutter Kane before
he disappeared was his agent. His agent was the man
who attacked him in the diner with the acts. So
this is the guy who's read more of sutter Kane's
new book than anybody else has.

Speaker 2 (01:21:19):
Yeah, so we get a nice research portion, investigation portion
of the film here where Trent is. He picks up
a bunch of the sutter Kane books. He's going to
read them, like, you know, it's not his thing that
he's he's a thorough researcher, so he's going to take
these home rusome coffee or whatever and just read them all.
And as this is going on, we also get these

(01:21:40):
scenes where the editing is is really really nice here
where we create this sort of dreamlike feel like already
just by being in close proximity to these books, the
lines between horror and reality are are blending and merging, like,
not in like over fantasy ways, but in like dream

(01:22:02):
like ways, like the scene where Trent's walking home and
he cuts through an alley and he sees a cop
beaten down a guy in the alley way and the
cop says, you want some too, buddy, and he's no
thinking he keeps going. But then later we revisit that
scene and it has demonic monstrous elements to it, and then.

Speaker 3 (01:22:23):
Ups faces it is now all scarred and reddened, and.

Speaker 2 (01:22:26):
Yeah, and then we get like a complete culmination of
this nightmare sequence that ends in a double wake jump scare,
which nobody does is better than John Carpenter, and he
does it twice in this picture. But you can't complain
because it's so perfectly executed.

Speaker 3 (01:22:43):
Yeah, very bold move, but it works very well, and
so you're not expecting a wake up jump scare right
after you've just had one.

Speaker 2 (01:22:50):
Yeah, And it works so well here because the double
wake jump scare is about the dream within a dream,
and of course that just folds so nicely into these
contemplations of warping reality.

Speaker 3 (01:23:03):
Yeah. So eventually he comes across a clue and there
are some I don't know, I like a lot of
the stuff the mood setting in this part of the movie,
like the scene where he did you already mention? I
think the scene in the bookstore where he runs into
a sutter cane fan and the can that's when the
guy says he sees you yeah, yeah, yeah. And so

(01:23:24):
he's just encountering bizarre, sinister phenomena associated with these books.
The books are affecting him negatively. He even talks about
how he was dismissive at first, but he gets on
the phone with somebody and he's like, I don't know,
you know, all this horror is trash. But you know,
Caine's a he's an okay writer. He's got a good

(01:23:44):
way of writing about it. So, like the books are,
he's kind of getting interested in them, but he's also
being sort of sort of rattled by them, and I
think the books are what's in a way, it's implied
causing all of these nightmare and everything, though you also
can't quite be sure if maybe that's just something happening
independently in the world as well. So anyway, he does

(01:24:10):
eventually find a clue, and that clue is embedded in
the covers of the books themselves. I love this part,
and so of course we should have said this earlier.
If we didn't, our discussion of the plot is going
to have a lot of spoilers in it. You know,
we're going to talk through the plot. So if you
want to go out and watch the movie without any
fun surprises spoiled, you should definitely do that. But anyway,

(01:24:32):
so we'll go on that. He starts to notice that
on the covers of Sutter Kane's books there are these
red lines that look just like a random design, you know,
in between the monsters and people screaming and the haunted houses,
there's just a red line making a shape. And he
gets the idea to cut out these shapes, and he
finds that when you put all these red line shapes

(01:24:54):
from the different book covers together, it makes an outline
of the state of New Hampshire, Haunted New Hampshire. And
of course this is a map that also shows the
location of a place called hobbs End. This is a
town in New Hampshire from the most recent previously published
book by Sutter Kane, The hobbs End Horror. And also

(01:25:17):
it is where they decide that sutter Kane probably is hiding,
like he's sending a message about himself.

Speaker 2 (01:25:23):
This is also a reference to quator Mass in the Pit,
which we talked about on the show, the hobbs End
being the tube station of note.

Speaker 3 (01:25:33):
Oh, I didn't make that connection.

Speaker 2 (01:25:35):
Yeah, there are a number of like little references to Lovecraft,
like you know Pickman, Missus Pickman. But this is a
particular reference to to Quitness in the Pit.

Speaker 3 (01:25:45):
So together Styles and Trent make the journey out to
hobbs End. Now they have trouble finding it because it's
apparently not on any maps. I don't know how plausible
that was in the early nineties, that there's a town
in New Hampshire that nobody has put on a map.

