Weirdhouse Cinema Rewind: Prince of Darkness

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Hey, you welcome to Weird House Cinema. Rewind. This is
Rob Lamb. Today we are reairing our episode that originally
published eleven one, twenty twenty four. It is our episode
on John Carpenter's nineteen eighty seven film Prince of Darkness.
This one is a lot of fun. Love this movie.
Let's jump right in.

Speaker 2 (00:23):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iHeartRadio.

Speaker 1 (00:31):
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.

Speaker 3 (00:39):
And this is Joe McCormick. And hey, if everything is
going according to plan, this should have published the moment
after midnight on the night of Halloween. So so happy Halloween, everybody.
We are bringing you horror accordingly. Today we're going to
be talking about the nineteen eighty seven John Carpenter horror
film Prince of Darkness. And somehow I think this is

(01:02):
our first John Carpenter movie.

Speaker 1 (01:04):
It is, And we did talk about the Carpenter produced
and Carpenter scored Halloween three a while back, but this
is the very first time we're actually going to be
talking about a John Carpenter directed film. And we managed
to wait until our one hundred and eightieth Weird House
cinema selection to do this, so some of you might
find that a little surprising. I kind of find it

(01:25):
a little surprising, I guess in retrospect, because obviously you
and I are both big John Carpenter fans. Some of
his films are among our favorites, and we keep talking
about them on the show. Anytime there's a John Carpenter
connection in a movie or in a core episode of
Stuff to Blow Your Mind, we'll talk about it. Lord knows,
we'll talk about it. Why did it take us so long, though,

(01:48):
you know, I despite the fact that obviously we really
like John Carpenter films, and we also have listeners writing
and suggesting John Carpenter films a lot. I'll have to
get your thoughts on this, Joe. But for my own part,
I feel like I've always kind of been reluctant to
tackle one of the all time great favorite John Carpenter films,

(02:09):
you know, something like The Thing or Big Trouble in
Little China, because they're just so well known, they're beloved
and in some respects kind of perfect in their own way.
And on the other hand, I've been perhaps more tempted
to cover something like Ghosts of Mars one of his
late period pictures, but it also felt wrong for our
first Carpenter selection to be one of his less well

(02:31):
received movies. So I think nineteen eighty seven's Prince of
Darkness is perhaps the perfect pick. It's Carpenter during his
heyday and also Carpenter at peak creative control. It's also
one of his truly weirdest films, I think, and it
has a strong cult following.

Speaker 3 (02:49):
Yeah, this is a Carpenter sleeper the sleeper awakens. In fact,
even some people who are fans probably haven't seen this one.
It took me a long time after you know, I
first started watching Halloween, An Escape from New York and
all the big ones everybody sees first to get around
to Prince of Darkness, and when I did, I was

(03:09):
quite wowed by it. It remains very much in the
top tier of horror movies for me, especially in you know.
It's a great example of a concept we've talked about
on the show that I think maybe applies more to
John Carpenter films than to anything else, and that is
a rub the fur movie. Prince of Darkness is a

(03:31):
rub the fur movie. It is about a textural experience
an experience of sights and sounds that conjures a mood.
This movie is absolutely amazing at creating a feeling and
a mood through its use of music, through its use
of imagery, through its use of interesting ideas. And I

(03:54):
really like the way that it throws different themes together.
So one of the things that I think must have
been behind John Carpenter's like creative process for Prince of
Darkness is he must have read like a pop physics
book or like watched a documentary about quantum mechanics, Because
this movie is full of ideas about both science and religion.

(04:18):
He was trying to do some kind of sort of
sort of Christian infused but also sort of maybe Lovecraftian
or Eldrich demonic awakening idea, but then also mixing that
with ideas about quantum weirdness, some stuff about astronomy. He's
clearly like trying to put a bunch of different kinds

(04:41):
of themes that are usually kept separate into the blender.
And that's an impulse I really like. And I think
if you don't look too close at the way he
uses the scientific ideas, it really works if you start
if you actually know what he's talking about and start like,
you know, reading between the lines too much kind of
falls apart. But if you just lean back, you kind

(05:03):
of you kind of tune out just a little bit
during the scientific parts. I think it is super nice.

Speaker 1 (05:10):
Yeah, yeah, I mean this this is ultimately a pretty
ambitious film, right, I mean, it's from a number of standpoints.
It's like it was a three million dollar picture, it
was an independent picture coming off of a lot of
studio work for Carpenter, and it attempts to weave in
all of these quantum physics and quantum mechanics ideas that
the Carpenter, you know, says that he'd been reading a

(05:31):
lot of this kind of thing. He'd read several books
about quantum mechanics, and that it had kind of like
a profound impact on him. Like he described it as
kind of like a shift in worldview based on what
he was reading. So you have that going on, and
then at the same time, this is something that really
came out when I was listening to the the commentary
track for this film, which I'll discuss more about that

(05:54):
in a bit. But he's talking with one of the
actors in the picture, Peter Jason, and it's neat because Jason,
of course is coming at it with a very actor's
standpoint when it comes to the questions, he's asking Carpenter
about the production and the process, and Carpenter of course
is approaching it from the view of the director and
the writer, but especially from the standpoint of the director.

(06:17):
And I think one detail that kind of from the
commentary track that kind of highlights these different views is
when they're talking about the scenes where they're first going
down into the basement. We'll get to the basement and
all this as you know, this sort of ruinous basement
that has lit by like hundreds of candles, and you know,
they're kind of having fun with the picture, riffing almost

(06:38):
a certain extent, and Jason's like, who who let all
these candles? And you know, Carpenter's like, well, you know,
this is just this is just great lighting. You know,
this just it just looks really cool, you know, And
I think that gets to the rub the fur aspect
of the picture. And then rub the fur, you know,
you can talk about again, you can definitely think about
it in terms of just sights and sounds, but it's
also there in the ideas, you know, in the way

(06:59):
ideas are sprinkled through it. And it's not only about
like what is given to you, but oh also what's
not given to you. There are a number of scenes
in this picture where we get audio free clips of
characters clearly discussing the implications of whatever is going on.
So we don't even have all the details. We just
have various nuggets of quantum physics and theology thrown at us.

(07:25):
And you know, again, yeah, if you lean back into
the chair and you let them wash over you, it's
a pretty great experience.

Speaker 3 (07:31):
I agree. I think that's exactly right, and I would
phrase it this way. I think the use of both
science and religion, the scientific and religious themes in the
movie is primarily esthetic. It is not primarily about how
either one actually works or what is actually true. It's

(07:52):
to create an aesthetic effect. And that's not a bad thing.
I mean, like, I think it is used quite well
as another type of texture. It's an idea texture, a
theme texture that fits in with the sights and sounds
and ultimately the whole it's all adding up to a feeling,
a mood, and it is a powerful, powerful mood.

Speaker 1 (08:12):
Well, I'll tell you what I have an elevator pitch
for this movie, and it is the following The Devil's
in the details and also in a big cylinder of
green liquid.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
Yeah, you know, it's an idea that works better in
practice than it does in theory. If you were to
actually explain the concept here that, yeah, Satan is physically
real and he is a volume of green liquid inside
a jar. I don't know. That just doesn't sound as
effective as the movie actually is.

Speaker 1 (08:39):
Yeah. I think in one of our most recent episodes
of Weird House, or maybe it was a core episode
I mentioned in Passing like movies that talk about evil
as an actual physical presence or substance, and this movie
kind of gets into that territory, but also ultimately I
think makes it work within the context of the film
in ways that it maybe doesn't in others.

Speaker 3 (08:59):
Yeah, we were talking about this in the House of
Ushare episode.

Speaker 1 (09:01):
Yeah, all right, Well, let's go ahead and listen to
a little bit of trailer audio here, which is we're
not gonna listen to the whole trailer, but hopefully we'll
get just a little splash of some of the dialogue
from it and a little taste of that excellent John
Carpenter Alan Howarth score that we're gonna be talking about.

(10:13):
All right, So hey, if you want to go see
Prince of Darkness before we proceed here. It is widely available.
You can stream it, you can rent it, you can
buy it physically. I watched it on the Shout Factory
Blu ray, which is pretty great, complete with three bonus
interviews and a full audio commentary track from Carpenter and
actor Peter Jason, who has a minor part here but

(10:35):
is a friend and frequent Carpenter cast member. This was
his first Carpenter film. Carpenter's audio commentaries with folks are
always entertaining and insightful. This one's no exception. I actually
I generally say I don't have time for audio commentaries
on movies anymore, and that's mostly true. And yet somehow
I ended up watching this movie all the way through,
and then watching half of it again with the commentary track.

Speaker 3 (10:57):
It's just that good. I remember listening to Way Carpenter
and Jamie Lee Curtis commentary track somewhere that was adorable.
It was great.

Speaker 1 (11:05):
Oh yeah I haven't. I haven't done that one. But yeah,
they're they're generally very well regarded. You know, it's just
very cool to hear Carpenter, you know, shoot the ball
with people that clearly he you know, pre picks knowing
that this is somebody that he has a rapport with
and can chat with about the film.

Speaker 3 (11:21):
I think Peter Jason does he play the He's like
a chemistry professor in this movie who spends a significant
amount of time walking around doing like kazoo noises with
his mouth. Yes, yeah, that's the one, Peter, I've got
the perfect part for you. All right, Well, let's let's

(11:48):
talk about the folks involved here, starting of course with
John Carpenter. He directed it. He wrote it under a pseudonym,
but it's pretty obvious that you know, everyone knows this
is a On Carpenter scripted film. Did he call himself
Martin quator Mass.

Speaker 1 (12:03):
Yes, yes, a reference to the films that he was
inspired by. That also, you know, have some direct inspiration
on the plot of this picture, you know, ancient evil
buried beneath the ground, that sort of thing. Nice And
of course yes see he did the score as well.
Born nineteen forty eight, living legend director of some of

(12:25):
the most iconic horror and sci fi films. Of the
late seventies and the entire nineteen eighties, who also played
a very key role in the birth of an entire dark,
ambient synth wave sound like There's just you know, there
are other important influences on that kind of sound out
there from horror and sci fi soundtrack, but John Carpenter

(12:45):
is a very important part of that equation.

