John Carpenter's maligned 'Prince of Darkness' deserves your attention
Maybe it’s time to accept that John Carpenter has been operating at a level so far beyond the rest of us that we’re only now starting to catch up with him.
While the horror auteur behind Halloween, The Thing, and They Live has been long acknowledged as a master of his craft, there have always been naysayers who dismissed him as a schlockmeister who mostly riffed on old B-movie Westerns and sci-fi movies.
Reviews of his 1987 film, Prince of Darkness, were particularly scathing. Carpenter wanted to depict the“apocalypse.” But Roger Ebert wrote that the film amounted to “a bunch of people chasing each other up and down a hallway while the soundtrack went berserk.” Ouch.
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Yet in retrospect, this maligned movie is one of Carpenter’s most terrifying and influential.
I’ll admit, it took me time to catch up to Prince of Darkness. First lured in as a horror kid by that lurid Henry Rosenthal image of a screaming face with a spider in its mouth oozing down the video box, I wasn’t quite disappointed by the film, just very confused.
When I returned to the film years later, I found it much more eerie than I remembered, with an atmosphere of dread as thick as the L.A. smog. Plus, there’s something unique about Prince of Darkness: It’s one of the few horror films that gets more frightening with repeated viewings.
What's Prince of Darkness about?
From the start, it’s clear things are not right in sunny California. An old priest dies in his sleep, leaving behind a cryptic note about a “dreadful secret." Meanwhile, a professor (Carpenter regular Victor Wong) explains to his class that physical laws get strange at the subatomic level: “While order does exist in the universe, it is not at all what we had in mind.”
Before the opening credits are over, Carpenter is already urging us to doubt man’s place in the cosmic scheme. Meanwhile, Carpenter and Alan Howarth's synth score thrums ominously in the background. The cinematography of Gary B. Kibbe bolsters this sense of dread. Tapping into another Carpenter trademark, the director shoots in distorting widescreen Panavision from low angles that make the characters look displaced in a looming background. And every shot seems to be at dusk or night; Carpenter’s Los Angeles is never that sunny.
Soon, a worried priest (Halloween stalwart Donald Pleasance) contacts his old friend the professor seeking help. It seems the deceased Guardian Priest was a lone sentinel in an abandoned church, watching over a large canister in the basement filled with an eerie green glowing liquid. A Catholic sect, the Brotherhood of Sleep, has guarded the canister for millennia, to prevent what’s inside from escaping. But, now its “power is growing,” and the priest needs science to help explain the evil ooze — and maybe keep it locked up for good.
Before you can say “Beelze-Busters,” a team of 13 grad students and their high-tech gear assemble in the church to get to the bottom of this — and maybe prevent the apocalypse for extra credit.
John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness is bursting with creepiness.
Worms and insects start piling up everywhere. Eerily emotionless street people surround the building like a legion of Michael Myers. The researchers start having the same eerie dream of degraded video footage, with a narrator (Carpenter himself) claiming it’s a transmission from the apocalyptic future. And a geeky researcher (Thom Bray) is confronted with one horror after another as he leaves for the night. First, he discovers an unnerving crucified pigeon. Then, he is brutally impaled with a bicycle by a head street person, played by none other than rocker Alice Cooper.
As he did in The Thing, Carpenter has trapped a group of people in an isolated location where something mysterious is coming for them. And things keep getting worse. The priest explains the church has greatly exaggerated man’s role in the cosmic scheme. Evil is a physical force in the universe, tied to every atom, while good... not so much. Good is really just a handful of people trying to survive a night full of bugs, possessed people, and Satan.
It’s a lot. How you read the film hinges on how seriously you take its mumbo-jumbo. But, if you suspend disbelief for a moment, you realize how ingenuous its sci-fi meets religion lore is. And how very bleak: The characters look across the gulf of existence at something vast and unknowable that couldn’t care less about them.
Carpenter puts Prince of Darkness in his apocalypse Trilogy, between The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness. I would say its doom-drenched apocalyptic surrealism really belongs to a category all its own, a genre I call “From Weird to Worse.”
More recent horror films, like Jeremy Gillespie and Steven Kostanski's Lovecraftian thriller The Void, David Prior's supernatural terror The Empty Man, Alex Garland's apocalyptic Annihilation, Jordan Peele's alien-centered Western Nope, and even Stranger Things, in which characters face huge and mysterious cosmic forces, have borrowed heavily from the atmosphere of mysterious dread Carpenter first created in the '80s. If you love any of these, you should give this forgotten Carpenter treasure a chance.
At its heart, Prince of Darkness is about the deeper terror mortal humans feel when they take on cosmic forces they can’t comprehend, while hoping only to hold back the darkness a little bit longer. As the professor responds, when asked if the group should call out for help:
“No one out there can help us.”
And that is utterly terrifying.
How to Watch: Prince of Darkness is streaming on Peacock Premium, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV+.
Topics Film
Rufus Hickok is freelance writer and pizza maker, who lives in NYC with his partner after two decades abroad in Canada. He has a Ph.D. in History, is the author of The Paris Bureau (DIO Press Inc. 2021), and is currently at work on a novel.