Speaker 2 (01:26:02):
But they're like, so they're not like it's not showing
up on ways, you know, you just wear there. They're
just trust is it's not on the maps, but it's there.

Speaker 3 (01:26:12):
Yeah, so you know, they drive around looking for it
and there there's more spooky stuff that happens here. There's
also some comedy just as these characters kind of play
off of one another. They're they're they're kind of needling
each other in a way. Uh, but there is like
they have differing perspectives. Styles very much has the perspective

(01:26:33):
that reality is constructed, that it's you know, constructed by
social consensus. And she talks about different ways that reality.
You know, if everybody says reality is one thing, how
can you say it's not that way? And Trent is
very no, no, no, reality is objective. It's fact based.
You can't make something real just by saying it. So

(01:26:53):
they clash over this and eventually they start encountering weird
phenomena the road. They're like, there is a young boy
who rides past on a bicycle that's got a baseball
card tape to the wheel spokes or tape to the
what do you call it, you know, against the wheel spokes,
so it rattles as it goes by. So they like
see the boy passing one way as a boy, and

(01:27:14):
then they see an old man passing the other way
on the exact same bicycles. So they're in some kind
of weird time warp, it seems. Also there are you know,
they have visions on the road. At one point, as
Styles is driving, she has a kind of nightmare that
the car is like flying through the air over a
great pit, and then realizes suddenly as she's kind of

(01:27:35):
coming awake, that the car is going through an old
covered wooden bridge. I love that set piece. A totally
quaint reality, but it fits in the in the you know,
Haunted New England scene, they kind of love craft world
that they're going for. So they come through a covered
wooden bridge into hobbs End. They found the place, and

(01:27:56):
so they settle in and start looking for Settercane within
hobbs End, encountering weird stuff here too, like weird crowds
of children running around seemingly chasing a dog and then
disappearing when you turn to look for them. The main
street of the town is basically abandoned. They go to
the bed and breakfast in town and they realize. Styles

(01:28:16):
notices this first, and Trent is doubtful about it, but
she notices that the town and the bed and breakfast
here are from a sutterkne novel. They're from The Hobs
and Horror. They're exactly how they're described in the book,
and based on having read the book and worked closely
with it, she can predict all these things about the environment.

(01:28:37):
There should be a painting here, yes, there is. There
should be a loose floorboard here, yes, that's right. So
she starts to be really freaked out, like she thinks
that somehow they have entered the world of the book,
and Trent again, he's like coldly rejecting this. He's like, no,
that's not possible, that's not rational, that doesn't make any sense.

(01:29:00):
I was thinking about the other option, which they don't
seem to entertain very much, which is just what if
this place were real? But he wrote about he like
literally made all the details part of the book.

Speaker 2 (01:29:10):
Yeah, they don't really explore that. Like the solution that
Trent he kind of touched on this already once he
figured out the map thing. But he begins to continue
to focus on this idea that this must all be
an act, that this is like the sort of Willy
Wonka prize for solving the puzzle of the different paperback
covers and that this is essentially like an immersive experience

(01:29:34):
that the publishers have put together for fans of the book.
And he's like, oh, you know, this is really well done.
These must be actors, and he's going to cling to
that as much as possible, while at the same time,
I mean, it's really rather clever. We've been talking in
recent episodes. In the last episode anyway, we'd have cinema
about Full Car, and we have some definite Full Car
elements to this portion of the picture because he is

(01:29:56):
they are both, but especially Trent is the skeptical out
of town or from the big city who is now
in the country, you know, in this strange place with
strange ways, with various things that are seem ritualistic.

Speaker 3 (01:30:11):
And tied to bothing old Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:30:14):
Something old belief systems that you know, he's not familiar with.
And so yeah, there's some definite Full Car vibes here,
but with with ultimately a different objective in place.

Speaker 3 (01:30:25):
Yeah, that's very perceptive. I didn't think about that, but
you're right, yeah, there, and full Car vibes really come
through when they get to the church. So Styles predicts
based on the book, she's like, you know, out the window,
if this is the if this is the hobs End
from the book, there should be a Byzantine church with minarets,
you know, out the window here. And at first Trent

(01:30:48):
tries to say, like, now, look, we can prove this
is not the book because it's not out the window.
But he's looking out the wrong window. So she looks
out the other window and like, yep, there it is.
And then they have a bizarre experience where they go
to the church and while there, so again it's this
Byzantine sort of Eastern style Orthodox church. It has this

(01:31:09):
mosaic of Christ, and it has a weird warning on
the door. It's I don't remember the exact phrasing, but
it's sort of a band and all hope you who
enter here.