Speaker 3 (12:48):
I had some plans to talk about this later, but
I might as well mention it now. I think that
John Carpenter not only creates great scores electronic scores for
his own movie. I think in many cases the movie
is only as effective as it is with his score.
Not to take away from the rest of the movie.

(13:09):
I mean, like, you know, he's got a great sense
of where to put the camera. You know, he's got
a good photographic style, and I like the stories he
writes and all that. So other filmmaking elements are strong
as well, But it is the score he creates for
the film that locks it all into place, that creates
the feeling that you associate with the movie. Try to

(13:30):
imagine Halloween without the John Carpenter score just sub in
what you would imagine for some other generic horror movie score.
It would still be, I think, a pretty good movie,
but it would not be anything like what it is.
And I think the same is true for all of
the movies that Carpenter scores himself. It's definitely the case here.

Speaker 1 (13:50):
Yeah, absolutely, So we really don't have to tell most
of you who John Carpenter is. You know, he's responsible
for such iconic films as seventy eight, Halloween, eighty on's
Escape from Me Go, eighty two is The Thing, eighty
six is, Big Trouble in Little China in nineteen ninety
four is in the Mouth of Madness, just to name
a few. He came out of the USC School of
Cinematic Arts in the late sixties and ultimately skyrocketed with

(14:13):
the success of Halloween. This film, eighty seven's Prince of
Darkness is notable for being his first independent film after
a string of big studio commercial movies, coming immediately on
the heels of the box office disappointment of Big Trouble
in Little China, which of course has gone on to
become a much loved cult classic, but at the time

(14:36):
it did not succeed.

Speaker 3 (14:38):
I think a lot of people didn't get it when
it came out. It was only kind of looking back
that people started to realize the genius.

Speaker 1 (14:44):
Yeah, so he's coming off of that. Carpenter has said
in interviews that he was worn out by the big
studio process and really wanted to make a lower budget
film that was completely on his own terms. And that's
what Prince of Darkness is. It's a weird, doomy contemplation
on religion and quantum mechanics, which Carpenter, you know, always

(15:04):
a science nerd, had been reading about leading up to
this production. And it's also a film that may comment
to some degree, maybe even almost subconsciously or subliminally on
the on his desire to break free from the tyrannical
order of big studio productions, you know, like you can
you can maybe pick up on a little sort of
like post studio angst in the in the way that

(15:28):
he's formulating things.

Speaker 3 (15:29):
Oh, there is a great part where they're discussing the
secrets kept by the Brotherhood of Sleep and Donald Pleasant
starts talking about how, you know, we we fed the
people what we thought they wanted a lie. It was
all a lie. I want to tell them the truth now.

Speaker 1 (15:44):
Yeah. Yeah, so it's it's in a way, this movie's
kind of. It has a meanness and you know, also
kind of a graphicness that you don't see in a
lot of other Carpenter films. I mean not to say, yeah,
you can look at the Thing and it's grotesque, but
this movie is also pretty violent and grotesque in its
own way. It's often situated with the Thing and in

(16:05):
the mouth of madness as being part of his Apocalypse trilogy. Yeah,
it's one of the bloodier ones. It also is clearly
a siege film, which he's quick to point out. And
it has a Howard Hawksian ensemble cast featuring several actors
that Carpenter handpicked to work with. Again, you know, mostly
people he liked working with and was excited to have

(16:25):
on a production like this. It made a reported fourteen
point two million off of a budget of three million,
and so he followed it up with They Live, which
was nearly identical in terms of creative control, budget and
box office. Carpenter's last full length director oorial effort was
twenty tens The Ward, but he's remained active, of course
as a composer, often working with his son Cody.

Speaker 3 (16:47):
Now, did you say in one of the commentaries you
were listening to that, Carpenter admitted to his obsession with
video games because I don't remember where I came across this,
but I generally had it in my head that is
like obsessed with playing like I don't know, NBA JAM,
like like sports, video games for the PlayStation and stuff.

Speaker 1 (17:08):
Oh yeah, I mean numerous interviews will bring up video games.
And even in this commentary track, which was I think,
you know, over a decade ago that it was recorded,
you know, he's mostly like, yeah, I'm not as tuned
into the you know what people, you know, what's going
on with horror movies these days, and mostly just do
sports and video games. And I've seen other interviews where
people ask him with what he's playing, and there's always
some sort of like shooter sports game I guess that

(17:29):
he's into. So, you know, you know, more power to him.
He's a big gamer.

Speaker 3 (17:34):
Yeah, fair enough, John. You know, you made a bunch
of good ones. You don't have to keep up with
what's what's great this year. Yeah, play video games.

Speaker 1 (17:42):
I should also point out Carpenter points to several influences
on the plot of this picture, one of them being
Gregory Benford's novel Timescape from nineteen eighty. That's a I
haven't read it, but apparent it's a novel that involves
messages from the future sent via hypothetical faster than lie
Tachyon particles.

Speaker 3 (17:59):
Oh, this ties into one of my favorite things in
the movie, The Dreams and from the Future. I guess
we'll get into that in the plot section. But I
love that convention here and the way it's realized as
a kind of staticky like you know, third generation VHS
copy video message is so good.

Speaker 1 (18:18):
Yeah. Now, again, this is a fairly expansive ensemble cast,
and we can't cover everyone here or do go into
great detail, so I'm probably gonna have to be a
little briefer than usual. All right, First of all, top billing,
we have Donald Pleasants playing an unnamed priest. He's just
credited as priest.

Speaker 3 (18:35):
Yeah, I was trying to so some sources I found
online called him. I think father Loomis. I don't think
that name is ever said in the movie, and I
don't see that in anything official. That might just be
something the Internet made up.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
He's he is very Loomis esque, Like it's impossible not
to compare this role as a troubled priest fighting against
evil to the other major role in she played a
troubled priest fighting against evil as Loomis and Halloween. It's
also similar to the character he played in The Devil's
Men that we previously discussed on the show.

Speaker 3 (19:09):
Oh no, the Devil's Man. He's much better in this
than he was in The Devil's Men. Yeah, but it
is very similar to his Halloween performance. In both cases,
he is playing a He is playing a haunted, disturbed
cleric of sorts who is motivated by a fear of
what's to come and guilt for what he in some

(19:30):
small part, played a role in releasing into the world. Yeah.

Speaker 1 (19:33):
Yeah. Pleasants lived nineteen nineteen through nineteen ninety five, and he,
of course not only appeared in Carpenter's Halloween. He was
also an Escape from New York, in which he played
the President of the United States.

Speaker 3 (19:45):
May God have messy on you all.

Speaker 1 (19:48):
He often played these really like, very dry, serious characters,
but it's said to be quite humorous behind the scenes,
and you know, everybody seems to have really nice things
to say about working with him. All Right. Up next,
we have the actor and character that are essentially positioned
as the leading man. But again very strong ensemble sensibilities here.
But this is the character Brian Marsh played by Jamison

(20:11):
Parker born nineteen forty seven.

Speaker 3 (20:14):
Is this supposed to be our Tom Atkins for the film?

Speaker 1 (20:18):
I think so, our mustachioed, handsome eighties leading man. Sometimes
he just hangs out like he's working alone in his
apartment or house at night. He's just he's got his
shirt open so he can show off his muscles to nobody.

Speaker 3 (20:34):
He's got some muscles, though he does.

Speaker 1 (20:36):
A man's in good shape. Jamison Parker was mostly known
for playing the Simon without a mustache on TV Simon
and Simon, so in this movie he's the one with
the mustache. And he worked several times with Simon and
Simon co star Gerald McRaney, the dad from The Never
Ending Story. So I mean this is mostly what he's

(20:57):
known for, also, of course remembered for this picture. And
you know he's perfectly fine in this no complaints. Again,
He's essentially the leading man that exists mostly within an
ensemble cast of characters.

Speaker 3 (21:09):
You know, I will say I love love Prince of Darkness,
but I will say I think deeply developed characters is
not this movie's strong suit. Instead of having characters that
we get to know super well and are very well defined,
we have a lot of characters. I would say the
most interesting singularly defined character in the movie is the

(21:29):
physics professor Barak, played by Victor Wong.

Speaker 1 (21:33):
Yes, Victor Wong, who of nineteen twenty seven through two
thousand and one Chinese American character actor, easily best remembered
for his role as the wizard egg Shin in Carpenter's
Big Trouble in Little China, but he also had a
great role in the cult classic monster film Trimmers, which
also had a great ensemble cast, and he was also
in nineteen eighty seven's The Last Emperor. Other credits include

(21:54):
eighty five's Year of the Dragon, eighty six is Shanghai
Surprise that as it's a Madonna movie, Memory Serves, and
also The Golden Child with Eddie Murphy nineteen ninety three,
is the Joy Luck Club in nineteen ninety seven Seven
Years in Tibet.

Speaker 3 (22:08):
I always love Victor Wong. Of course I love him
in Big Trouble in Little China, and I love him
in this. He has such a strong, like good magic,
comforting aura. He's almost like the good Witch Glinda when
he appears, you know, does that make any sense?

Speaker 1 (22:26):
Yeah? Yeah, it's like there's he's able to bring a
certain wisdom to everything that he's saying, you know. And
we'll get into when we can do examples from his
various physics lectures. But I think it's interesting because I
think you could say the same for Donald Pleasants and
Victor Wong. Both of them are really great at making
you believe the things that they're saying, no matter what

(22:46):
kind of dialogue they're given. You're like, Yeah, this guy
knows what he's talking.

Speaker 3 (22:50):
About absolutely, And I really like the way he plays
this character too, So not just in delivering, say, these
strange physics lectures about you know, the other characters say
about like the student characters say about him that he
is a physics professor, but he's almost more interested in
turning his students into philosophers than scientists, because he's really

(23:12):
captured by the ideas the implications of the quantum mechanics
that he teaches, and so he does come out he
does portray that well as like the man wrapped up
in not just how the science works, but what it
means for our lives, and he clearly like he gets
lost in thought about that and wants other people to

(23:33):
understand to the extent he does, how strange all this
is and how much it should shake them to their core.
But I also like the way that he plays this
role as as physically feeble but mentally tough. Like he
sort of plays the character. He's very kind of slow
moving and almost sort of with a limp or something
in the way he walks, but he doesn't get as

(23:56):
easily mentally shaken as a lot of the other characters.

