Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iheartradioch.
Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
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 our first John Carpenter movie.
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 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, 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 like the all time great favorite John Carpenter films, 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 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.
Yeah, this is a Carpenter sleeper the sleeper awakens. In fact, even some people who are fans probably haven't seen this one. 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 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 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 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 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 watched a documentary about quantum mechanics. Because this movie is full of ideas about both science and religion. He was trying to do some kind of sort of sort of Christian infused but also sort of maybe Lovecraftian or Eldritch 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 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, it kind of falls apart. But if you just lean back, you kind of you kind of tune out just a little bit during the scientific parts. I think it is super nice.
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 car and it attempts to weave in all of these quantum physics and quantum mechanics ideas that the Carpenter says that he'd been reading a 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 commentary track for this film, which I'll discuss more about that 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. 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 is lit by like hundreds of candles, and and you know, they're kind of having fun with the picture, riffing almost a certain extent,
and Jason's like, who who let all these candles? And 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 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 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 you know, various nuggets of quanto physics and theology thrown
at us. 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.
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 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.
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.
Yeah, you know, it's 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.
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.
Yeah, we were talking about this in the House of Ushare episode.
Yeah, all right, Well, let's go ahead and listen to a little bit of trailer audio here, which is we're not going to 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's score that we're going to be talking about. H h H. All right. Uh, so, hey, if you want to go see Prince of Darkness before
we proceed here, it is widely available. Uh you know, 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 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. It's just that get.
I remember listening to a Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis commentary track somewhere that was adorable.
It was great. Oh yeah I haven't I haven't done that one. But yeah, 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 rapport with and can chat with about the film.
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 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 John Carpenter scripted film.
Did he call himself Martin quator Mass.
Yes, yes, a reference to the to the 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 he did the score as well. Born nineteen forty eight, living legend director of some of 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 is a very important part of that equation.
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 movies. 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. I mean, like, you know, he's got a great sense of word up 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 or he creates for the film that locks it all into place, that creates the feeling that you associate with the movie. Try to imagine Halloween without the John Carpenter score, just suben 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.
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 Eights, Halloween, eighty one's Escape from New York, 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
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 student udio 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, you know, it did not succeed.
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.
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 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 subliminentally, on on his desire to break free from the tyrannical order of big studio productions. You know, like you can maybe pick cup on a little sort of like post studio angst in the way that he's formulating things.
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 fed the people what we thought they wanted a lie. It was all a lie. I want to tell them the truth now.
Yeah. Yeah, So it's it's in a way, this movie's kind of it has a meanness and 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 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 like people he liked working with and was excited to have on a production like this. He 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 directorial effort was twenty tens The Ward, but he's remained active, of course as a composer, often working with his son Cody.
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 Carpenter is like obsessed with playing like I don't know, NBA JAM, like like sports video games for the PlayStation and stuff.
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 stays and most just to sports and video games. And I've seen other interviews where people ask him what's what he's playing, and there's always
some sort of like shooter or sports game. I guess that he's into, so, you know, you know, more power to him. He's a big gamer.
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 here? Yeah, play video games.
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 apparently it's a novel that involves messages from the future sent via hypothetical faster than lie Tachyon particles.
Oh this ties into one of my favorite things in the movie, The Dreams sent 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.
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.
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 of.
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 which he 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.
Oh No, The Devil's Men 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 small part, played a role in releasing into the world.
Yeah. 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.
May God have messy on you all.
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 Parker born nineteen forty seven.
Is this supposed to be our Tom Atkins for the film?
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. Yeah, he's got some muscles, though he does. He's 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 a Never Ending Story. So I mean this is mostly what he's 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.
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. And we have a lot of characters, I would say the most interesting singularly defined character in the movie is the physics professor Barak played by Victor Wong.
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 eighty five's Year of the Dragon, eighty six is Shanghai Surprise that as some 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.
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 which Glinda when he appears, you know, Does that make any sense?
Yeah? Yeah, it's like there's he 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 that 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 kind of dialogue they're given. You're like, Yeah, this guy knows what he's talking.
About, absolutely. And I really like the way he plays this character too, So not just in delivering say, these 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 captured by the ideas the implications of the quantum mechanics that he teaches, and so he does come off
he does portray that well as like the man apped 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 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 limb or something and the way he walks, but he he doesn't get as easily mentally shaken as a lot of the other characters.
