31 Days of Halloween (Day 6) - Prince of Darkness

John Carpenter. I do love him so. Halloween. The Thing. Escape from New York. Some of the best horror and science fiction movies from the late-70s through the end of the 80s came from Carpenter. They are relentless, well-filmed and have a strand of nihilism running through them that appealed to me as a kid and still appeals to me as an adult.

One of my favorites is Prince of Darkness. The movie, which relies heavily on concepts Carpenter gleaned from HP Lovecraft and Nigel Kneale, not to mention some reading he was doing at the time about quantum physics, it deals with an evil that predates humanity. Part of entity was locked away in another dimension (The Father, basically Satan), the other segment, a green fluid is locked in a container before man walked the Earth. This creature is The Son; in Christian terms, the Anti-Christ. For thousands of years, this container was guarded by a sect of the Catholic Church, the Brotherhood of Sleep. This name has a number of meanings. Not only do they watch over The Son to make certain it stays asleep, it is also responsible for keeping the masses unaware of the true nature of evil, not a spiritual force, but an actual physical entity. Now, something has changed, heralded by the arrival of light (and radiation?) from a distant supernova. The Church recruits a team of scientists (mostly grad and PH.D students) to prove that the substance within the container is an alien intelligence, one that threatens mankind if it is allowed to awake.

Why does this make me want to order a pizza? Hmmmmm

Like Keane’s Quatermass and the Pit (in which the idea of the Devil turns out to be humanity’s racial memory of its origin; a hybrid simian/martian slave race) Carpenter’s film posits that the devil is not a spiritual being but a powerful alien intelligence. Oh...and Jesus was a human/alien hybrid sent here to warn us of the danger represented by The Son. This also ties in with Lovecraft’s idea (greatly expanded on by decades of writers in the Cthulhu Mythos) that there are no gods, only immensely powerful aliens and personified natural forces. For Lovecraft fans out there, who has seen this movie and not thought that the Father and Son are just avatars of Nyarlathotep? And, for those of you who read that sentence and thought “Nyarlatho-what?” don’t worry about it.

Lime Jell-O is the source of all evil in the universe

The movie works as a horror film - there are jump scares, nasty kills, gooey monsterish things - but it also works as science fiction. Everything that happens is basically an attempt to understand and fight an entity that existed on Earth before man (and is possibly the original intelligent life on Earth) and that will destroy humanity as we know it, if it ever escapes from its extra-dimensional prison. It plays with a lot of interesting concepts, in particular the idea that the spiritual world is essentially a PR gimmick used by the world’s religions to hide the truth; that we are caught in struggle between the Earth’s original inhabitant and some possibly benevolent aliens. We are not at the center of things; we just happen to live on the battlefield. It is ultimately, a bleak, secular view of existence. Good and evil are human concepts and we can't rely on God to save us...or the Devil to damn us, for that matter.

Survival tip: when around evil fluid...keep your mouth closed

One of the implications of the film that I find provocative is that this universe is Hell, in that it is the home of The Father; i.e., Satan. The Father is imprisoned in another dimension and The Son caged in the container by someone, perhaps the same aliens who created Christ. But there is no indication that that someone is God.

I also like the portrayal of the science team. Unlike the trend in modern films and TV to make scientists aggressively quirky (look at the portrayal in things like Pacific Rim, Fringe and the more recent Agents of Shield) the characters in Prince of Darkness seem like real people. The actors sell their roles well and deliver the technical jargon in a believable fashion.

Are there problems with the movie? Sure. There are some plot point that are odd, like the need to use a mirror to create a gateway between our dimension and the one The Father is trapped in. Why a mirror...other then it looks kind of neat? The acting is pretty good, but not universally so. And this is a movie where a viewer can see how a bigger budget would’ve helped. This is a film that could’ve used some really fucked up, tentacle-and-teeth monsters keeping our heroes trapped in the church and not some homeless people (even if one of them is the awesome Alice Cooper).

Still, this is a great film. It has some amazing images; the ending, where Lisa Blount’s character is trapped in the other dimension, reaching up towards the closing portal, is nightmarish. The ending, where we find that all of our hero’s sacrificing having only changed the details of the coming apocalypse, is chilling, nihilistic...and completely satisfying.

Alice Cooper wishes he had some lines in the film