Speaker 1 (23:59):
Yeah, yeah, again, it's you know, it's probably that strong
wisdom rating for his character. All right, let's see next,
we have the character Catherine Danforth played by Lisa Blount,
who lived nineteen fifty seven through twenty ten. Along with
most of the characters, she's part of the Professor's assembled

(24:20):
science team, and as we'll see, she's also the love
interest of the character Brian Marsh. Best known for her
Golden Globe nominated performance in nineteen eighty two as an
officer and a Gentleman. Her other credits include nineteen eighty
one's Dead and Buried, nineteen eighty four's Radioactive Dreams, and
What Waits Below, eighty seven's Night Flyers and nineteen eighty

(24:41):
nine Blind Fury. She also produced three projects, including the
Academy Award winning short film The Accountant in two thousand
and one that starred and was directed by her husband
Ray McKinnon and co starred Walton Goggins, both both fine actors.

Speaker 3 (24:56):
Oh Goggins connection. As I said earlier, a lot the
student characters, maybe including our supposed leading man Brian, are
not super well defined. I think Catherine is one of
the slightly more interesting ones. She has there's something unspoken
about her backstory, Like there are moments she has with
Brian where they're talking about like why she seems to

(25:19):
have a kind of pessimistic outlook about say love, or
about the future. Why she seems to have a lot
of doubts about herself, and she often doesn't want to
explain what the cause of that is, and so we're
just sort of left to fill that in ourselves. But yeah,
she's presented as this character who has I don't know,

(25:39):
who has a kind of darkness, who has doubts, but
she does essentially save the day in the end, the
bridging into the dark world where the father of Satan resides.
More on that later is ultimately that is stopped by
an act of heroism by Catherine.

Speaker 1 (25:55):
Yeah. Yeah, all right. Next we have the character Walter
played by Dennis Dunne born nineteen fifty two. This is
another big trouble in Little China alumni. He also appeared
in nineteen eighty five's A Year of the Dragon and
eighty seven's The Last Emperor American actor of Chinese descent
with the credits and TV film and stage. His role
is interesting because he is the funniest character, but he

(26:18):
is also it's important to distress, not a comic relief character,
Like he is not there just to make a few
jokes and then get killed by a monster or anything
like that. Like, he has a lot of personality and
he brings a lot of legitimate humor to the role.
But he's also a character that you're pretty invested in,
So I don't know, he feels almost like co male
lead in the film.

Speaker 3 (26:39):
Yeah, I would say it's not that he functions as
comic relief within the plot. I would say that the
character the main characteristic of his character is that he
is a jokester and he in fact deals with fear
by making jokes, which is the thing a lot of people.
Do you know that's a common character, You know, you
can recognize that character trait in others, the people whose
impulse when things start getting tense or scary is to

(27:02):
start trying harder and harder to be funny.

Speaker 1 (27:04):
Yeah, all right. Next we have Kelly. Kelly is played
by Susan Blanchard born nineteen forty four. She's another member
of the science team. I don't remember what her discipline
is off the top of my head. She has a
bit the physics group by physics. Grip Oh, she's physics.
She's the blonde member of the team. She becomes really

(27:25):
important in the final act. So more on that in
a bet. She also appeared in They Live and was
on tpe's Policewoman. All right. Then we have the character
Susan Cabot played by Anne Marie Howard born nineteen sixty
This is the science team member with the piercing eyes.
Do you remember what her discipline is?

Speaker 3 (27:43):
Also, I don't remember her discipline. But she's the one
who's working down in the basement with the cylinder of goo.
She has the glasses. Multiple characters refer to her by
saying glasses.

Speaker 1 (27:55):
Yeah, And then of course she becomes the first person
to be possessed. So minor spoiler there, but hey, and
she loses the glasses and becomes the creepy possessed woman
for the rest of the film, which she does a
great job at.

Speaker 3 (28:07):
She goes around essentially urinating satanic fluid out of her
mouth into other people's mouths.

Speaker 1 (28:14):
Exactly, which is great. I mean, how many other films
do you have this sort of like possessed zombie vampire
that uses like a projectial green liquid to infect others.
That is pretty great. This is essentially her first film role,
which she followed up with a stint on Days of
Our Lives and has had a long career acting in

(28:35):
mostly television. I think some solid stage credits as well.
All right, up next, we have the character Lisa played
by Ann yin one of only a handful of credits
for her that include According to IMDb, anyway, there's always
possibility something's crossed here, but they have listed a nineteen
eighty Chinese film called What Is Love? And then she

(28:56):
does a few other things. She does this movie and
then finally has an episode of TVs in a in
color and then I don't know, well what happened to
her after that, but I thought she was pretty good. Here.
She's like a computer person, right.

Speaker 3 (29:07):
No, no, no, she's well, she's using a computer. But no,
she's brought in as a theology student because they need
someone to translate the ancient languages in the book that
is kept by the Brotherhood of Sleep. That's right, So.

Speaker 1 (29:20):
She's doing a lot of translation work on the computers.

Speaker 3 (29:22):
Yes, she's like just looking at the book and apparently
not needing to use any reference resources or anything. She
just like looks at the Brotherhood of Sleep book and like, okay,
that's Coptic, and then just starts typing in English on
the computer, doing it straight from the head. I mean,
that's impressive. I think even most professional, you know, language
scholars probably need to use some reference materials when they're

(29:45):
translating things. But yeah, so she's the one who's like
translating the book. So she gives us a lot of
like creepy statements that are coming from this ancient tone.
But then also she has one of my favorite scary
moments in the movie, where after she gets possessed by
the Satanic fluid, she's sitting at the computer and just
like staring ahead, not not looking at the screen, but

(30:07):
like looking off to the side and just typing repeatedly,
over and over, and then you see the screen and
it just says I live. I live, like a million times.

Speaker 1 (30:16):
Peter Jason, in the commentary tract did comment that, hey,
she's like acting and using a computer and it looks believable.
I can't do that. He's like making a case like
most actors can't do that. We don't know how to
use computers. That's why we're acting. So found that amusing.
So I'm going to skip various members of the science
team here, but yeah, I'll mention that. Yeah. Peter Jason

(30:37):
born nineteen forty four appears here in the first of
seven collaborations with John Carpenter. Alice Cooper the rock Star
born nineteen forty eight has a small role as a
possessed man who, as we'll discuss, also essentially brought his
own special effects with him for one scene, and then
visual effects supervisor Robert Grasmere is also in it as

(31:02):
an actor. He has a memorable role in the film
because he gets to die not once, but twice. This
was only Grassmere's third movie as a visual effects supervisor,
but he went on to serve on such films as
eighty seven is the Running Man, nineteen nineties Predator, two,
ninety three's Demolition Man, and twenty twenty one's Barb and
Star go to Vista del mar So in a lot

(31:23):
of different films.

Speaker 3 (31:24):
Oh, but if we're talking about the scientists, we got
to talk about one of my favorites, which is Calder
the Microbiologist.

Speaker 1 (31:31):
I think, yes, he's tremendous. Jesse Lawrence Ferguson, who lived
nineteen forty one through twenty nineteen. He's kind of forgettable
early on, you know, he's just one of the scienced crew,
but he goes on to seemingly just have a blast
playing a possessed version of his character, engaging in all

(31:52):
manner of like strange facial expressions, and I think he's
the only one that laughs. And he has this just
completely unhinged laugh that he does that really adds to
the creepiness deering, Like like the final part of the picture.

Speaker 3 (32:07):
It's it's so good, hats off to him. It's like
I am the devil now and it's hilarious and he's
it's only but it's a laugh that he's not just
laughing maniacally like outright laughter. It's like he is trying
to keep from laughing, but he can't stop himself. And
that's what makes it so good.

Speaker 1 (32:26):
Demonic laughter like bubbling out of him. It's so good.

Speaker 3 (32:30):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
Now he was a He was an actors stage and
screen who appeared in a fair number of things, including
nineteen eighty four's Buckaru Bonzai eighty six is Neon Maniacs.
I do not remember him from theon MANIAX, but I
have seen that film, nineteen nineties dark Man, and nineteen
ninety one's Boys in the Hood. Great voice, great voice, talent,
let's see of note. Gary B. Kibbi is cinematographer on

(32:53):
this with nineteen forty one through twenty twenty. He'd previously
worked as a camera operator on some films, and this
was his first film as director of photoghography. Followed by
They Live, he went unto work on several different John
Carpenter films and then finally Yes the score we already
credited Carpenter and again this is one of several collaborations
with musician Alan Howarth. You can find the score wherever

(33:16):
you get your music streaming or otherwise. But if you
want something physical, Sacred Bones Records, who have worked extensively
with John Carpenter, have a really beautiful box set that
includes a blu ray of the film. Real quick, now
that I'm looking at the picture of the blu ray,
I'm again reminded of the box art for this film.
The poster art for this film with like the screaming

(33:37):
face and the green lightning stemming from some sort of
a church. Long before I ever actually watched this picture,
I do distinctly remember seeing that VHS box art on
the shelf at VHS rentals stores, and it always kind
of like scared me and captivated me from a very
young age. So solid, solid poster.

Speaker 3 (33:59):
Who's face is this? Is this anybody from the movie?
Not that I recall.

Speaker 1 (34:04):
I don't know for certain that it may Yeah, it
may just be nobody. It's just an evocative poster, which is,
you know, sometimes the case.

Speaker 3 (34:12):
Can I say something about the marketing for the movie.
I am impressed that they managed to resist just putting
Alice Cooper on the cover.

Speaker 1 (34:20):
Yes. I also think it is very admirable that despite
the fact that Alice Cooper has a song title Prints
of Darkness that is like technically on the soundtrack, and
yet is not the closing credits song, or at least
I don't. It's not the initial closing credit song. Maybe
they play it later on after I stop watching the credits.
But this is a film that has a tremendous music obviously,

(34:45):
and a tremendous endpoint, like the final shot in the
film is perfect, and the music matches with it perfectly
and feeds into the end credit song that is Carpenter
and Howarth. I wouldn't change that for the world. I'm
so glad we don't switch over into a rock number
at that point.

Speaker 3 (35:03):
Yeah, that's right. I mean, as I said earlier, the
use of music in this movie is perfect and it
is what makes the film work as well as it does.
Not that there aren't a lot of other great things
about the movie, but the music is the glue that
holds everything together and does the most work of anything
to establish the intended feeling of the movie. So yeah,

(35:24):
you couldn't mess with that, I think. Yeah, I totally agree.
If as soon as you cut to the credits you
went to a rock song, I think that would be
a real bummer. That would really spoil it.