Speaker 2 (01:31:17):
Yes, it doesn't like any who enter here are you know,
damned forever. You know, it's just pretty pretty firm in
its proclamation.

Speaker 3 (01:31:24):
And we get a bunch of townsfolk with pitchforks. I mean,
I guess they're actually just armed with guns. You know,
it's a pitchfork mob, but they've got shotguns who come
up in trucks and they confront the church and they're
saying Cain give him back. So they are under the
impression that sutter Kane has stolen and I think somehow
like satanically mutated their children, and they are chased away

(01:31:48):
from the scene by evil Doberman's that seems to be
maybe a kind of nod to the Omen.

Speaker 2 (01:31:53):
And sutter Kane appears briefly at the front door.

Speaker 3 (01:31:55):
Yes he does. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:31:57):
Oh, by the way, this is a real church. Is
the Cathedral of the Transfiguration in Markham, Ontario. I have
never been, but I know for a fact that we
have at least one listener, probably more than one listener
out there, who have visited this church and toured it.
So I'm hoping to get a site report, a field
report that we can share in a future episode of

(01:32:20):
Listener Mail.

Speaker 3 (01:32:21):
Please contact that stuff to Blow your Mind dot com.

Speaker 2 (01:32:23):
Yeah. So, basically, there's just a lot of really fun
explorations and keeping they keep uncovering, like new hideous things
about Hobbes in like the grotesque secrets of Missus Pickman

(01:32:44):
and how she's as in keeping with one of the
stories that's in one of the Suturcane stories, she has
like imprisoned her husband and has chopped him up and
and is herself mutating into some sort of a monster,
you know, little things like that. We have Simon the
old man, warning about the horrible things that have happened
to the children, and you know, one gets the idea

(01:33:06):
that there's almost like there's so many more stories here.
It reminds me a bit of the recent Widow's Bay series.
You know, we have like a haunted locale and they
are all sorts of like terrible stories and monstrous stories
that are taking place there.

Speaker 3 (01:33:22):
Well, so this is sort of the middle part of
the movie where Styles briefly kind of becomes the protagonist.
She kind of takes over because she starts to think
that not only is this place a place that was
maybe written into existence from a previous Sutterkane book, she
also believes that the events now happening to them, the

(01:33:44):
events happening to her and to Trent, are the events
of the books sutter Caane is writing now. She says,
she believes that he is writing their lives as they happen,
so like they've now sort of lost their free will
and have come to exist within a sutter Kane narrative.
She goes to confront him by going to the church,

(01:34:06):
and she finally we get like lines from Sutter Kane.
She meets him and I think he talks that he
has this monologue where he talks about how, you know,
he used to think that the stories he wrote were
just things he made up in his head, but he
came to realize over time that he wasn't making it up. Same, Yeah,

(01:34:26):
something was giving the stories to him. He's been almost
kind of channeling it. And we get reference to they
where we get the wet door. There's this like wooden,
juicy door that is groaning under strain, is just like
this big wooden door barely holding back some kind of
interdimensional horror that is very, very full of fluids and

(01:34:49):
never wants to stop pushing. And you just get the
feeling that Caine's going to lose his resolve at some
point and he's going to have to open that door.

Speaker 2 (01:34:57):
Yeah, and that, and it's going to unleash something horrible
on the world, something that the book is preparing us
for and will sort of pave the way for its madness.

Speaker 3 (01:35:09):
And in this sequence, styles reads the manuscript. He's got
the completed manuscript here or I don't know, if it's
fully completed. He's been working more on it, more than
she's seen so far. And she begins to read it,
and it seems this process like drives her insane and
begins to transform her into one of them. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:35:27):
Yeah, be causes their eyes to bleed. So there's like
a stigmatic effect from having read the book. But yet
now she has crossed.

