| Prince of Darkness | |
|---|---|
Theatrical release poster |
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| Directed by | John Carpenter |
| Produced by | Larry J. Franco |
| Written by | Martin Quatermass |
| Starring | Donald Pleasence Jameson Parker Victor Wong |
| Music by | John Carpenter Alan Howarth |
| Cinematography | Gary B. Kibbe |
| Studio | Alive Films |
| Distributed by | Universal Studios |
| Release date(s) | October 23, 1987 |
| Running time | 102 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $3 million |
| Box office | $14,182,492 |
Prince of Darkness is a 1987 horror film directed, written, and scored by John Carpenter. The film is the second installment in what Carpenter calls his "Apocalypse Trilogy", which began with The Thing (1982) and concludes with In the Mouth of Madness (1995).
Contents |
The movie opens with a dying priest clutching a metal box. The priest was protecting the box and soon it is found out why. The box contains a key that opens an area beneath a derelict church. The area contains a room that holds a terrifying secret.
A Vicar (Donald Pleasence) begs for help from a professor called Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and a group of physics students to investigate this room and a mysterious cylinder in the basement of the derelict Los Angeles church. The cylinder contains a twisting, green gooey liquid. The students attending the experiment are Walter, Wyndham, Kelly, and Catherine. Among these people investigating this is a Metaphysican who is named in the film as Marsh (Jameson Parker), Lisa, a theology student who can translate ancient scriptures, Susan, a professional radiologist, and Dr. Lahey. Next to the cylinder is a book inscribed in three different languages which they try to decipher.
After reading Lisa's translation of the written passages found next to the cylinder, it is discovered that the liquid is actually Satan, the devil incarnate. The liquid itself appears to be a living organism, producing increasingly complex data that is revealed by computer decoding to include differential equations and sending the computers into data overload. One of the students decides to call it a night and is brutally murdered by a tramp (Alice Cooper) with part of a bicycle frame. Another student called Wyndham is brutally stabbed with scissors after having bugs crawl on his face and body.
The next two days develops into something sinister as small jets of liquid escape the cylinder and possess the group one at a time, causing them to attack and incapacitate the remaining students. Kelly is injured, and a bruise forms. The bruise eventually, Catherine realizes, is the astrologer's staff seen in ritual magic. Kelly has been marked. From outside Wyndham returns back from the dead and says he has a message from Satan for the rest of the group. He says the words: "Pray for death" and his body erupts into a swarm of beetles. His head falls off and more bugs crawl out until his body dissolves and only his suit remains. A infected student called Conor, a Christian trying to fight the effect of the liquid, tries to take his own life by jabbing a piece of stair bannister into his throat.
They try to escape the church and they are stopped outside by possessed homeless people who are trying to kill them. Birack and the Vicar soon start to realise that Satan is actually the son of an even more dangerous and powerful force of evil--the "Anti-God"--who Satan plans to bring into this world and therefore damn it for eternity.
The survivors that still remain find themselves sharing the same dream, apparently a subconcious vision that has been sent as a warning to not just the group but also mankind from the future year 1999. It shows a distorted vision sequence of a shadowy figure emerging from the front of the church. The vision and the shadowy figure shown seem to change slightly with each and every reoccurance of the dream. A voice overheard as the vision plays out each time warns the 'dreamer' that they are witnessing an actual broadcast from the future and they must alter the course of events to prevent Satan from completing his evil plan.
Eventually, the cylinder is opened and the entire gooey substance is entered orally into the body of Kelly, having been chosen. She becomes the ultimate incarnate of Satan: A gruesomely disfigured being, with powers of Telekinesis and regeneration, who attempts to bring the Anti-God through a dimensional portal using a powder puff mirror. He fails at first because the mirror is too small to bring his father into the human world. Realizing his mistake, Satan finds a larger wall mirror, and begins to pull the Anti-god's hand through it as most of the group are immobilized in fights with the other possessed members.
Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount), who Marsh is in love with, begins to sob. She doesn't know what to do, whether to save Marsh from the possessed Conor or stop Satan's plan. As she is the only one not immobilised like the others, decides to stop Satan's evil plan and tackles the possessed Kelly with both of them falling through the portal in the mirror. The Vicar then smashes the mirror with an axe, trapping Satan, the Anti-God and Catherine on the other side of the mirror. Catherine is seen briefly on the other side of the mirror reaching desperately out to the portal before it closes, leaving her in total darkness. Immediately the possessed drop dead and the homeless people, no longer under Satan's spell, walk away from the church. Walter sees this as an advantage and runs away into the night. The survivors are rescued, feeling relieved that the evil has been stopped and the nightmare is over.
At the end, Marsh has the recurring dream again, except that this time it's a possessed version of Catherine that emerges from the front of the church. He appears to awaken, and rolls over to find Catherine, gruesomely disfigured with her face covered with blood or what looks like bloody muscle instead of skin, lying in bed with him. He awakes, this time for real. Glistening with sweat, shocked and screaming, he gets up off the bed and approaches his bedroom mirror, hand outstretched. The film cuts to black just before his fingers touch the mirror, thus giving the impression that the horror isn't over.
The idea for the film came about as Carpenter had been researching theoretical physics and atomic theory. He recalled, simply, that "I thought it would be interesting to create some sort of ultimate evil and combine it with the notion of matter and anti-matter".[1] This idea, which would eventually develop into the screenplay for Prince of Darkness, was to be the first of a multi-picture deal with Alive Pictures, where Carpenter was allocated $3 million per picture and complete creative control.[1]
Executive producer Shep Gordon was also manager to singer Alice Cooper and suggested Cooper record a song for the picture. Carpenter also cast Cooper in the picture as one of the homeless zombies. Cooper also allowed the 'impaling device' from his stage show to be used in the film in a scene where Cooper's character kills Etchinson.[2] The song Cooper wrote for the film, also titled "Prince of Darkness", can be heard briefly in the same scene playing through Etchinson's headphones, although the song was not released until a year later.
Carpenter brought back to the film people that he had worked with previously, including Victor Wong and Donald Pleasance. Peter Jason, soon to become a Carpenter regular, was also in the film.
The film was shot with wide-angle lenses, which combined with anamorphic format created a lot of distortion.
Although Carpenter wrote the screenplay, in the film's credits the writer is listed as Martin Quatermass, a homage repeated in the film with Kneale University. These were in reference to the British film and television writer Nigel Kneale and the famous fictional scientist he created, Professor Bernard Quatermass. The storyline features elements associated with Kneale (the ancient evil aspect of both Quatermass and the Pit and The Quartermass Conclusion, the idea of messages from the future from The Road, and the scientific investigation of the supernatural from The Stone Tape). Carpenter returned to the idea of clerical secrecy in Vampires.
Kneale, however, was irritated with this use of the character's name in the film's credits, as he feared that the impression may be given that he had something to do with the film. Previously, he had written the original screenplay for the 1982 film Halloween III: Season of the Witch for Carpenter, but had been so incensed with all of the changes director Tommy Lee Wallace had made to it that he had his name removed from the credits.[3]
Prince of Darkness was poorly received critically upon release. In his review for the Washington Post, Richard Harrington wrote, “At one point Pleasence vows that 'it's a secret that can no longer be kept.' Here's another: "The Prince of Darkness stinks." It too deserves to be shut up in a canister for 7 million years".[4] Liam Lacey, in his review for the Globe and Mail, wrote, “There is no character really worth caring about, no sympathy to any of these characters. The principal romantic couple, Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount, are unpleasant enough to create an unfortunate ambivalence about their eternal destinies”.[5] In his review for the New York Times, Vincent Canby called the film a "surprisingly cheesy horror film to come from Mr. Carpenter, a director whose work is usually far more efficient and inventive."[6]
In 2004, Jim Emerson wrote that Prince of Darkness was an undervalued horror film: "What makes me goose-pimply about Prince of Darkness is its goofy-but-ingenious central conceit and its truly Surrealistic imagery, some of which could have sprouted out of Buñuel and Dali's Un Chien Andalou."[7]
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