Speaker 1 (35:42):
All, right, Well, let's dive into the plot proper here.

Speaker 3 (35:45):
So the action opens with that ominous theme music. It
consists of a deep electronic pulse that bounces kind of
like a hammer on a harpsichord string. But then it
also has these high synthesized tones that sound kind of
like choirs, but not so much singing but sighing. I

(36:06):
love that sighing voice they've created there. I don't know
exactly what that is, but this music keeps playing as
we go through the opening shots of the movie, and
the first I would say the first ten minutes or
so of the movie function kind of like a montage
where we don't follow any individual character character all that long. Instead,

(36:30):
it's more like a montage where we cut back and
forth between credits and then different characters, settings, and important props.
So it's kind of like a survey of the game
pieces being laid out on the board, except it is
charged with this incredibly strong combination of dread, anticipation, and
unstoppable forward momentum, all created by the music. And I

(36:54):
think somewhat famously, this opening credits montage goes on for
like nine or ten minutes.

Speaker 1 (37:00):
Yeah, Yeah, it's a good one though. It really brings
the intrigue following these characters around, establishing who they are
and what's happening in this world.

Speaker 3 (37:08):
So the first thing we see is the full moon
in a black sky with reflected moonlight almost a shade
of pink.

Speaker 1 (37:16):
Yeah, this is one of many great mate paintings in
the film by Jan Dan Janfirth Here. Anytime you see
characters looking up at the sky and there's something weird
going on with the sky, it's a great mat painting.

Speaker 3 (37:25):
And by the way, I'm going to describe this opening
montage in a good bit of detail to kind of
help create the feeling. But then, so after we see
the moon, we see inside a room and the moonlight
falls through a circular window that's criss crossed with bars.
Underneath the window, an old an old man lies alone
in a small bed. Across from him, there's a heavy

(37:47):
black wooden door on the far wall, a crucifix, a candlestick,
and a framed image of a saint, so we think
this guy's probably a priest. Then we close on his face.
He seems to be struggling, drawing his last breath, and
then his hand falls away. From something that he has
been clutching. It is a tiny silver box. Then we

(38:08):
get the title John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. Next, we
open on daylight on a university campus and there are
students gathered under shady green trees. They're walking along paved
pathways between the buildings and we fall in with one
of our main characters. This is Brian Marsh played by
Jamison Parker. He's fit, blonde with a mustache, wearing a

(38:30):
neatly tucked red polo shirt, carrying a leather satchel, and
he walks to the foreground of the shot and pauses
while the music kind of pulls you along, and this
is the camera getting to know him. Across the courtyard,
he sees another major character, Catherine Danforth played by Lisa Blount,
talking to another woman before class. Catherine is red haired,

(38:51):
dressed casually in a denim jacket, holding a stack of
books and binders in the crook of her arm. She
looks she's like a good natured nerd. Then back to
the room of the priest in the morning, a nun
knocks on the door, comes inside and finds him dead
with the silver box resting on his midsection. Later, we
see the nun talking to Donald Pleasants also a priest

(39:13):
dressed as a priest. Don't know if that needs to
be said, but yeah, we established he's a priest. She's
talking to him about the fact that she found this
other priest unconscious. His name was Father Carlton, and he
was taken to the hospital, but he never woke up again.
Donald Pleasant asks why Father Carlton was here in the
first place. Where are they? Well, they appear to be

(39:33):
in some kind of headquarters of the Catholic hierarchy, because
the nun says he had an appointment with his Imminence
this afternoon. Oh, his Eminence, so important business going on
within the church. Donald Pleasance sits down and begins investigating
what happened here by reading doctor Carlton's handwritten journals, and

(39:53):
the header on this handwritten journal entry is the Brotherhood
of Sleep. Now it cuts away before you can read
everything on the page. I actually did stop to see
what it actually says and take down everything. It's actually
not as interesting as they didn't intend for you to
read this whole part. It starts with like I can
no longer keep silent as to this dreadful secret. We'll

(40:14):
get more intriguing Brotherhood of Sleep stuff as we go along.
It does eventually zoom in on one particular part that
says says the sleeper awakens, I have witnessed his stirrings,
felt the cold, hellish blast. Now next, we're going to
meet the character of the physics professor Howard Barrack played
by Victor Wong. He is walking class with the heavy briefcase,

(40:37):
dressed in a wool blazer with at least five pins
in his shirt pocket, so he is a professor, but
he's also dressed very classically professorially, and he comes off
as preoccupied with his obscure curiosities and research questions. And
as he heads to class, something gets his attention in
the sky, so he puts things down and he crosses

(40:58):
his fingers over his eyes to block the light, and
then looks up toward the sun. We see the sun
shining through the clouds, and then right next to the
sun in the middle of the day is a crescent moon.
And then the camera shows us he doesn't see this,
but the camera shows us nearby on the ground, red
ants swarming ferociously over a mound in the grass, and

(41:21):
this will establish a theme that happens a lot in
the movie where characters stop and they kind of look
up in the sky or look toward the sun as
if they feel like something is wrong. And then we
see the sun and it's just sort of hidden by
the clouds sometimes or partially hidden. It's like shining through
some thin clouds and music lets It's like the music

(41:44):
lets us know that there is something wrong with the sky,
something wrong with the sun, but nobody is ever able
to say what it is. People don't really talk about it.
It's just this feeling of unease about the atmosphere. And
I love this.

Speaker 1 (41:59):
Yeah. Quick note on the bugs. There are a lot
of bugs in this picture. And there was just one
really brief moment in the audio commentary where Peter Jason
asked Carpenter says, like a lot of bugs here, where
did they come from? And Carpenter's like, oh, you know,
we had a bug wrangler, And Jason says that sounds expensive,
and Carpenter says, it's not that bad. I don't know

(42:19):
why I love that exchange so.

Speaker 3 (42:21):
Much compared to getting Alice Cooper come.

Speaker 1 (42:24):
On Alice Cooper, by the way, that it was kind
of funny. He was cast in the film because his
agent was one of the producers of the picture. So
like that was kind of like the meet up, like
how they kind of like I think they also met
at WrestleMania or something Wrestleman. Heir three, I want to say,
And so he was like, I'd love to be in
a horror movie a big horror movie fan, and they're like,

(42:45):
you know, it came together. And then also, as we'll discuss,
Alice Cooper had a particular impalement gag that he would
do on stage and they were like, Oh, that's great,
let's do a version of that in this picture.

Speaker 3 (42:59):
And they do, Oh, is this where he stabs the
stabs the nerdy guy with a bicycle?

Speaker 1 (43:04):
Yeah? Yeah, I think the stage version is a microphone
stand and they adapted it for to be a bicycle
in this Yeah. It's pretty great. Though, more on that
when it occurs.

Speaker 3 (43:14):
I can't promise more on that because I don't know
what else to say. He just gets stabbed with the bicycle.

Speaker 1 (43:19):
Well, okay, I'll go ahead and say. What happens is
Alice Cooper's character, who's zombified, stabs a guy through with
the bicycle's got half a bicycle with like a you know,
like a part of the frame sticking out that you
can pail somebody with. And then that leaves the guy
to like slump over, impaled over like the bicycle wheel

(43:40):
and so forth. However, nobody then you kind of expect
a zombie to then come behind the victim, pick up
his legs wheelbarrel style, and then turn him into a
wheelbarrow and wheelbarrow him off. That does not happen. It's
still a great scene though, all.

Speaker 3 (43:56):
Right, So the montage continues. Oh, we get one I
thought funny shot of Donald Pleasant standing in the courtyard
of this church office building dramatically opening the silver box
and pulling out a comically oversized key. And then we
get one of these classroom scenes with dialogue. So some
of these scenes are silent, some talking in them. In

(44:19):
this one, we hear Professor Barak delivering a lecture on
quantum physics to a classroom of graduate students, including Brian
and Catherine, the characters we saw earlier, and a bunch
of the other characters that we'll see get possessed by
the devil or killed later. And I'm just going to
read the quote what Professor Barack says. He says, let's
talk about our beliefs and what we can learn about them.

(44:40):
We believe nature is solid and time a constant. Matter
has substance and time a direction. There is truth in
flesh and the solid ground. The wind may be invisible,
but it's real. Smoke, fire, water, light. They're different, not
as to stone or steal, but they're tangible. And we
assume time has an because it is as a clock.

(45:02):
One second is one second for everyone. Cause precedes effect,
fruit rots, water flows downstream. We're born, we age, we die.
The reverse never happens. None of this is true. Say
goodbye to classical reality because our logic collapses at the
sub atomic level into ghosts and shadows.

Speaker 1 (45:23):
That's pretty great, especially the way it's punctuated there, and
it ties into one of the basic themes of the
film that everything you thought you knew about science, religion,
and the universe is wrong. So you know, some strong
cosmic horror elements there, like the safety net that you
thought was there is not there at all, and the
yawning cosmos is more terrifying than previously assumed.

Speaker 3 (45:45):
Yes, it's cosmic in that sense. In that the threatening,
the threatening malevolence in this movie is not just like
a single embodied entity that's coming in to attack us,
but it is threaded through the very physics and fabric
of the universe. There's something in the laws of physics,
in all of the atoms and particles and bits of
energy in the universe that contains bits of this malevolence

(46:09):
and evil. It's just waiting for us in the universe itself. Now,
after this, we get our first establishing shot of the
church where most of the movie will take place. This
is a church called Saint Goddard's in the film. It's
a stately old brick chapel topped with an ornamental cross,
with columns on the front and a fire escape leading

(46:31):
down the side. It's situated on a kind of run
down looking city block. Actually, when you get some other angles,
you see more activity going on sort of across the
street or further down the street. But I think just
by showing a tighter shot they create the feeling that
maybe not much is going on here. We see a
building with some shuttered windows, there's trash piled up on

(46:53):
the sidewalk, So I think the idea is that this
is in. It's on a disused city block. Maybe nobody
goes to this church anymore. And the church is surrounded
by a white iron fence with an extremely creepy bronze
statue of a cloaked figure out front. Is that supposed
to be the Virgin Mary? I can't quite tell.

