H.P. Lovecraft is called the father of modern horror and is credited with creating the Cthulhu Mythos and the ‘weird fiction’ sub-genre. Although there have been several adaptations of his various stories (most of them directed by Stuart Gordon) the highest any of those films have ever climbed in the mainstream consciousness is the movie Re-Animator, and that’s not a very well-known film. In 1995, the fans of John Carpenter (one of the more iconic horror directors working today) were treated to the giant H. P. Lovecraft tribute film In the Mouth of Madness. The movie opens with Sam Neill as a raving lunatic in a straight-jacket being dragged into a padded cell. Doctor Wrenn (David Warner) is called in to find out what made Sam’s character, named John Trent, go insane. John, who has covered himself and the walls of is cell with the images of crosses, sits down to tell Wrenn about his most recent case. John was a private investigator that specialized in cases of insurance fraud, and he was called in to investigate the disappearance of a best selling writer named Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow) who vanished with the manuscript of his latest book. Trent is convinced that this is not a real missing person’s case, but a publicity stunt and, through some diligent research, discovers clues in the cover art of Cane’s previous novels that create a map to the fictional town of Cane’s stories called Hobb’s End. Trent departs to locate the town, which he believes is real in spite of it not existing on any map, with Cane’s agent Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) who is interested in locating the manuscript.
While Linda is driving at night, she experiences all kinds of crazy occurrences like passing the same young bicycler several times, and aging each time, and seemingly driving through the sky. Somehow, she stumbles across Hobb’s End, where even more bizarre tings are happening. The two visit the Black Church, a dark monolithic structure mentioned in many of Cane’s stories that is entirely out of place in a small New England town. Their, after many of the townsfolk show up with weapons, Sutter Cane appears in the church, and sends some primeval attack dogs on the town’s people. As Linda and John try to come to terms with the strange scene they just experienced, Linda comes clean with John, saying that this was originally supposed to be a publicity stunt to promote his new book, but the town and its residents are not supposed to exist. The people, places, and creatures from Sutter Cane’s fiction are coming to life in the real world. As one of John Carpenter’s entries in his unofficial Apocalypse Trilogy, it’s a safe bet that this film won’t end well. The earlier parts on the film rely on a lot of shock scares involving John Trent having vivid nightmares about people turning into gnarly-faced monsters. The whole crux of the movie relies on a blurring between the lines of the movie’s meta-reality, which is pretty much the same as our own reality, and the fantasy world of Cane’s creation, which draw heavily on H. P. Lovecraft for inspiration with all kinds of hideous slime beast and tentacle demons that, wisely, only show up on screen for a few select seconds. The sparseness of the monsters makes their brief flashes on screen much more memorable.
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