Dave craps on a movie - IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS (by John Carpenter)

[Dave (imported)]

HBO has made available IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS by John Carpenter.

It has a checkered set of reviews online from Roger Ebert to any number of unknowns. It is sometimes called the quintessential HP Lovecraft homage.

The plot is that an insurance fraud detective is asked to locate an author and starts having hallucinations about large, gooey, slimy creatures living in the pit of the world coming to the surface to take over and subjugate mankind. These "old gods" are very much in line with HP Lovecraft's world of horror.

SO the movie begins with the detective being locked in a padded cell, he tells the story in reverse. He finds strange murders going on before ht meets with the Author's publisher -- the author has been missing. So he discovers a hidden map in the book covers and sets out with the editor to find the last manuscript. They drive all night in a hallucination to a previously unknown town and there is the author who among the strange killings and weird happenings of multi-limbed old ladies, ritual killings by torch carrying mobs, strange cursed churches and odd evil and menacing shadows has the manuscript at hand. HE orders the detective to take it back and as the detective tries, he has to leave the editor and take the bus. More strange things. Seven months passes and the book series sells billions of copies, more copies than the bible and the belief in the weird, old gods and monsters becomes real because people believe in it.

Great premise if you can pull it off -- does belief in a religion make it real? Or does the real religion create the belief? -- in this case, the horror is that the old monsters are returned to earth (or released from their prison) as belief in them grows. Neil Gaiman in AMERICAN GODS does it. Just to name one.

So at the end of this I thought it was great. However, this morning and a few thoughts later, I decided that this is what I fear the most as a writer.

I fear that I can craft a story so scary and so great of only the elements of the common horror story that it is routine, awful and forgetful a day later.

That is my judgment of IN THE MOUTH OF MADNESS. It is beautifully constructed and amazingly well put together but in the end, it has only the symbols are there. The detective has no heart, no change, no story. The editor (his gun moll, the lady of mystery in those great Raymond Chandler stories) . . . is merely a cardboard figure who is TSTL.

And the story is perfunctory, without mystery or drama in the end.