Speaker 1 (47:13):
This is a real church in LA, by the way.
At the time it was the abandoned former Japanese Union
Church of Los Angeles, and today it's the Union Center
for the Arts. You can visit it in LA's Little
Tokyo district. And I was reading a little bit about it,
like it also has an important role in Japanese American history.

(47:35):
I believe this is a place during Japanese Internment that
a lot of people's affected people's possessions were stored. And
of course, you know, the people affected by this often
lost a great deal of what they previously owned, you know,
real estate or otherwise. But yeah, it's currently the Union
Center for the Arts, and you can visit it, get

(47:56):
your picture taken in front of it. Just you know,
be respectful, obviously, spit any green stuff out of your
mouth at it, and so forth.

Speaker 3 (48:03):
So we zoom in here in front of the church
and see Donald Pleasant standing out front on the sidewalk,
and he looks filled with worry and doubt. He goes inside,
walks down a long hall and finds that the silver
key from the box he opened it unlocks a heavy
iron door marked with a sign of the Cross. He
pushes open the door and goes inside. Later we see

(48:25):
him typing out a letter to Professor Barak, saying he
has discovered a most unusual phenomenon that should be of
interest to him, and it's urgent that they meet it once.
And then we pop in on another one of Barak's lectures.
This time he's saying from Job's friends, insisting that the
good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists

(48:45):
of the nineteen thirties, proving to their horror the theorem
that not everything can be proved. We've sought to impose
order on the universe, but we've discovered something very surprising.
While order does exist in the universe, it is not
at all what we had in mind. And then after
class we see a conversation between Brian and another student.

(49:07):
This is Walter played by Dennis Dunn. They see a
nun delivering Donald Pleasance's letter to their professor, and they're like, oh, none,
that's interesting, and then they remember, well, apparently Professor Barack
participated in a series of televised debates on the BBC.
I think with Donald Pleasance. I wonder what they were debating.

Speaker 1 (49:31):
I mean, I don't know, evolution, free will. I'm guessing
it's something a little headier like free will. That's gonna
be my inclination here.

Speaker 3 (49:41):
But apparently were they were good natured debates because they
have something of a friendship now, and you know that
Donald Pleasance can call upon Barack for help. So they
meet up in this ornately decorated room and Donald Pleasance
gives the diary to him to read, imploring him for help.
Now we get one of these scenes where just like

(50:02):
the ominous tension is mounting because we see Brian alone
in his apartment, playing solitaire and watching a TV news
report about a recently detected super nova five hundred million
light years away, the light from which is just now
reaching us. And then also on Brian can't see this,
but we see that red ants are massing inside the

(50:24):
back panel of his television seto. This is funny because
We've done episodes in the past about ants getting inside
of electronics devices. Did we talk about Prince of Darkness
in that.

Speaker 1 (50:37):
I don't think we did. I'd kind of forgotten about
this element of the picture. Ants going into the television set. Yeah,
but it is. It is not just something you've seen
in horror movies. I forget the details. I think the
crazy ant was one of the main ones that has
been recognized as a TV crawler. But in general, you
want you want your insects to stay out of your
television sets.

Speaker 3 (50:58):
Raspberry crazy Ants was that.

Speaker 1 (51:00):
It sounds delicious.

Speaker 3 (51:01):
Yeah, okay, but what's this all working up to? Our
cleric and our wizard. Donald Pleasance and Victor Wong have
to visit the dungeon together. So they arrived by limousine
and they head into Saint Godard's I like this idea
that like professors and priests travel by limousine, do they?
But they arrive at the church and they go in.

(51:24):
Of course, we learned that the priests who died earlier,
he was the guardian of this church. This is where
he lived, and he was tasked with keeping watch over
something in the basement below. Pleasance unlocks the heavy iron
door and leads the professor down into the underground chambers,
which we learn were built in the fifteen hundreds by
the Spanish. And as they move along we get some

(51:47):
exposition on the Brotherhood of Sleep. They have existed for
going back a couple thousand years in secret, not even
known to the Vatican, though through hidden mechanisms they wielded
an orm power within the church. And finally the two
men arrive at their destination, a subterranean stone cathedral lit
by hundreds of candles, and at the far end the

(52:10):
goo oh boy, this is this is what it's all about.

Speaker 1 (52:14):
Yeah, And this is a great set piece, you know,
and it's it is just about like all the feelings
that it invokes. Because you have like tons of crucifixes
on the wall, so it's like holiness established religion, Catholicism.
You have all the candles as well as part of
this like sacred scene that you're greeted with. But then

(52:34):
in the center this unholy cylinder, a swirling with green
liquid slime or energy that's dripping in corrosion. And next
to it you have computer equipment with that wonderful like
black and green screen that you know, sinks nicely with
the green glow of the cylinder, and so you have

(52:55):
all the key elements of the picture kind of merged together,
you know, science, religion, unholy terror from beyond realms that
can be touched by our sanity, and so forth.

Speaker 3 (53:05):
Yeah, the green screen matching the green of the ouze
almost implies that the essence of the devil is already
in what makes the computer work.

Speaker 1 (53:15):
You know, it's probably too late for this year, but
if you need a head start on next year's Halloween costume,
somebody please dresses the cylinder of green liquid from Prince
of Darkness. You can just be straight up the cylinder
from Prince of Darkness, or you could be the sexy
cylinder from Prince of Darkness. You could be this is
a great toddler outfit as well, So please somebody make

(53:36):
this happen and send us photographs.

Speaker 3 (53:40):
All my favorite Halloween costume ideas are things that nobody
would get.

Speaker 1 (53:45):
Yeah, this one would pre one of those where I
would get really excited about it and then nobody would
guess it. Like maybe it would be like, are you
the ooze from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And I'd be
just like, yeah, fine, that's what.

Speaker 3 (53:56):
I There's a line about this later in the movie
that Victor Wong says that made me laugh, where he's
talking about the devil and he's like, there could be
a limit as to what he can do as a
volume of liquid.

Speaker 1 (54:11):
That's true. He's got to he's got to get out
of there.

Speaker 3 (54:13):
Yeah.

Speaker 1 (54:13):
You know.

Speaker 3 (54:14):
Another bit of imagery here that I would like to
point to rob is on the walls in this room
with all the candles. There's also this swarm of crucifixes,
multiplicity of apotropaic crucifixes, which kind of reminds me of
in the Mouth of Madness.

Speaker 1 (54:28):
Yes, yeah, in the padded cell that the John Trent
occupies in that picture. Yeah, he's he's put he's drawn
crucifixes over everything and also all over his his clothing
and over himself. I'm speaking of Halloween costumes. I did
dresses him for Halloween one year, and virtually nobody got it.

(54:49):
I got it, You got it, Yes, a few people
got it. But when I just walk around on the street,
people are like, huh, I guess he likes Jesus and
was No.

Speaker 3 (54:58):
We ran into you guys at the Halloween for and
I got I think that was Was that the year
that Rachel and I were dressed up as Jack and
Wendy Torrence?

Speaker 1 (55:05):
Yes, I believe. So yeah, yeah, some people got the
people who got it loved it.

Speaker 3 (55:10):
Only some people got that one as well.

Speaker 1 (55:11):
Yeah, but it is a great part of the scene.
It's kind of like this idea that this is how
much just insistent faith has We've had to muster to
keep this thing in check for so long, and it
no longer is working. The fail safes are failing, and
stuff is beginning to corrode and leak out.

Speaker 3 (55:32):
Yeah. So right next to this volume of liquid there
is a huge ancient book on a lectern, So, like,
what is this book? Is it the Diary of the
Keepers of the Ooze? I think the answer is yes, Yes,
that is what it is. It's it's this extremely old
tome written in many different languages. They say it's full
of over writing and emendation, attempts to erase certain parts.

(55:56):
And so the professor is asking what is it, and
Donald Pleasant says, it's a secret that can no longer
be kept. Do you feel it? It was never here
before it started a month ago, a change in the
Earth and the sky his power. Okay, so that's the religion.
But we got to check back in with the science again.

(56:17):
So we go back and there's a funny scene between
Lisa Blount and Dennis Dunn where they are walking across
campus and they're talking. They're wrestling with the weird implications
of the quantum mechanics they're studying. Specifically, they're talking about
Shredinger's cat. Now, note that this is one of the
mini pop invocations of quantum physics that just takes the

(56:39):
Copenhagen interpretation as a given. It is not the only interpretation,
so you don't have to go with that. But they're
talking about, like, wait, why am I even studying this?
And one of them makes the joke says, particle beam
weapons research grants being a millionaire by the time I'm forty. Ah, yeah,
that's what it is. And again I was like, is
that a normal outlook for physics grad students?

Speaker 1 (57:01):
I don't know. That's how Walter sees it.

Speaker 3 (57:04):
Okay, that's right. I mean he's at least a maybe
he's a he's joking, he's a jokester. But so they
find that a group of they go to class to
find like a posted note that indicates a number of
physics grad students have been recruited by Professor Barack for
a special project that's going to take their take up
their weekend, So all their weekend plans are canceled now.

(57:27):
And this leads to scenes where Catherine and Brian are
getting to know one another better as well. So remember
Brian is sort of the tom Atkins guy, he's the
blonde mustache, and they're talking about the counterintuitiveness of quantum
mechanics and Catherine says, I want the clockwork back, and
then Brian goes on to make a sexist comment about
how women as beautiful as her don't usually work in

(57:50):
physics departments, and she reacts bluntly. She's like, that is
a stupid and sexist thing to say, and then he
goes for the classic Oh, I was just joking, don't
get offended, and then she's the one who apologizes to him.
I can't believe he got away with that one. Also,
if it's the joke, what's the funny part. It didn't
seem like a joke anyway.

Speaker 1 (58:09):
He's not the funny one. Walter's the funny one, though
he makes some bad jokes too, but at least there's
charm in the delivery.

Speaker 3 (58:15):
Yeah, but then he sort of at least euphemistically apologizes
by saying something like, you know, this wasn't the way
I'm in for our conversation to go, and all eventually
gets smoothed over because it does seem that they like
one another and they end up agreeing to go on
a date later. But I think there is something kind
of revealed about Catherine's character here in that, like, they

(58:38):
have this little tense moment, and it seems to me
she's in the right, like what he said was dumb,
and then she's the one who ends up apologizing. So
it seems like it's something about her character here that,
at least at the beginning of the story, she's capitulating
when she doesn't need to.

