Hello, everyone, and welcome back to another exciting Marvelous Videos episode. Today we present to you a film that has terrified almost everyone who has seen it. Who does not enjoy a John Carpenter film, right? Prepare yourself for some fantastic horror entertainment because today we will be discussing one of the most well-known and well-loved films from the Apocalypse Trilogy.
Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy continues with Prince of Darkness, which was released in 1987. The trilogy began in 1982 with The Thing and was completed in 1994 with In the Mouth of Madness. Prince of Darkness is one of Carpenter’s best supernatural horror pictures, and it will leave horror fans surprised, horrified, and wanting more.
Prepare to see a lot of science, as well as some love, deaths, and, of course, a lot of blood and gore, in this picture with an amazing star cast. It presents a series of terrifying occurrences to our screens, one after the other, with no time for the characters to catch their breath. That is, after all, what makes it so exhilarating to watch. Oh, and there is also the fear of possessions from time to time.
There are professors and students, as well as the mystery surrounding the local church. Professor Howard Birack, who is played by Victor Wong, is a quantum physicist who lives in Los Angeles. He is here to assist Donald Pleasence, who plays a Catholic priest, with some of his students. They are looking into something that has been kept concealed in the Church for a long time.
Now, without further ado, let us get right into the story and see what is going on at this church, and how it is going to result in so many deaths and the loss of several people’s possessions.
Before man walked the earth it slept for centuries – Prince of Darkness (1987)
The film begins in California, where Father Carlton is found dead with a small box and a diary. It looks like the Priest and the sister are suspicious about this since Father Carlton was supposed to disclose a certain matter, so the death clearly could not have been a coincidence.
The Priest finds a key inside that box, which belongs to a hidden secret chamber inside the church. He invites Professor Howard Birack and his students to explore and discover what lies in the basement of this church. As it turns out, Father Carlton was a member of an order called The Brotherhood of Sleep, which has taken care of the church since the beginning.
It is an order who communicates through dreams. Here is something that you might not know. So, the main plot of the film about the brotherhood of sleep is loosely inspired by H.P. Lovecraft’s works within his ‘Cthulhu Mythos’. Well, in the chamber the priest is trying to investigate a strange cylinder that is filled with a swirling green liquid. Professor Birack forms a team of around 13 academics who are all his students. Among them are the lovers Brian and Catherine, played by Jameson Parker and Lisa Blount, Walter played by Dennis Dun, Susan Blanchard as Kelly, and Anne Howard as Susan.
Now, you will not believe what they found after deciphering the text which was next to the cylinder. The liquid inside this ancient cylinder is apparently a sentient, liquid embodiment of Satan. Yeah, now that has to be terrifying obviously! Oh, and guess what, this film is Carpenter’s first film after Escape from New York in 1981 which he made independently.
Another mind-blowing thing that the team found out was that Jesus Christ was in fact a space traveler and he was executed due to heresy after he tried to warn the people of Earth about this exact vessel in which Satan was locked up. That is why now, they need scientific evidence to prove this so that the people would actually believe them.
Now they find out a lot of bizarre things in the books left by Christ-followers. The data from the cylinder was just unbelievably insane. It can also only be opened from the inside. Some of the liquid escapes from the cylinder over the course of two days and the ones from the group who have been exposed to the liquid are now possessed by the entity and they start attacking the others.
It is only going to go downhill from here on. You will be surprised to know that the film was shot in just over 30 days. That is right, just a month. No doubt Carpenter is a genius.
Susan, the radiology student, is one of the victims of the Satan liquid, and she starts killing the others one after another. It turns out that this thing can possess people even after they are dead. There are also a whole bunch of homeless possessed people who have surrounded the church, so now nobody can escape. They will die if they tried to help.
So, here’s Professor Birack’s and the priest’s brilliant theory. Basically, Satan is the child of the “Anti-God” from the mirror world. Now comes the communication through dreams, in which the group members who are still alive begin to share a similar dream in which a shadowy figure comes from the front of the church. Walter, Professor Birack, and everyone else also sees this dream one after the other. Brian now comes to realize that this could be due to a tachyon particle sent as a warning from the future year.
Now, a tachyon is basically a theoretical subatomic particle that can travel faster than the speed of light. Because nothing has been known to be capable of moving faster than light, tachyons could really move back in time and might well be used to send a message from one time to another in order to alert others about a specific event.
An interesting fact about the film is that several of the scenes were shot at the University of California, which is the alma mater of John Carpenter which he attended as a film student.
Oh, now get ready for some really scary scenes because the actual possession is about to take place. It happens when the cylinder is slit open and all the rest of the liquid is absorbed by Kelly’s body since she was the chosen one. Obviously, it transforms her into the physical vessel of Satan, who is horrifyingly disfigured with telekinesis and regeneration powers.
As it turns out, all this time, the liquid was just waiting for a vessel. Kelly, who is now Satan, first tries to summon the Anti-God, through a tiny mirror. But since it didn’t work, she soon finds a huge mirror and puts her hand through it to draw out the Anti-God.
A terrifying scene indeed, we do see the Anti-God’s hand coming out of it, but Catherine who is still in her senses tries to save everyone by pushing herself against Kelly and sending both of them inside the mirror portal. That definitely was a heroic move.