Speaker 3 (01:35:34):
Over, so we have a reconfrontation between her and Trent,
and Trent is just getting increasingly freaked out. He tries
to leave town, and this leads into a long sequence
where he's like trying to get out and keeps getting
pulled back in. Just when I thought I was out,
you pulled me back in. He tries to drive away

(01:35:56):
from the town, but he keeps like the road turns
into the road in the middle of town and is
like repeatedly confronted by the same angry mob of villagers.

Speaker 2 (01:36:04):
Something we might think of now as the schmeigadoon. So
he kind of smiga dooon's here? Where are you driving out?
And then suddenly you're driving right back in?

Speaker 3 (01:36:11):
Yeah, on the way out. As you said, there are
a bunch of good monster encounters, Like missus Pickman is
turning into a monster. Styles herself is turning into a monster.
There's a great part where she goes in the bathroom
in the hotel room, and then we just see all
these wormlike tentacles like wiggling out under the door.

Speaker 2 (01:36:27):
God, the sound design is excellent in this movie. Anytime
we have some sort of a body hoar thing happening
and we generally can't see it, or we just see
a little of it, we get this weird like sort
of like flesh ripping and reforming sound, like a flesh
morphing sound effect. And I'm not sure what they did
to create it, but it's just so good, just so good.

Speaker 3 (01:36:49):
So eventually Trent, while he's trying to escape, he crashes
his car and he loses consciousness and I love this transition. Crashes,
the car wakes up in a confect both so good.
I don't know if it's supposed to dawn on you
immediately what that is. Maybe he's just like in a
tiny wooden room, but you can see the mesh at
the window in the old wood. It's an unrepentant center's nightmare.

(01:37:13):
And I really like it.

Speaker 2 (01:37:14):
Yeah, I mean, most people have seen enough movies to
I think to recognize it. But even even if you're
not thinking about it on that level, it's like, now
he's in this tomblike enclosure, you know, the narrowing of
observable reality. And they shoot it. At first, they shoot
it from the top for like maximum effect, you.

Speaker 3 (01:37:32):
Know, yeah, looking down very good. So at first Trent panics,
but the booth is locked. He can't get out, so
he eventually settles down, tries to light a cigarette, and
then there's this very simple effect, but I love it,
a flash of light from the other side of the booth.
It comes through the mesh. And then sutter Kane begins
to speak. So this is the first real confrontation, the
first real conversation between Trent and sutter Kane. Suttercane first

(01:37:57):
starts talking about the deficiencies of earth religion. He is like,
you know, religion, it's not so great because they try
to discipline you by making you afraid. But religion it's
not actually very good at making you afraid, because you've
got to understand creation in order to induce fear. And
he says, no one's ever believed it enough to make

(01:38:19):
it real. The same cannot be said of my work.
So he's got healthy self confidence. The thing I'm writing
now better than any Earth religions, Trent says. He scoffs,
and he says, your books aren't real. Cain says, but
I've sold over a billion copies. I've been translated into
eighteen languages. More people believe in my work than believe

(01:38:41):
in the Bible. And Trent argues, Trent is again, he's
just resisting the unreality. He says, you know, Cain cannot
possibly be writing fantasy into reality. There has to be
some kind of rational explanation for everything he's experienced. And
then also Trent finally just shouts through the confession window,

(01:39:02):
your books suck, and.

Speaker 2 (01:39:05):
Cain angry flash of light in response to.

Speaker 3 (01:39:08):
That, yeah, angry flash of light. That's all right, And
Cain says, you must try reading my new one. The
others have had quite an effect, but this one will
drive you absolutely mad. It will make the world ready
for the change. It takes its power from new readers,
new believers. That's the point belief. When people begin to

(01:39:28):
lose the ability to know the difference between fantasy and reality,
the old ones can begin their journey back. The more
people who believe the faster the journey. So that's ultimately
kind of the premise, and that's the thing that we
found a little bit unsettling upon revisiting. It's a story
about a magical, supernatural doom of humanity that is brought

(01:39:51):
on by failures of people's reality testing mechanisms. And I
think also the explanation here is a little bit rattling.
The idea is that the mechanism that makes people's reality
testing fail is sufficiently compelling entertainment. Yeah, also relevant to today.