Speaker 1 (58:54):
Yeah. Yeah, it is interesting to think about this scene
in terms of the ultimate trajectory for both of these characters.

Speaker 3 (59:00):
Yeah, we do get a scene of like a briefing
from Professor Barack in front of the grad students where
we learn that okay, you've all been drafted to become
live in researchers for a special project at this abandoned church.

(59:21):
They're all going to go to Saint Goddard's and live
there at least for the weekend to do research. They
will receive class credit, and he can't tell them what
they're going to be researching. So we go on to
see Professor Barack arriving at the church to begin the project.
And when he gets there, he he looks down the
sidewalk and he sees a woman standing in the distance

(59:41):
as if in a trance, looking up at the sun,
and she has ants crawling on her face. And this
will become the beginning of a theme where we see
a lot of visions like this. I'll explain more as
we go along. But we also get a conversation between
Barack and the priest played by Donald Pleasants where they're

(01:00:01):
talking about like what all of this means, and Donald
Pleasant says that they must translate the book of the
Brotherhood of Sleep and Barack must quote prove it scientifically,
prove what they don't say yet. But as the weekend approaches,
we get a few storylines further developing. So Brian and
Catherine's romance deepens, they go on a date, they get

(01:00:21):
to know each other better, and they appear to be
falling in love. But at the same time as that
sort of positive storyline is developing, there's a negative one too.
We get more ominous signs from the atmosphere, something about
the sunshine feels wrong and hostile. And then around Saint
Goddard's people begin to gather. There is like a conclave

(01:00:42):
of silent entrance to drifters, led by a disheveled Alice Cooper,
and they wander slowly around the streets and the alleys
around the church, sometimes staring up at the sun, sometimes
staring down at the ground, maybe looking at insects, and
one of them at one point approaches Donald Plum and
says he's entering the building, and she says, it's so

(01:01:03):
wonderful what you're doing, father, opening the church again. And
then Donald Pleasance looks down and sees that she is
holding like a coffee cup full of maggots.

Speaker 1 (01:01:14):
The bug wrangler really just did have. They had a
lot to do on this picture. Maggots, beatles, earthworms, you
name it, ants.

Speaker 3 (01:01:24):
Yes, So the students and professors arrive and begin their
weekend of work. They unload their equipment and introduce themselves.
So it's not only people from the physics department, but
also biochemists to microbiologists, theologians, and classicists. To translate the book,
there are a lot of characters. As we said earlier,
we can't really spend time talking about all of them,
but we'll mention a few individuals as we go along

(01:01:46):
for certain scenes. One thing that often bugs me in
storytelling does happen here. Doesn't bug me as much here
as it often does, but it's that situation where, like,
many specialists are assembled for a project or mission, but
they are not told what it's about or what they're
going to be doing until after they get there. So like,
in this situation, it's like, why did they agree to

(01:02:08):
do it in the first place. It often feels implausible.
So we get those kind of scenes where the characters
arrive here and they're like, what are we going to
be studying? What are we doing? And they're like, I
don't know, you know, I'll tell you when I know.
I could be wrong, But I seem to recall a
particularly egregious example of this in the movie Prometheus, because
they do this, but they also they don't get the

(01:02:29):
briefing until they're like literally light years away from Earth.

Speaker 1 (01:02:33):
Yeah, I guess I'd cut Promethea some slack personally, because
the experts in that film were recruited to board a
state of the art exploration space vessel funded by the
world's pre eminent innovator and visionary. In Prince of Darkness,
a local physics professor has just invited students to sleep
in the basement of a condemned church. But I mean,

(01:02:55):
all in all, you know, I guess you have to
sort of think of it again from a story telling
choice standpoint, and you know, I venture to guess. I
don't know for certain on this, but I've ad ventured
to guess that this is perhaps a storytelling trope with
roots and military movies where the characters are gonna have
more limited choice about showing up for that secret mission

(01:03:18):
with that last minute debriefing. Carpenter has always been pretty
open about his use of like classic Western structure his
inspiration for his film, so I would not be surprised
if he and other filmmakers are drawing on stuff like that.

Speaker 3 (01:03:29):
That's a good insight. That makes a lot of sense.
This works in a military situation because the characters are
just supposed to follow orders. They don't have to know
what they're gonna do. You know, they're told when they're told.
It makes less sense for like movies about scientists or
something where normally you would like you would know what
you're gonna do before you start doing it. But yeah,

(01:03:50):
that makes a lot of sense to me. So it's
just like the same kind of storytelling structure is pourted
onto different types of characters and situations.

Speaker 1 (01:03:57):
Yeah, and then all that aside from the standpoint of
giving the audience more about you know, providing some exposition,
but also some little character moments. A debriefing scene like
that can be very useful. You know. Obviously it can
work well with characters being like, well, now, why are
we here because I'm a doctor and you're a lawyer.
What do we possibly have in common?

Speaker 3 (01:04:19):
One?

Speaker 1 (01:04:19):
Why are we in this church basement? That sort of thing.

Speaker 3 (01:04:21):
Oh yeah, totally. I mean it's absolutely clear, like why
it happens from a storytelling and efficiency point of view,
because it's like you can explain it to the audience
at the same time that the characters find out. You
can see them react all at once. You can string
the mystery or the tension along before that moment of
the reveal. What everybody's doing. Yeah, I mean it's clear
why it works from from the storyteller's point of view.

(01:04:42):
It's just one of those where like that clashes with
the plausibility.

Speaker 1 (01:04:46):
All right, so we got the team is assembled, right,
and now they're being told what's up.

Speaker 3 (01:04:52):
Right, So we're going to start making some discoveries. First
of all, there's the character Lisa I mentioned earlier. This
is the theology ste udent who studies ancient languages. She
just like looks at the Brotherhood of Sleep book. She's like, Okay,
I'm gonna start typing out the translation. So she's typing
on the computer, and we keep cutting back to her
at different times, like seeing the sentences as she types them.

(01:05:14):
They're things like, I Jesus have sent mine angel to
testify unto you this thing which shall be unleashed, and
the Prince of Darkness was himself sealed that old life
called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.
So kind of biblical type stuff, except it's interesting. This
text seems to have a quality that none of the

(01:05:37):
canonical texts of the Bible have, which is it claims
to be written by Jesus. You know in the Bible,
we don't have that. We only hear about Jesus from others.
That's kind of interesting, So this would be all read text. Yeah,
I guess so. So the team all they gather in
the basement and they're finally shown the cylinder of green goo.

(01:05:58):
So it's like swirling around really good in the cylinder.
They're watching it churn and Donald Pleasant says, I can
feel it getting stronger. And some of the scientists are
not amused. They're like, wait a minute, we're here for what,
and they think it's a waste of their time. Others
are more interested. But as the research begins, we get
different scenes where like findings emerge. So I'm going to

(01:06:21):
list off some of the things they discover. First of all,
they discovered the ancient book describes a long series of
differential equations mathematical instruments that had not been invented at
the time the book was written, So huh, how is
that possible. They also find that the lid on the
cylinder is sealed shut with a strange locking mechanism so

(01:06:44):
that it can only be opened from the inside, and
the corrosion on the lid is carbon dated to seven
million years ago. By the way, just pedantic note. Carbon
dating is not useful for things that old. You would
need to use a different radiometric method for that. Is
inside the cylinder, what is it? What is the green goo? Well,
they do some tests and Brian reports to Barak. He says, quote,

(01:07:08):
a life form is growing out of prebiotic fluids. It's
not winding down into disorder. It's self organizing. It's becoming something.
What that This is one of those where I'm like, Okay,
I don't know how what did they detect? What tests
did they do to determine that?

Speaker 1 (01:07:26):
Well, you know, yeah, it's it's it's it's technobabble. But yeah,
the important thing is we know there's something growing inside
this cylinder that can only be open from the inside.

Speaker 3 (01:07:36):
But if they can't they can't get inside the cylinder.
How did they test it? Hm, well, okay, I'm not complaining.
I'm just saying, like.

Speaker 1 (01:07:44):
There are some containment issues going on as well. See.

Speaker 3 (01:07:48):
I think this is a great example of what I
was saying earlier that I think the science stuff in
this movie it works. I think it works great if
you don't pay too close attention, If you just take
it esthetically and you don't try to like analyze it substantively.
If you just like let it happen as an aesthetic experience,
it's beautiful.

Speaker 1 (01:08:06):
Yeah. Also, trust scientists, Joe, trust them, they're professionals.

Speaker 3 (01:08:11):
Somewhere in here we get the scene where one dude
tries to leave the church at night. Oh, this is
the guy who's going to get stabbed with a bicycle
by Alice Cooper. And he finds a crucified pigeon in
the alley when he's going out, So that's not a
good sign. That's never good. And then he like runs
into Alice Cooper in the alley and and all of
his and all of his band you know, they're they're

(01:08:33):
hanging out down there, and he gets he gets impaled
with the bicycle. Uh, and nobody seems to notice this.
This just like happens off to the side while nobody's looking.
And then finally we get a scene where Lisa reveals
the translation of the book and sort of summarizes its
main teachings.

Speaker 1 (01:08:51):
Oh yeah, we got we got a real doozy come
in here.

Speaker 3 (01:08:54):
Are you ready? Obviously we've had lots of spoilers so far,
but like if you know, if you don't want to
have everything spoiled, you could stop now and watch the
movie yourself. But here we go. This is like the
big reveal, she says, And this is a quote with
some abridgments. The container was buried somewhere in the Middle
East eons ago by the father of Satan, a god

(01:09:16):
who once walked the earth before man, but was somehow
banished to the dark side. Apparently the father buried his
son inside the container. Now later on here Christ comes
to warn us he was of extraterrestrial ancestry, but a
human like race. Finally, they determine Christ as crazy, but

(01:09:38):
he's gaining power, converting a lot of people to his beliefs,
so they kill him. But his disciples keep the secret
and hide it from civilization until man could develop a
science sophisticated enough to prove what Christ was saying. And
then Donald Pleasance goes on to surmise from that that
the Church kept this a secret for the last two millennia,

(01:10:00):
thinking it better to characterize evil as an abstract spiritual
force rather than as a volume of liquid buried in
a jar. But I, oh, my God, I love this reveal.
So the idea is that all of Christian history is
sort of a facade to cover up the reality, which

(01:10:20):
is that Jesus was an alien who came to warn
us that the father of the Devil buried his son
the Devil, which is a jar of liquid in the
desert somewhere and it's been hiding there and we have
to watch out for it.

