the thing I can't remember is what came first
in the mouth of madness (john carpenter, 1994)
I like movies where Sam Neill plays somebody crazy (Event Horizon, Possession).1 To me, Neill has a kind of handsomeness that is only really brought to its full potential when he’s grinning really wide. When you do you grin really wide? When you’re crazy.2 Thus Sam Neill in a movie titled In the Mouth of Madness represents a promise of endless delights. Mouth and madness… both right there in the title.
Still, in this case, Neill’s character, the blandly named “John Trent,” is crazy because he’s sane. Even when he’s faced with insane but undeniably real circumstances, Trent often does exactly what you’re yelling at him to do. A hot new manuscript makes people who read it crazy, so you yell don’t read it. He doesn’t! Then he’s lugging this evil manuscript around so you’re thinking destroy it, idiot. He does! It doesn’t matter, because he’s in an insane world. His very sanity and skepticism is why he can be the portal between the insane reality that takes over and the sane reality he started in. Maybe started in. Depending on what you think.
The premise of In the Mouth of Madness is that John Trent, an effective and cynical insurance investigator, is hired to investigate the disappearance of Sutter Cane, a best-selling horror writer. Trent thinks that he’s being dragged in to shore up a publicity stunt on behalf of Cane’s newest book and takes a kind of professional glee in the thought of beating the publishing company to the punch. His skepticism deepens when he figures out that the covers of Cane’s mass market paperbacks make a map to Hobb’s End, the New Hampshire town where Cane’s stories take place.
The publisher insists that it really doesn’t know what’s happened or where Cane is and they pack Trent off to New England to find him—along with Cane’s editor, Styles. Of course Hobb’s End is full of characters from Cane’s books and things gets progressively crazier and crazier while they are there, until Cane himself quite literally turns into a gateway between the world of the monstrous “Old Ones” and the world of “reality.” There are several suggestions as to what is happening here, from the idea that Cane’s books themselves are becoming real to the idea that nothing in the movie was there before Cane wrote it.
What makes the most sense to me is to understand this as the story of Cane’s books becoming always having been real… a phrase I cannot figure out how to make any less tortured no matter how many times I look at it. When Trent is finally ejected from Hobb’s End and meets a basically normal kid on a bicycle, and then a further procession of basically normal people who react to him with incredulity, these are people for whom the books are not true. Later, though, they, along with the rest of the world, will change into people for whom it has always been true—even if they don’t read it themselves. After all, even if you don’t read… there’s a movie.
By the end, Trent is left in a deserted, looted New York City; he goes into a movie theater, watches the adaptation of In the Mouth of Madness, sees himself running around on the screen yelling about what is and isn’t reality, and he has a great time.3
Trent occupies a curious position in his own story as the designated sole retainer of “old” reality, even as he becomes fiction. He’s freed from the danger of being infected with madness himself but partly because he’s the necessary vector through which it spreads. He can contain the knowledge of how it always used to be and how it’s always been now. One thing I take from the final image of him wandering around an empty New York and watching himself in the movie is that he is going to be the last person alive in some more durable sense—he is not merely a character, he is also the audience, without whom the story cannot function and has no point.
So as people go insane and mutate into post-human forms, as we’ve watched them do throughout the movie, Trent himself will, and must, continue to remain as he is. Horror isn’t horror if nobody there’s to react to it as something outside of the norm. Then it’s just, as Trent is so fond of declaring, reality.
Odds & Ends
In finally getting this post out, I have fulfilled my oath contained herein and as of the moment of typing this statement, have not died:
This movie feels inherently more friendly to “odds & ends” than to trying to write something more sustained about it… like it’s a good time! That’s why Sam Neill is having fun at the end! It’s a fun movie!
That said I do feel like it’s kind of significant that one of the moments of violence Trent runs into early in the movie—a cop beating a homeless man—has no relation to Cane and is just a scene of ordinary human brutality. He goes back to this moment in his dreams, etc. Also, I don’t know how I did this formatting thing where this is a sub bullet point but I’m afraid to try to change it.
I have a Letterboxd list of movies that feel like good X-Files episodes, but one thing watching this movie made me realize is that good X-Files episodes feel like mini John Carpenter movies. Plenty of X-Files episodes have premises straightforwardly lifted from movies, including (for instance) Carpenter’s The Thing—but that’s not what I mean. I mean something about the texture, the plotting, and the pacing that’s not easy to put my finger on.