(01:40:14):
I think different kinds of entertainment involved. I might say that, actually,
we've discovered entertainment media, entertainment technology that are much more
threatening than any individual story or narrative could be. But anyway, yeah,
so at this part of the movie, Sutter Kane, well,
first of all, he kind of slams Trent's face through

(01:40:35):
the wall, like he gives him a bunch of visions
and blood dripping against gravity and snaggle tooth demon children
and that kind of thing. And then suddenly we are
teleported to Kane's office in the church with these apparently
blood stained walls all around and a writing desk with
a mechanical typewriter in the middle, and I did think, man,
it's I'm glad that they went with a mechanical typewriter here,

(01:40:57):
because can you imagine if he had a laptop up
Charlton Eston's boxy laptop that we see in his office.

Speaker 2 (01:41:03):
Yeah, yeah, he needs to be typing on like a
steel machine like this thing.

Speaker 3 (01:41:08):
Yeah yeah. So Cain hits the carriage return and he
turns the wheel. He pulls out a page from the typewriter.
Apparently this is the last page of the book. In
the Mouth of Madness is now finished, and Cain ties
up the manuscript in a folder. He hands it to
Trent and he tells him now it is his job
to deliver it to the world, and he says, with

(01:41:29):
some whimsy, I'll be joining my new publishers now. And
then suddenly Styles is in the room there as well,
and we hear this wet, creaking, clattering sound. Great sound design,
kind of like rain falling on wood. But then we realize, oh,
maybe it's not rain. Maybe it's that slimy door to
the Eldritch Hall, groaning under stress. And then Cain goes

(01:41:52):
to the door and Trent is confused. He doesn't quite
know what's happening, and Cain again reiterated that he's like,
it's not you that's real. It's me that's real, and
I'm writing you and trying. Of course, he's still protesting
the entire time. He says, nobody pulls my strings. At
a different part, he says, I'm not a piece of fiction,

(01:42:13):
and then Kane says, I think therefore you are.

Speaker 2 (01:42:17):
Yeah, of course, of course. He says it in a
way where it's like I think therefore you are, which,
you know, I'm sure that was one of those things
where they tried it different different ways and they're like, Okay,
this is the best read, but yeah, I keep turning
around in my head trying to sort of figure out
why it works better like this.

Speaker 3 (01:42:34):
A lot of good prognow deliveries in here. We also
learned in the sequence, by the way that the reason
the so I just assumed the agent was one of them,
one of the servants of the you know, the beings
that have been feeding these stories to Cain. But actually
Kine says that his agent tried to stop John Trent.
His agent got the book first, or got a draft

(01:42:57):
of the book first, before it was finished. Knew that
John Trent was going to become the deliverer of this
manuscript to broader humanity and tried to stop it by
killing him first. And you know, and again Trent like
doesn't buy any of this. But finally he kind of
taunts Trendy. He says, read it. See what I have
in store for you. And here's the parting of the ways.

(01:43:19):
So Trent and Styles stand at the end of this
vast dark hallway with these rippled obsidian walls. The hallway's
got like wind billowing through it.

Speaker 2 (01:43:30):
Kind of a black mirrored surface on the floor.

Speaker 3 (01:43:33):
Yeah. Yeah, And this this hallway is supposed to be
the way back to reality. While sutter Kane goes to
the opposite end of the room. He's going to stand
by the wet door, the juicy door. He says, I
can't hold them back any longer. And then he reaches
up and tears away half of his face. But that's
not what it sounds like, because instead of peeling away
skin and revealing blood underneath, he tears away as paper.

(01:43:57):
His flesh is the page of a book, revealing only
a black void beneath.

Speaker 2 (01:44:02):
And I believe this is a digital effect, And what
is otherwise a film that has mostly like really great
practical effects, but this is not one of the at
least is by my judgment. For my money, this is
not one of those early digital effects that looks really
wonky by today's perspective like it is.

Speaker 3 (01:44:22):
It doesn't look like Mortal Kombat the movie.

Speaker 2 (01:44:24):
Yeah, it seems very conservative in execution. It knows exactly
what it's it can do and what they're trying to do,
and so I think it holds up.