Speaker 1 (01:10:35):
Yeah. Yeah, it's essentially Christianity, if not organized, religion as
a whole is just a placeholder. It's a band aid
until science can reach the point where we can actually
tackle the problem. And you know, now that I say
it out loud, there are a lot of interesting ways
to take that apart and look at it. So yeah,

(01:10:58):
I like the way it hits in this picture though.

Speaker 3 (01:11:00):
Oh yeah, yeah, oh another funny like report on findings scene.
This is one of those like how did they figure
that out? Moments Brian discovers that the green goo is
one conscious and two capable of telekinesis a little fuzzy
on how they detected that with the machines, but they

(01:11:20):
put it together. So at some point we start getting
the leaky cylinder and this is where everything really goes haywire.
The volume of green goo starts leaking out of the container,
and it drips upwards so against gravity and forms a
pool on the ceiling of the room. And then Susan Cabot,

(01:11:41):
one of the researchers, notices this. She's like down in
the room with it. She sees the pool on the
ceiling and then it sprays into her mouth, turning her
into a servant of Satan. And this starts a chain
reaction where from here Susan goes on to start killing
and converting other people in the church. Sometimes she'll snap
their necks. Sometimes she will infect them and turn them

(01:12:04):
into new thralls of the Satan fluid, often by like
vomiting a jet of fluid out of her mouth into
somebody else's mouth and face orifices.

Speaker 1 (01:12:14):
And even if she does kill you, you'll still come back
and be a servant. Later we see that with next
Snap Dude.

Speaker 3 (01:12:20):
Yes. And then another type of threat begins, which is
the same thing we saw earlier that people who try
to leave the church get attacked by the Alice Cooper crew.
So a lot of the middle of the movie is
like scary scenes like this, people getting attacked by the
Satan thralls or by the Alice Cooper crew outside in
any particular scary scenes you want to talk about rob.

Speaker 1 (01:12:41):
Ooh, any particular scenes. Oh, I mean there's a lot
going on here with characters just sort of like you
wandering off maybe you know, going outside, even which is
extra dangerous, and or taking little naps in which we
get the you know, the reveal about the dreams, which
we'll get to here. But I'm trying to remember if

(01:13:02):
there was I pretty much any scene in which a
character spits a stream of green liquid out of their
mouth into another character a character's mouth, I'm generally on
board for. Also, any of the sequences with the cylinder
are all great, so you know everything's going according to plan.
Oh wait, one scene does come to mind. This is
not really a scary scene, but there's a scene where

(01:13:24):
Peter Jason's character is moving through like the snack room,
the break room, the kitchen or whatever. And I just
both times I watched it, I was very captivated by
all the things he was grabbing, because I think he
had a coffee cup, who's smoking a cigarette, also grabbed
two apples and an entire package of oreos, and I

(01:13:46):
was like, this man is going to get down for
what is his discipline. I guess he's the microbiologist, a
chemist chemist. I think, yeah, this guy's about to do
some serious.

Speaker 3 (01:13:55):
Chemistry, chemistry with all the package of doughnut, several apples
that he's doing tricks with. He's like popping them up
in the air and kind of juggling apples while he's
smoking and doing kazoo songs with his mouth.

Speaker 1 (01:14:06):
Yeah, yeah, I had noted that. Both times I watch it,
I remember that over any actual scares that were happening
during this portion of the picture.

Speaker 3 (01:14:22):
Oh, there's another great technobabble scene in here where Barak
and the priest are talking and the thing, and Barack
starts to hypothesize that, Okay, maybe if there is a
universal mind, like a god, controlling every single thing in
the universe, every the movement of every single subatomic particle.

(01:14:44):
He says, well, every particle has an anti particle. It's
mirror image, it's negative side. Maybe this universal mind resides
in the mirror image instead of in our universe as
we wanted to believe. Maybe he's anti god, bringing darkness
instead of light. Once again, I don't know how well

(01:15:05):
that works if you engage too closely with the idea
of an anti particle, but as pure aesthetics, it's great.

Speaker 1 (01:15:10):
I love this and so that's ultimately the threat here,
the threat of the coming of the anti God.

Speaker 3 (01:15:16):
Yes, so you mentioned the idea of the dream, and
this is one of my favorite things in the whole movie.
So what the characters start to discover is that every
time someone goes to sleep in this church, they have
the same dream. Not just the same dream they had
last time. All of the different people have the same dream.

(01:15:36):
They start comparing notes and realizing they're all dreaming the
same thing. It's an image of the church seen from
outside from outfront, with a figure in shadow emerging from
the front doors of the chapel into the daylight, and
what sounds like a looping recorded message that begins, this
is not a dream, not a dream. We are using

(01:15:58):
your brain's electrical system as a receiver. And ooh, I
think of everything in the movie, this was the thing
the first time I saw it that got me the hardest.
I love this dream.

Speaker 1 (01:16:10):
Yeah, this is pretty great. I'm a sucker for any
kind of like at this point, you know, vintage creepy
technological transmission stuff like you know, be at the video
drone transmission in the original video drone film or be
at the Ring video. I'm on board for all of that,

(01:16:31):
and I put this up there with any of those examples.

Speaker 3 (01:16:34):
Oh it's so good. So we get different snippets of
the recorded message because characters are often woken up in
the middle of the dream and they only remember part
of the message. But like the beginning is what it says,
this is not a dream. Not a dream. We're using
your brain's electrical system. And then it says we are
unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving
this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the

(01:16:57):
year one nine nine nine. And then like suddenly, you know,
the character will snap awake. And so it turns out
what we learn is that the Brotherhood of Sleep has
recorded testimony that anyone in close proximity to the church
has always had this dream, always has the same dream.

(01:17:20):
And Brian suggests a theory, what if someone is trying
to communicate with them, This could be a message beamed
into their brains from the future by the emission of tachions,
which are hypothetical particles we've never detected directly, but they
are proposed to exist that sort of fit with existing
models of physics hypothetical particles that always move faster than

(01:17:44):
the speed of light and thus possibly backwards in time.
And so the idea is is this is a warning
scent from the future to our brains as receiver antennas
in the past, and it's an invitation to change the
course of history to avert some kind of catastrophic future event.

Speaker 1 (01:18:05):
Yeah. Yeah, I love pretty much all the descriptions of
this in the film that I think it's later where
someone talks about how it's like it's like each time
it's more intense in your mind, as if it's growing
and pushing other things out of your sleeping mind to
make room for itself.

Speaker 3 (01:18:20):
Yes, yes, I love that. And so while this is
going on, the characters are like learning about the dream
and comparing notes about that. We also get Susan running
around recruiting minions. So she infects Lisa, who's the one
doing the translation of the book of the Brotherhood of Sleep.
She vomits satanic juice into her mouth, and then she
also recruits Calder, the microbiologist, and so we get that

(01:18:44):
really creepy scene that I love where Lisa is after
she's infected. She's sitting at the computer typing, not looking
at the screen, and like one of the professors tries to,
you know, pop into the door and be like, hey, Lisa,
what's going on, But she's just typing over and over.
I Live, I Live, I Live. And then later you
see her type on the screen. You will not be

(01:19:04):
saved by the Holy Ghost. You will not be saved
by the God Plutonium. In fact, you will not be saved.

Speaker 1 (01:19:13):
It is interesting that the the Devil, the son of
the anti God here as it's communicating with people, its
main communications increasingly are kind of taunting. They're kind of like,
you got no chance. It's not like you need to
fall in line or I can do great things for humanity.
It's like it's just saying, hey, I'm bringing doom and

(01:19:34):
there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 3 (01:19:35):
Yeah. One of the guys who went outside earlier and
got killed, he starts calling everybody to the window and
he's like standing there in zombie form in the parking
lot below, and they're like, hey, what's going on and
he just yells at them like pray for death.

Speaker 1 (01:19:50):
Yeah, and then collapses into Beetles. Great great scene.

Speaker 3 (01:19:54):
So the remaining researchers are increasingly overtly threatened by the
servants of Satan, and they start finding themselves like they
first they discovered they're barricaded inside the church. The Alice
Cooper band has piled up trash and furniture on the
doors outside. Calder, who has been possessed by the devil.
He like stabs himself with a steak of wood in

(01:20:16):
the throat in front of everyone in a horrifying scene.
Susan and Lisa end up bringing the cylinder of goop
up from the basement and they take it to a
sleeping Kelly where it pools on the ceiling and then
it drains down from the ceiling into Kelly's mouth and eyes.
So oops. I think Kelly might be the chosen one.

(01:20:36):
And we later learned about like she had a mark
on her arm that was growing. She didn't know what
it was, but it takes the form of I think
they say they call it the magician staff. It's like
a symbol that is not good news.

Speaker 1 (01:20:48):
I think that Carpenter said they got the symbol from
a blue oyster cult alb I mean, and you know
it likely has I'm sure it has a history pre
dating Blue Oyster Cult, but there you have it.

Speaker 3 (01:21:02):
So in the final act we get less reveals about
the mythos. You know, it's starting to all kind of
come together, but instead it turns into more action and
desperate horror. So the final act involves various demon sieges.
You mentioned there are elements of the Siege movie to this,
as there certainly are, Like the remaining humans get sort
of herded into different rooms of the church or defensive positions,

(01:21:25):
like there's one part where the character waltered and it's done.
He gets stuck in a closet where he can like
look through a sort of a confessional screen out at
Kelly as she's being transformed into the host of Satan,
and he's like freaked out and his friends are trying
to like dig him out through a wall. We also
get resurrected versions of the dead scientists. Calder especially is

(01:21:49):
awesome in this form. He's the one who can't stop
laughing and he's very creepy. And eventually Kelly gets turned
into this absolutely horrifying anti god vessel who is like
she's awake and she's got these wide wild eyes like
she's thrilled to be in physical form again and just

(01:22:10):
like testing her limits, except she's in Kelly's body. She
has Kelly's original body, but with mangled, burned, bloody flesh.
Is disgusting to look at.