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 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 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.
Oh Goggins connection. As I said earlier, a lot of 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 have a kind of pessimistic outlook about say love,
or 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, 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.
Yeah, yeah, all right. Next we have the character Walter played by Dennis Dunn born nineteen fifty two. This is another big trouble in Little China Alumni. He also appeared in nineteen eighty five's The 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 is also it's important 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.
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 a 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 start trying harder and harder to be funny.
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 hand.
She has a bit the physics group, but physics.
She's physics, the blonde member of the team. She becomes really important in the final act, So more on that in a bet. She also appeared and 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.
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.
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.
She goes around essentially a urinating satanic fluid out of her mouth into other people's mouths.
Exactly, which is great. I mean, how many other films do you have this sort of like possessed zombie vampire that uses like a project 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 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 does a few other things. She does this movie, and then finally has an episode of TVs in living color, and then I don't know what happened to her after that,
but I thought she was pretty good. Here. She's like a computer person, right.
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 she's doing a lot of translation work on the computer.
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
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 looking at the screen, but 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.
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 I found that amusing. So I'm gonna skip various members of the science team here, but yeah, I'll mention that. Yeah. Peter Jason 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 Grassmere is also in it as 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's The Running Man, nineteen nineties Predator, two, ninety three's Demolition Man, and twenty twenty one's Barb and Star Go to to del mar So. In a lot of different films.
Oh, but if we're talking about the scientists, we got to talk about one of my favorites, which is Calder the microbiologist.
I think, yes, he's tremendous. Jesse Lawrence Ferguson who lived nineteen forty one through twenty nineteen. He's kind of forgetable early on, he's just 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 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 during the final part of the.
Pictures, it's so good. Hats off to him. It's like I am the devil now and it's hilarious and it's on. 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. Demonic laughter like bubbling out of him.
It's so good. Yeah. Now, he was an actor of stage and screen, who appeared in a fair number of things, including nineteen eighty four's Buckarou Bonzi eighty six is Neon Maniacs. I do not remember him from Neo 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. Kibbe is cinematographer on
this who of nineteen forty one through twenty twenty. He previously worked as a camera operator on some films, and this was his first film as director of photography. Followed by They Live, he went onto 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 you get your music streaming or otherwise. But if you want something physical, Sacred Bones Records, who have worked extensive 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 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.
Whose face is this? Is this anybody from the movie, Not that I recall, I.
Don't know for certain. It may yeah, it may just be nobody. It's just an evocative poster, which is, you know, sometimes the case.
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.
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 tremendous music obviously, 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.
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, 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.
All. Right, Well, let's dive into the plot proper here.
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 synthesizer tones that sound kind of like choirs, but not so much singing but sighing. I
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 or character all that long. Instead, 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 think, somewhat famously, this opening credits montage goes on for like nine or ten minutes.
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.
So the first thing we see is the full moon in a black sky with reflected moonlight almost a shade of pink.
Yeah, this is one of many great Matte 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 mapping.
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 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. He's 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 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 well in with one
of our main characters. This is Brian Marsh played by Jamison Parker. He's fit, blonde with a mustache, wearing a 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, 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 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 on 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 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 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 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 a heavy briefcase, 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 in research questions. And as he heads to class, something gets his attention in the sky, so he puts things down and he crosses 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 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. He is like shining through some thin clouds. And music lets It's like the music lets us know that there is something wrong with the sky, something wrong with the sun, but nobody's 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.
Yeah. Now, a quick note on the bugs. There are a lot of bugs in this picture. And there's just one really brief moment in the audio commentary where Peter Jason asks Carpenter says, like a lot of bugs here, where'd 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 why. I love that exchange so much.
Compared to getting Alice Cooper.
Come 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, WrestleMania three, I want to say, And so he was like, I'd love to be in a horror movie and big horror movie fan, and they're like,
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.
And they do, Oh, is this where he stabs the stabs the nerdy guy with a bicycle.
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.
I can't promise more on that because I don't know what else to say. He just gets stabbed with the bicycle.
Well, okay, I'll go ahead and say. What happens is Alice Cooper's character, who zombified, stabs a guy through with the bicycle. He'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 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.