Speaker 3 (01:44:33):
I would say it doesn't feel like digital imagery. It
feels like digital stitching together of conventional imagery. Yeah, but anyway,
I don't know. I was mixed on what I thought
about this. I don't want to criticize it because overall
I liked the movie so much and I was like
grooving with this moment. I don't know, I feel like
it maybe it could have looked a little bit better,
but I don't know anyway. So Styles at this point

(01:44:58):
starts reading from the manuscript and like they're like poking there.
Trent pokes his head into the ripped hole where where
Jurgen proc Now was And that's right, he's got to
see the holes in his not his hands, but the
holes in his pages, and so he leans his head
in and Styles reads from the manuscript of the book

(01:45:21):
called in the Mouth of Madness, where it describes Trent
looking down into the void and seeing the abominations that
are shrieking and coming out, coming for their world. And
so Trent starts to run away. He begs Styles to
come with him, but she says she can't. She's read
to the end and so she is doomed. She can't go.

(01:45:41):
So Trent runs down the dark hall he's pursued by
creatures coming out of the rip in the page, these
very lovecraft inspired beings.

Speaker 2 (01:45:49):
So oh, and these are amazing, like the practical effects
they clearly like. You don't see much of them. You
see glimpses of them either, you know, quick flashes from
far away, some glimpses up close. But they're very they're
very conservative in what they show you. But they also
clearly made some just amazing like myth Thos monsters to

(01:46:11):
roll down this hallway, and this all is just so
tightly edited together. It's just a perfect sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:46:18):
I like it because it does the It does the
love crafty and kind of monster the right way, which
is it doesn't let you see the whole thing. You
get these like glimpses of pieces of them, suggesting a
kind of piranha octopus elephant.

Speaker 2 (01:46:32):
Yes, yeah, yeah, like big almost goat legs, stomping down. Yeah.
They just show you little pieces of it, and it's
it's amazing. At least you have to stitch it all
together in your mind.

Speaker 3 (01:46:51):
Then, just as the creatures descend on Trent, Trent wakes
up elsewhere. He is at a crossroads in the daytime.
He meets a kid on a bike. There was a
sinister kid on a bike earlier, but now this just
seems like a normal kid. The kid gives them directions
to the highway. He asks him ever here of hobbs End,
and the kid shakes his head. Now, so Trent hitchhikes

(01:47:13):
back to civilization. He briefly stays at a motel where
he watches part of Robot Monster on TV Nice one
John Carpenter. He is obviously disturbed at this point. He
keeps checking himself out in the mirror. Something seems like
he's afraid he might be losing his mind. He tries
to initially dump the manuscript he's been given on the road.

(01:47:34):
When he first wakes up, but at the motel he
receives a package in the mail. It's another copy of
In the Mouth of Madness, and he burns this manuscript
page by page in the bathroom sink. He takes a
bus back to New York and sits next to a
lady who wants to tell him about how bad things
were back in her day. But then the lady this
was an LOL moment for me. She transforms into Sutter Cane.

(01:47:56):
After Trent wakes up from a nap.

Speaker 2 (01:47:58):
Oh yeah, and this is where we're can to get
a second double wake jump scare, and it's still great.

Speaker 3 (01:48:04):
Yeah, still good. The first wake up it's Cutter Kane
and he's like, I'm not going anywhere. I'm God, Now
you understand. Then we get another wake up and Trent
seems to be suffering from some light madness now on
the bus that the multiple dream jump scares. And then
later we see him yelling at people in some kind
of government office because they refuse to acknowledge that a

(01:48:27):
town called hobbs End exists anywhere in New Hampshire. We
also have a scene where he meets with Harglow, Sutter
Kane's publisher. Hardlow does not seem to believe Trent's story
and in fact denies ever having known anyone named Linda Styles.
He says that he sent Trent to look for Cain alone,
and then Trent realizes, oh no, Cain wrote her out.

(01:48:50):
She never existed, and Hearglow's like, you know, some readers
of Sutter Kaine's work have become affected. He's kind of,
you know, imply like you might want to check yourself
before any wrecking happens. And oh, and this is the
scene where it becomes clear that Harglow, despite being the
publisher of this popular fiction, that never reads it himself.

(01:49:13):
He's like, no, no, no, I don't have the stomach for it.
So oh, also we find out here that Trent believes
he has destroyed all the manuscripts, but a Harglows like,
oh no, no, not at all. You delivered the manuscript
to me a few months ago. Personally, it's already published.
It's in stores now. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:49:28):
Yeah. And then there's a movie in the work, so
you also sometimes oid, oh yeah, the movie comes out
like in a couple of months. And this is something
if anyone out there you know this says, now is
the time to capitalize and create a sequel to in
the Mouth of Madness. I think probably not a good
idea in general, But if you were to go with something,

(01:49:49):
what about the idea of the people within this fiction
who have to adapt a reality warping book into a
motion picture that will warp the minds of people who
don't read or haven't read the book. Yeah, I don't know.
I think there might be something there.