Speaker 1 (01:22:20):
Yeah, I've always kind of thought about that. This is
one of the things I've always noticed about this particular
character is that she does the effects here are great,
and she looks disgusting, and I feel like it does
feel like an intentional choice, like they didn't try to
make her like horror cool or horror sexy, you know,

(01:22:41):
like she's supposed to be just this gross, zombified slab
of rotting meat. Like the possession is just decaying or
flash or something. So it's an interesting look, and especially
with the hair remaining pristine. Likes the blonde hair has
been untouched by the corruption, but the flesh is all decayed.

(01:23:02):
And yeah, the big eyes steering out of.

Speaker 3 (01:23:04):
It, it's tremendously revolting. Yeah. Now, there are actually some
more conversations that go on with the remaining human characters.
There's one thing where they talk about how they believe.
For some reason, I think there was something about this
in the Brotherhood of Sleep book that the goal of
Satan here is to bring back his father from the

(01:23:25):
dark side. Somehow, his father, the anti god, was banished
to the sort of inverse universe, and Satan wants to
bring his father back. There's an interesting thing where at
multiple times we notice Donald Pleasance reverts to prayers and
the Bible, like he's reading from the Bible or saying
Christian prayers, like he does this at a short funeral

(01:23:47):
they hold for Calder and he's also praying and reading
from some kind of book when he's in danger. And
I thought this was interesting in that he's doing this
even though he seems to have been convinced earlier that
the official doctrine in mythology of the Church is purely
a fiction to cover up the truth about Christ as
an alien. But it's like he can't give it up.

(01:24:08):
He still needs it.

Speaker 1 (01:24:09):
Yeah, I mean, when during a stressful situation, you know,
what are you going to do? You're gonna fall back
on your faith. There previous models of your faith and
so forth.

Speaker 3 (01:24:19):
It's like he's fully convinced that the metaphysics of his
religion are are untrue, but he still needs the act
of his religion. He still needs to be able to pray,
so there are Again there's the Siege movie aspects that
are like fighting off demon attacks on the rooms. There's
one part that's funny where the scientists are defending a
room against a zombie attack and Professor barak U's is

(01:24:42):
a shaken up soda can as a weapon.

Speaker 1 (01:24:44):
Yeah, he's an astrophysics man. You can't mess with him.

Speaker 3 (01:24:47):
I love that. And they're all like they're dodging streams
of satan juice vomit while the Satan hosting Kelly oh Man.
There's a creepy scene where she starts looking into me,
like she finds a little makeup compact and looks into
the mirror in it and says, father, it's so creepy.

(01:25:08):
And I like that the mirror she's looking into appears
to be showing static like an old TV.

Speaker 1 (01:25:14):
Oh yeah, yeah, I love the use of mirrors here. Obviously,
you know, it's very Alice in Wonderland.

Speaker 3 (01:25:19):
Very bores as well.

Speaker 1 (01:25:21):
The idea that the mirror is a gateway to the
unseen world, to the realm where this ancient being is imprisoned.
And it's also kind of interesting to think about this
in terms of Okay, you're you're the son of the
anti God waking up during the mid nineteen eighties, and
you have not been privy to any of human history

(01:25:41):
really at this point, is that correct?

Speaker 3 (01:25:44):
So it was buried before, like eons ago?

Speaker 1 (01:25:47):
They say, yeah, so you've never seen a mirror, not
like this, I mean, the best.

Speaker 3 (01:25:52):
You could ever see a human, I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:25:54):
Never seen a human. Yeah, never never seen a mirror.
I guess the best you could hope for would have
been reflection in water. That sort of thing. So very
very exciting here for ancient evil entities of venturing into
our reality. And you don't even know how big mirrors
get become important.

Speaker 3 (01:26:15):
That's right. So the first attempt to contact the anti
God through the mirror fails, but then Kelly goes to
another room, goes to another room with a bigger mirror,
and this is the room where Donald Pleasance is like
hiding behind a piece of furniture. So she goes up
to the mirror and then it starts saying like father,
and the mirror fills with light and like, oh we
are tuned in now, baby, It's something is happening. She

(01:26:37):
starts reaching in through the mirror. And we see her
hand emerging on the other side, and it's an underwater shot,
like a hand reaching under the surface of a liquid.

Speaker 1 (01:26:48):
Yeah. Yeah, some great effects here with the surface of
the mirror that I believe they said the use mercury
here to create this effect. So a bit dangerous but
worth it.

Speaker 3 (01:26:58):
Yeah. So Donald pleas since tries to intervene, Like he
chops off the demon Kelly's arm with an axe, but
then she immediately grows a new one. Then he chops
off her head, but she picks it up and puts
it back on. It seems like there's nothing stopping her.
But finally, just as she is about to pull her father,
the anti god, through the mirror from the other side,

(01:27:19):
Catherine intervenes. So Kelly is like reaching in grasping a
shadowy hand on the other side. Catherine sees what's happening.
In a moment of clarity, she realizes what's about to
take place, and she runs and tackles the satan possessed
Kelly tackles her into the mirror, so Catherine also disappears

(01:27:40):
into the mirror, and then Donald pleasant smashes the mirror
with his axe.

Speaker 1 (01:27:45):
Yeah. Incredible sequence.

Speaker 3 (01:27:47):
So this causes sort of it cuts the connection to
the demonic power. The zombies all collapse, They fall down dead.
Alice Cooper's crew are no longer possessed. They sort of
go off mission and then just wander off on their
own business. Kelly and Catherine have vanished, Brian, Walter, Barack,
and Donald Pleasance have survived. And the next morning we

(01:28:07):
see characters sort of being taken to the hospital or
trying to figure out what this all means, and Donald
Pleasant says, we stopped it. The future conjured up by
that vile serpent. It will not happen now, and Barack says,
we're safe, but he's waiting on the other side. She
died for us, and so you think it's all over.

(01:28:27):
But then somebody starts having the dream again. We go
back to the dream and it turns out it's Brian
having the dream, and the recorded message plays and the
dark figure begins to come out of the church, and
this time we see a part of the message we've
never made it to before. We get later and later,
and it's revealed that the dark figure coming out of

(01:28:48):
the doors of the church is Catherine, and Brian suddenly
wakes up. He wakes from a horrible nightmare. He like
imagines that she's lying there, bloodied and mangled in the
same way that that ke he was as the host
of Satan. But he wakes up and he's alone in
his room, in his bed, and then the pulsing music
starts again. Something is wrong with the world still, and

(01:29:11):
he looks in the mirror on his wall and slowly
he reaches out to touch it, and then cut to credits.

Speaker 1 (01:29:18):
Yeah, right, as the music is building too, Like it's
so perfect, perfect ending.

Speaker 3 (01:29:24):
Love the ending, powerful, so good. So yeah, I love
Prince of Darkness. I think it is such a powerfully moody,
ominous horror film, just a tremendous menace, and it establishes
a tone almost like no other film I can think of.

Speaker 1 (01:29:41):
Yeah, and again, so ambitious too, not only in terms of,
you know, these themes of quantum mechanics and theology, but
also just you know, other choices that Carpenter made in
attempting to make a film that stood out from what
he perceived as some of the sameness that was present
in the horror genre at the time, and honestly, as
there's almost always some like swell of sameness in the

(01:30:03):
horror genre at any given point. So kudos to anybody
who tries to break through that, to push through that,
almost as if like pushing through that mirror right and
reaching something on the other side.

Speaker 3 (01:30:15):
Here's something I wonder about. I wonder what you think.
This movie has strong themes of science and technology. Most
of the major characters are scientists. They're doing scientific tests
for most of the film. And yet I am not
at all tempted to think of this as a science
fiction movie. It is definitely horror. Why does my brain

(01:30:37):
subconsciously just classify it that way without a second thought?

Speaker 1 (01:30:41):
Hmmm, Yeah, that's a good question. Is is it ultimately
any less science fiction than the thing? And yet you know,
I'm far far more likely to classify the thing, John Carpenter?
Is the thing as sci fi horror? Yeah? I don't know.
I don't know exactly what it is. Maybe the degree

(01:31:01):
to which like direct technology is employed. Like nobody like
builds a technology technology based trap. Nobody uses a ray
gun or a symbol some sort of electroshock device. I
don't know.

Speaker 3 (01:31:17):
You know, there are movies where there are mysterious or
unexplainable phenomena that are first thought of to be supernatural,
but then it is discovered that they are like physical
in nature, they have a scientific explanation. And then there
are movies where there are mysterious phenomena that are first
thought of to be physical, but they're discovered to have
a supernatural explanation. In this movie, I can't quite tell

(01:31:41):
what they have discovered, Like we sort of get an explanation,
but I don't know how to classify it is the
ultimate explanation supernatural or physical? Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (01:31:52):
Yeah? I mean I guess some of it kind of
comes down to the idea that everything kind of collapses
into and into what like missed and shadow smoking shadows.

Speaker 3 (01:32:00):
You know that it is you can't tell the difference
between between the sufficiently powerful and understandable alien presence and
like a ghost story spirit from beyond.

Speaker 1 (01:32:12):
Yeah, Like, this is a film where science has failed
us to a certain extent, and so has religion, and
these are the consequences of those failures.

Speaker 3 (01:32:20):
It's beyond science or religion. You can't even understand whether
what you're dealing with is natural or supernatural. Yeah, yeah,
that does seem more like horror, I guess.

Speaker 1 (01:32:30):
Yeah, Yeah, I think it is far easier to say
Friends of Darkness, solid horror film with science elements to it. Yeah,
all right, well, there you have it. Happy Halloween, just
reminded that stuff to blow your mind is primarily a
science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
just talk about a weird film on weird House Cinema.

(01:32:53):
You can find a full list of all the movies
we've covered over the years at letterbox dot com. This
L E T T E R bo x D dot com.
Our user name there is weird House and that's where
you'll find the list. Hey, go to our tea public
store if you like. We have a couple of Halloween
shirts up as well as they rub the fur shirt
if you want to get in on that. You know,

(01:33:14):
those are just for fun, but if you know, if
you want to stick or a shirt, yeah, check it out.
It's well, I guess it's a way to sort of
spread the word about the show.

Speaker 3 (01:33:21):
Huge thanks as always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway.
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 2 (01:33:42):
Stuff to Blow Your Mind is production of iHeartRadio. For
more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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