In the Mouth of Madness

Director: John Carpenter (USA). Year of Release: 1994

A large imposing building. We see an ambulance speeding up the front drive. Beefy security guards bring in a man who is resisting as hard as he can. A lucky kick hits one of the men restraining him straight in the balls. The man is dragged down to a cell in what we now recognise as a psychiatric institution. The cell looks just like those in real life don’t – white padded walls and a single thin mattress as the only furniture within the locked room.

Cut to the same man closing down an insurance scam, John Trent is the best in the business, and has got photos of both the wife and the mistress of the claimant wearing clothes which were supposed to have been lost in the fire or whatever he’s claiming for. Trent has made the extra step of showing the wife the photos of the mistress in fur coats, which means that he has more corroborating evidence than he needs.

Trent goes into a coffee shop to talk to the man who gave him the job. The man wants to employ him on a full-time basis, but Trent prefers working for himself without anyone telling him what to do. As they peacefully chat, we see a man with an axe leaving the building opposite and slowly making his way to where they are sitting. He breaks the window with the axe, then raises it above Trent’s head. Trent is only saved when cops shoot the axeman dead.

Trent is ushered into a publishing house. It turns out that his assailant was the literary agent for Sutter Cane, best-selling author who has recently gone missing. The publishers want to send Trent, together with their top editor Linda Styles, to hunt down the missing author. With his usual suspicion, Trent believes that this may be a scam to publicise Cane’s next book. He buys a load of Cane’s book which, according to the legend, cause its readers to perform random acts of craziness

You can’t say that In the Mouth of Madness lacks ambition. Sutter Cane sells more books than Stephen King, and lives and sets his books in New Hampshire – one State on from King’s Maine. “Look”, it seems to be trying to tell us. “You know all those films which you like that are based on Stephen King books? Well this one is even better.” Still, it is one thing to make an extravagant claim, quite another to justify your boast.

For all its manifold faults, In The Mouth of Madness comes with heaps of style, so much so that for the first half I was convinced that director John Carpenter was going to pull all the loose strings together and present us with something which at least approaches coherence. No such luck. It’s one thing to say that a film requires its audience to suspend its disbelief, quite another to say that it makes no fucking sense at all.

You might say that this is all part of the film’s subtle satire, but for satire to be successful it needs to convince us that it is based in some sort of reality. And yet the film contains absolutely no concessions to realism. There are occasional surreal moments which might make you laugh – most notably the hotel receptionist who has her naked husband chained to her ankle behind her desk – but none of this adds together to any sort of coherent whole.

The film contains all sorts of horror clichés, as if it’s ticking them off on a check list. Scary-looking kids on bicycles? Check. Slimy creatures of no fixed form? Got it. Rampaging mob storming the doors of a Cathedral with ornate onion towers? Of course. Each of these might work as an individual scene, and both the cinematography and acting is first rate, but taken as a whole it’s all a huge inchoate mess.

Sometimes it’s the trivial things which irritate you most. Like when Trent and Styles book into a clearly empty hotel and book a single room. When this happens, you presume this must be plot-related and that the couple who until now have struggled to get on will end up in some awkward bed sharing arrangement. But no, the shared room has no particular dramatic purpose. Just put it down to lazy writing.

Maybe the most ridiculous scene comes when Trent cuts out the cover designs of some of Cane’s novels, randomly puts them together, and comes up something which looks slightly like part of New Hampshire but not quite. Look, Trent proudly announces, this shows Cane is not dead and is hiding in his home town of Hobbs’ End. Now I sincerely hope that this is satire, but seeing as until now Trent has been arguing that you should look at things rationally, it is just bewildering.

So, what is the film trying to say? Well, your guess is as good as mine, but if it’s trying to say anything profound (and I sincerely doubt that it is), it’s that trash fiction is rotting our minds and causing the end of civilisation, maybe. If this is true, then this is one supercilious film, being an example of the very thing it is criticising. Of course, it could all be a self-parody, in which case it takes an awful lot of effort to make a fairly uninspired joke.

But maybe the message is that “Reality isn’t what it used to be” (the words of a character just before he shoots his own head off), whatever that’s supposed to mean. To be honest, it’s so very hard to tell. One review argues that the film is “as much a sly satire on the “movie violence causes real violence” argument as it is a solid piece of horror filmmaking,” which is only remotely true if you concede that as a piece of horror film making it is about as flimsy as you can get.