Speaker 3 (01:50:05):
I wonder. Yeah, that's a good point, because the whole
thing is everybody who reads it kind of goes mad
and starts mutating into a monster.

Speaker 2 (01:50:12):
Yeah, so I think if work, though, you have plenty
of cases where individual actors don't know the full picture
of what they're making. They just know their own lines,
they know their own scenes. I don't know, there might
be something interesting to create there with. You know, there's
a lot of interesting commentary to be had regarding like
the whole filmmaking engine and industry.

Speaker 3 (01:50:33):
We get a news report somewhere around here that the
two top stories are number one, lead story Sutter Kane's
latest novel still sits atop the bestseller list, and then
number two the second second story. Police are unable to
explain the wave of violent crimes committed by the clergy.
So Trent, now driven totally mad, shows up outside of

(01:50:56):
a bookstore with a fire axe and attacks a Suttercane
fan who was already bleeding from the eyes by the way,
just presumably from exposure to the book. And here we
cut back finally to the framing narrative. This is the
lead up to Sam Neil being put in the padded
room covered with crosses. David Warner, so remember him, He's

(01:51:17):
the one interacting with Trent. He seems to not deny
Trent's suggestion that things are getting bad out there, so
the chaos is spreading with each person who reads the book,
and Warner says, what about the people who don't read?
And then Trent smiles and reminds him, but there's a
movie now, you know. It's just I think it's just
time for it to come out. The opening just happened,

(01:51:39):
and Trent is in no hurry to leave the hospital.
He says it's safer in here now, and he gives
this monologue where he says he says every species can
smell its own extinction. The last one's left won't have
a pretty time of it, And in ten years, maybe less,
the human race will just be a bedtime story for
their children, a myth, nothing more.

Speaker 2 (01:52:01):
So really good, really creepy.

Speaker 3 (01:52:02):
Yeah, talking about the world being taken over by these
other beings. They're not just here to get us, They're
here also to I think, you know, they're going to
be sleeping in our beds when we're gone.

Speaker 2 (01:52:13):
A little bit of a little few shades of I
am legend there to some of the flavoring there too.
We become the myth.

Speaker 3 (01:52:19):
Yeah yeah. And then also there's this exchange between Warner
and Glover where which one asks the oh yeah, Glover
asks him, do you read Setter Kane?

Speaker 2 (01:52:30):
Yeah, And he doesn't answer. He keeps walking, and we
don't see what what what happens between the two of them,
But we're left to imagine, like I don't know, and
we we don't know. Maybe Warner's character doctor Wren does
make it out and I don't know, I mean, nothing
good is going to happen outside. But also it's possible
that Sapristine ends up killing Wren as well, like that

(01:52:51):
could be the next beat that we just don't see.

Speaker 3 (01:52:53):
David Warner becomes the Omega Man of the Uh in
the mouth of Madness universe. Yeah, he's got a calm pound. Anyway,
we're finally coming to the conclusion. So later that night,
there's thunder and lightning, screams and darkness in the hospital.
Something very bad is going on outside Trent's room, and

(01:53:14):
they seem to be people seem to be turning into monsters,
you know, general squealing and tentacles whipping, And finally the
door is ripped open with these giant claw marks in
the middle, and Trent wanders out in his scrubs covered
in crosses. The hallway is deserted, there's sparks shooting from
the wires and blood smeared on the walls. There's a
radio broadcast describing mass random homicide, mass mutation of people

(01:53:38):
into strange forms, and Trent wanders out of the hospital
onto the green lawn beyond. The streets are basically empty.
You can kind of just see people mulling about in
the distance and what they're doing.

Speaker 2 (01:53:49):
Yeah, you don't see monsters, for say, like you really
get the sense that it's almost like the change cuttercanes.
Change has washed over the world. But it's like a
like a like an electromagne pulse. It's just brought madness
in its wake and wiped everything out, and it's just
left this kind of apocalyptic wasteland.