Right, So the montage continues. Oh, we get one I thought quite funny shot of Donald Pleasant standing in the courtyard of this you know, 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 have talking
in them. In 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. 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 steel, but they're tangible. And we assume time has an arrow because it is as a clock. One second is one second for everyone. Cause precedes effect, fruit rots, water flows downstream, where 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 subatomic level into ghosts and shadows.
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.
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 like 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 and evil. It's just waiting for us in the universe itself.
Yeah.
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 at 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 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 the sidewalk, So I think the idea is that this is a sort of 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.
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. 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 your picture taken in front of it, just you know, be respectful, obviously, don't spit any green stuff out of your mouth at it, and so forth.
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
pushed open the door and goes inside. Later we see 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 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, This is Walter played by Dennis Dunn. They see a nun delivering Donald Pleasantce's letter to their professor and they're like, oh, a nun. That's interesting, and then they remember it.
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.
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.
But apparently 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 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 back panel of his television set. 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 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.
Raspberry Crazy Ants was that it sounds delicious. 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. 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 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 enormous 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 goo oh boy. This is what it's all about.
Yeah, And this is a great set piece, you know, and 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 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 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.
Yeah, the green screen matching the green of the US almost implies that the essence of the devil is already in what makes the computer work.
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 this happen and send his photographs.
All my favorite Halloween costume ideas are things that nobody would get.
Yeah, this one would prey 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, yah, fine, that's what I h.
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.
That's true. He's got to get out of there Yeah.
You know. 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 crucifer fixes, multiplicity of apotropaic crucifixes, which kind of reminds me of in the Mouth of Madness.
Yes, yeah, in the padded cell that that John Trent occupies in that picture. Yeah, he's he's put these drawn crucifixes over everything, and also all over his clothing and over himself. I'm speaking of Halloween costumes. I did dresses him for Halloween one year, and virtually nobody got it. I got 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 that was No.
We ran into you guys at the Halloween parade and I got I think that was. Was that the year that Rachel and I were dressed up as Jack and Wendy Torrence?
Yes, I believe so. Yeah, some people got the people who got it loved it.
Only some people got that one as well.
Yeah, but it does. 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.
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 this extremely old tome written in many different languages. They say it's full of overwriting and emendation, attempts to erase certain parts. 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. 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 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?
I don't know. That's how Walter sees it.
Okay, that's right. I mean he's at least a maybe 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 up their weekend. So all their weekend plans are canceled now 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 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.
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.
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 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.
Yeah, yeah, it is interesting to think about this scene in terms of the ultimate trajectory for both of these characters.
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. They're all going to go to Saints 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 looks down the sidewalk and he sees a woman standing in the distance 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 Barak and the priest played by Donald Pleasance where they're talking about 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 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 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 Pleasant says he's entering the building, and she says, it's so 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.
The bug wrangler really just did. They had a lot to do on this picture. Maggots, beetles, earthworms, you name it, hants.
Yes. So the students and professors arrive and begin their weekend of work. They you know, 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 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 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 call a particularly egregious example of this in the movie Prometheus, because they do this, but they also they don't get the briefing until they're like literally light years away from Earth.
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, all in all, you know, I guess you have to sort of think of it again from a storytelling 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 going to have more
limited choice about showing up for that secret mission, 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.
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 going to 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 going to do before you start doing it. But yeah, 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.
Yeah, and then all that aside from just 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? One? Why are we in this church basement? That sort of thing.
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 the storyteller's point of view. It's just one of those where like that clashes with the plausibility.
All right, So we got the team is as symboled, right, and now they're being told what's.
Up, 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 student 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.
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 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. 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 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 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. Next thing 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, a life form is growing out of prebiotic fluids. It's not winding down into disorder, its self organizing, it's becoming something what 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?
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 opened from the inside.
But if they can't, they can't get inside the cylinder. How did they test it? Hm, well, okay, there are not complaining. I'm just saying like there are.
Some containment issues going on, as we'll see.
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.
Yeah. Also, trust scientists, show trust them, they're professionals.
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 pidg 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 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.
Oh, yeah, we got we got a real doozy come in here.
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 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 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, 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 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.
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, I like the way it hits in this picture though.
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 gou is one conscious and two capable of telekinesis a little fuzzy on how they detected that with the machines, but they 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, 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 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.