I recently discovered the “Weird Studies” podcast because they did an episode on a novel I’ve been trying to understand. They also did an episode on this movie, which I listened to most of. I say “most of” because I mostly listen to podcasts to fall asleep and I am pretty sure I did fall asleep, which is not a comment on the podcast but only my Pavlovian response to podcasts. Anyway, the episode’s worth a listen, though I suspect anybody reading this who would want to listen to a Weird Studies podcast already is doing so.
A not particularly subtle aspect of In the Mouth of Madness is placing the growing reality of the Old Ones and Cane against the old reality of religion. Cane says bluntly that the problem for religion is that people didn’t believe in it enough. Toward the end of the movie a news story says that clergy are attacking people, which either implies that they are big Cane fans or that they sense the competition, not sure which.
He’s not quite at Wes Anderson levels but this is the third John Carpenter movie I’ve seen where something terrible happens to a dog (the other two being Halloween and The Thing).
Many Lovecraft films (or possibly just Stuart Gordon’s) have an odd tendency toward being very horny in a specific, rather rapey way. I’m sort of talking shit here because I’m not watching any of them because they all seem to be… well… horny in a specific, rather rapey way. I call this odd because Lovecraft is not very horny. The part where Styles comes onto Trent because it’s what the readers what, he refuses, and she’s written out of the story is interesting on this level.
A fun read.
Is this a “Lovecraft” movie? In its imagery, yes, duh, but in its themes, I’m less sure. The story that In the Mouth of Madness resembles most is “The Shadow over Innsmouth,” which is a story I find ambiguous in its attitudes. Like Trent, the narrator of that story ends up in a small New England town that seems hostile toward outsiders. Like Trent, he receives warnings to leave. Like Trent, he has to escape from first his hotel and then the town itself as the dark secret reveals itself to be supernatural in origin, and, like Trent, he discovers that the “contagion” of the town lies within himself (and always has). The fish people of Innsmouth—who struck a deal with a dark power in return for immortality—mostly stick to Innsmouth. But one of them didn’t, and that was his grandmother. He now realizes that his relatives have a fishy kind of look to them and that this family secret is why his cousin has been locked away in an insane asylum. And, in retrospect, that’s probably why he went to Innsmouth in the first place, even if he didn’t know, and also why he reacted with such violent hatred. Once the narrator realizes that he himself is one of the fish people of Innsmouth, you expect him to kill himself. His uncle did. But in fact, something very different happens, and you can watch it happen over the course of this paragraph:
So far I have not shot myself as my uncle Douglas did. I bought an automatic and almost took the step, but certain dreams deterred me. The tense extremes of horror are lessening, and I feel queerly drawn toward the unknown sea-deeps instead of fearing them. I hear and do strange things in sleep, and awake with a kind of exaltation instead of terror. I do not believe I need to wait for the full change as most have waited. If I did, my father would probably shut me up in a sanitarium as my poor little cousin is shut up. Stupendous and unheard-of splendours await me below, and I shall seek them soon. Iä-R’lyeh! Cthulhu fhtagn! Iä! Iä! No, I shall not shoot myself—I cannot be made to shoot myself!
Like “The Outsider,” “Innsmouth” is a story of realizing you’re a monster but finding that knowledge ultimately liberating. Your sense of alienation, your sense you never fit, your loneliness—all of that has a cause. There is a place where you can fit and need not be lonely, but you have to accept that you are not a human being to find it.4 Your discovery of your own nature is the key that unlocks the world. In many Lovecraft stories, that… is not how this story goes!5 But in the case of “Innsmouth” I don’t think the way we’re meant to feel about the narrator’s acceptance of his nature is at all clear. You might find it horrifying, or delusional, or you might find it happy in some inhuman but nonetheless real way.
I have never seen Jurassic Park. I’m not even sure if he plays a crazy person in that movie.
Indeed even though In the Mouth of Madness was kind of a flop at the time of its release, the image of John Trent in the movie theater has somehow entered into GIF immortality.
“A person cannot make this journey alone… but maybe… a fish can.”
You can consider this your obligatory Lovecraft Was Racist footnote but the difference in the stories I’ve read is usually the difference between people who turned out to have “always been” something (ambiguously happy) and the people who seek to be transformed into something (bad). That said, there is a lot of Lovecraft out there, and I certainly haven’t read all of it.
Regarding Stuart Gordon, I really like Re-Animator and don’t remember it being rapey in that way, though it’s been a long time and I could be forgetting something. Castle Freak is absolutely unpleasant in this way. I’ve never seen From Beyond and only know that someone gets skeletonized by bugs
Did you ever see Sam Neill in the old BBC series Riley Ace of Spies? He's only sort of crazy there, but there are a few good instances of that grin!