Speaker 4 (01:54:08):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:54:08):
And then the final image of the movie, John Trent,
in his scrubs covered in the crosses, wanders up to
the cinema. He ends up going into a movie theater
where we see on the marquee outside that they are
playing in the Mouth of Madness, and he's on the poster, yep,
and he wanders in slowly. He gets popcorn somebody who's

(01:54:28):
still serving popcorn there. I guess maybe he scooped it himself.

Speaker 2 (01:54:31):
Yeah, there's always some popcorn left in one of those machines.
Kicky gets there.

Speaker 3 (01:54:35):
He's got the theater entirely to himself now and the
movie's playing, and it's the beginning of this movie. It's
the beginning of John Carpenter's in the Mouth of Madness.
He's watching himself in the opening scene of the movie
that you are now watching, and as he relives the story,
he starts to laugh louder and louder, mad laughter alone
in the theater, and that takes us to the end.

(01:54:58):
I think it's a brilliant ending image. And uh, in
a way, I kind of felt like, wow, that's that's us.
That's like, yeah, what we do that's where John Trent
in the theater there. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:55:11):
Yeah, It's it's a fabulous ending to the picture in
so many ways, like it's the ultimate culmination of this
of this doom. Uh. We see the you know in
the in a fitting horror literature way, like the the
ultimate descent into madness, cackling madness at the end. Uh
and and and of course Sam Neil delivers it so

(01:55:31):
perfectly where it's like the mad the mad laugh is
almost becoming anguish or is becoming anguish, uh and is
becoming unhinged. So it's you know, tremendous performance. And then
the music is beginning to to rev back up again
and uh yeah, and then we close out the film.
Uh yeah, just fabulous ending. And I will say it

(01:55:52):
makes me think of the it's kind of like the
opposite of the of the no Cole kidman a mc
lady uh in trope that you know, where she's talking
about how good heartbreak feels in a place like this.

Speaker 3 (01:56:01):
Movies can inspire us, Movies can make us transform into
beings with tentacles unknown.

Speaker 2 (01:56:07):
There you go, there you go.

Speaker 3 (01:56:12):
So hats off too. In the Mouth of Madness brilliant.
Loved it excellent, even better the second time than when
I last saw it. And Sam Neil, what a great show.

Speaker 2 (01:56:24):
Yeah, absolutely great performance. Absolutely all right. Well, we're going
to go and close this one out, but I'd love
to hear from anyone out there who has strong feelings
about In the Mouth of Madness or any of the
topics we've discussed here. I'm particularly interested to hear from
anyone who actually saw this in the theater. You know,
it's long been my I'm sure I've had the opportunity

(01:56:44):
over the years and haven't capitalized on it. But part
of me has always wanted to see it in the
theater because of this final scene. Wouldn't that be magical?
And maybe it would be maybe it would be a disappointment.
You kind of have to see it by yourself in
the theater get the maximum effect, and that's kind of
pricey to pull off.

Speaker 3 (01:57:00):
I would hope the audience would play along and I'll
go into maniacal laughter with him.

Speaker 2 (01:57:04):
Yeah yeah, but especially since this didn't do that well
in theaters, it's possible there's someone out there who saw
this in a theater by themselves, and that was what
an experience that would have been so right in. We
would love to hear from you. Let's see, just a
reminder to everyone out there that Stuff to Blow your
Mind is primarily a science and culture podcast, with core

(01:57:26):
episodes on Tuesdays and Thursday, short form on Wednesday and
on Fridays. We set aside most serious concerns, so just
talk about a weird film here on Weird House Cinema.
We're always open to suggestions for future episodes, and if
you go to a letterbox dot com you can pull
up a list of all the movies we've covered over
the years, and sometimes the peak ahead of what's coming
out next. The card is always subject to change, of course,

(01:57:47):
but generally you can get a good idea of what
we're going to do next. And let's see what else
can we tell you. We've been doing this show for years.
We've been doing Weird House Cinema for years. You can
find past episodes wherever you get audio podcasts, and if
you are a Netflix viewer, you can actually watch us
a little bit there, because we do the more recent

(01:58:09):
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reminded about new episodes.

Speaker 3 (01:58:19):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer JJ Posway.
If you would like to get in touch with us
with feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest
a topic for the future, or just to say hello,
you can email us at contact at stuff to Blow
your Mind dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:58:39):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
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