And even if she does kill you, you'll still come back and be a servant. Later we see that with next Snap dude.
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.
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 into here, but I'm trying to remember if there's 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 plant. Oh wait, one scene does come to mind. This is not really a scary, but there's a scene where Peter Jason's character is moving through like the snack room, the breakroom, 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 was like, this man is going to get down for what is his discipline. Guess he's the microbiologist, a chemist chemist. I think, yeah, this guy's about to do some serious chemistry.
Chemistry with all the package of donut 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.
Yeah, so, yeah, I had noted that both times I watched. I remember that over any actual scares that were happening during this portion of the picture.
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, the movement of every single sub atomic particle. 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 that works if you engage too closely with the idea of an anti particle. But as pure aesthetics, it's great. I love this.
And so that's ultimately the threat here, the threat of the coming of the anti god.
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. They start comparing notes and realizing they're all dreaming the
same thing. It's an image of the church seen from outside from out front, 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 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.
Yeah, this is pretty great. I'm a sucker for any kind of like at this point, you know, vintage creepy technological transmission, 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, and I put this up there with any of those examples.
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
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, you know, testimony that anyone in close proximity to the church has always had this dream, always has the same dream.
And Brian suggests a the 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're proposed to exist that sort of fit with existing models of physics, hypothetical particles that always move faster than the
speed of light and thus possibly backwards in time. And so the idea 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.
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.
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 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 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 saved by the Holy Ghost you will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, you will not be saved.
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 just just saying, hey, I'm bringing doom and there's nothing you can do about it.
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.
Yeah, and then collapses into beatles. Great, great scene.
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 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. 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.
I think that Carpenter said they got the symbol from a Blue Oyster CULTU. 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.
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, 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 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 like testing her limits. Except she's in Kelly's body, Kelly's original body, but with mangled, burned, bloody flesh. Is disgusting to look at.
Yeah, I've always kind of thought about that. This is one of the things that 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, 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, like the blonde hair has been untouched by the corruption, but the flash is all decayed. And yeah, the big eyes steering out of.
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 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 they hold for Calder, and he's also praying and like 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. He still needs it.
Yeah, I mean when during a stressful situation, you know, what are you going to do? You're gonna fall back on your faith in previous models of your faith and so forth.
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. They're 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 uses a shaken up soda can as a weapon.
Yeah, he's a master of physics, man, you can't mess with him.
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 mirrors, like she finds a little makeup compact and looks into the mirror in it and says, father, it's so creepy, and I like that the mirror she's looking into appears to be showing static like an old TV.
Oh yeah, yeah, I love the use of mirrors here. Obviously, you know, it's very Alice in Wonderland. Very bores as well, 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 the son of the anti god, waking up during the mid nineteen eighties, and you have not been privy to any of human history really at this point? Is that correct?
So it was buried before like eons ago?
They say, yeah, so you've never seen a mirror, not like this, I mean, the best.
You could ever seen a human?
I guess, never seen a human, yea, 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 culturally become important.
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, the 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 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.
Yeah. Yeah, some great effects here with the surface of the mirror that I believe they said he use mercury here to create this effect. So a bit dangerous but worth it. Yeah.
So Donald Pleasance 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 through the mirror from the other side, 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 into the mirror, and then Donald pleasant smashes the mirror with his axe.
Yeah, incredible sequence.
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 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. He's waiting on the other side. She died for us, and so you think it's all over. 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 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 Kelly 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 he looks in the mirror on his wall and slowly he reaches out to touch it, and then cut to credits.
A yeah, right, as the music is building too, like it's it's so perfect ending.
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.
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, the 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 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.
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 why does my brain subconsciously just classify it that way without a second thought.
Hmmm, Yeah, that's a good question, Like is it 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 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.
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 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?
Yeah? I mean I guess some of it kind of comes down to the idea that everything kind of collapses into into what like missing shadow smoking shadows.
You know that it is you can't tell the difference between between the sufficiently powerful and understandable alien presence and like a ghost or a spirit from beyond.
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.
It's beyond science or religion, and 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.
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. You can find a full list of all the movies we've covered over the years at letterbox dot com. That's L E T T E R B O x D dot com. Our user name there is weird House, and
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