So, in order to close the portal of the Anti-God, the priest breaks the mirror with an axe, which in turn traps Kelly and Catherine along with the Anti-God in another realm. We later see Catherine from the other side trying to reach out to the portal again, but it closes before she can. Now, if you are thinking that is the end for Catherine, well, wait until you discover yet another scary scene.
After the portal closed, all the possessed bodies were set free and everything seemed great. It was as if all of their troubles had finally gone away. Oh, but the biggest one is yet to come when Brian has the same dream as the rest of the group, but it looks like the dream has transformed a bit.
Instead of a shadowy figure, Brian sees Catherine in his dream who is coming out of the church. And as if that was not scary enough, we see a possessed, Satan-like Catherine lying next to Brian. That sure gave us a scare, but thank god it was just a dream inside a dream.
After he actually wakes up, he takes the dream to a sign and goes to his bedroom mirror to see if his fingers go through inside it. And just as he stretches out his hand and is about to touch the mirror, our screens go black. The end credits roll in. That is how this epic horror film ends.
Well, looks like we really are not going to find out if another portal did end up opening in Brian’s bedroom or not. But the thought of it, sure is scary enough. Now, here is something interesting which you did not know. The central location of the film is actually a church named Saint Godard’s.
Now, we know all of you are excited to hear about what the devil is like, so, let us dive right into discovering the liquid embodiment of Satan.
The Devil Prince of Darkness
We already know that the one causing all the havoc in the film is basically Satan. Now, this Devil is a continuously swirling green liquid that represents the Evil One, a powerful demonic being. He also calls the Anti-God, his father, who is an even greater villainous force.
After Lisa translated the ancient text from the book into English, we found out a lot of things related to the origin of the green liquid. So, Satan was imprisoned in a cylinder for 7 million years.
Now, hundreds of years later, in ancient Israel, Jesus, who comes to warn everyone about Satan and the Anti-God, was thought to be insane, so he was executed and crucified. But his disciples kept the secret hidden from civilization until humanity begins to develop a science so advanced that it will be capable of proving, through scientific means that what Jesus had warned was in fact all true.
In the 16th century, there was a Christian sect in Spain known as the Brotherhood of Sleep. They discovered the cylinder in which Satan was imprisoned, somewhere in the Middle East, and asked the Spanish government to relocate it.
The Brotherhood managed to bring the ancient object to America and took a vow of silence, even about their own existence, so that no one, not even the Vatican, could find out about them or the cylinder they protected. And they have been doing this for many years.
That is the story of how the Brotherhood of Sleep originated and later became the connection between the group of researchers in the church. We could also say that it was kind of because of them, that they managed to survive somehow.
Now, when they researched the text which was found next to the cylinder, they did not just discover that the liquid is actually Satan, they also found something even more strange. So, the liquid appeared to be sentient, producing increasingly complex data which was decoded by the computer and was revealed to also include differential equations.
Imagine, even the highly skilled students were finding everything to be difficult to believe. In the middle of trying to survive against the possessed people, they did not realize when Kelly became the physical vessel for the liquid embodiment of Satan. It was when that strange-looking mark appeared around her wound, which was shaped like the Brotherhood of Sleep’s very own crest.
So, before anyone could make an attempt to save Kelly, all the green liquid was absorbed by her. Now, we all know how things went down from there. Sure, Satan did not succeed in bringing the Anti-God into this world, but who knows what he will try next. The way that the film ended, it sure did not look like Satan, be it in any form, was going to back down so easily.
Let us not forget what the priest said about Satan “No prison can hold him now”. That is right, even in a liquid form, Satan managed to cause so many deaths and terror among the people.
What Is the Future Dream Message in The Movie?
So, pretty much a lot of mystery has been surrounding around the similar dream in the film that is shared by all the group members. This was the dream that the protectors of the church, meaning the Brotherhood of Sleep, had as well. But the twist here is, that this actually is not a dream at all. Surprising, right?
While sleeping inside the church, they all see a dark figure exiting the church, which is pretty scary in itself. It is actually a message being sent from the future, trying to warn all of them about the disaster which is going to come. The dream also includes a voice-over, but it is pretty difficult to understand what was being said.
Something interesting about the origin of this dream scene is that the idea for it actually came from John Carpenter’s one-time producer Debra Hill. And the director himself went on to record the voice-over for the narration of this future dream. Now, let us take a look at what is really being said in this message.
“This is not a dream… not a dream. We are using your brain’s electrical system as a receiver. 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. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious state of awareness, but this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation.”
Okay, now that is a really bizarre situation to be in. You are dreaming, but in the dream, you actually hear that it is not a dream. Well, of course this was bound to happen when we have a bunch of people trying to protect the church.
This message also tells us that the film actually takes place in the year 1987 as well as 1999. So, basically, the scientists from the year 1999, are trying to tell everyone at the church that they have to stop the Anti-God from rising and coming into our world.
The distorted audio, along with the strange visual elements of the dream, makes it one of Carpenter’s most impactful horror scenes, and it still remains the most famous scene from the film. We already know that the dream did kind of change at the end when Brian was the last one to see it.
Now, it happened after all the chaos had already ended. So, what could it mean? Did they manage to stop the arrival of the Anti-God, or was it just another nightmare that Brian had because he lost Catherine? Looks like we will be left in the dark about this, but at least Prince of Darkness is not the last film in the Apocalypse trilogy. So, we surely can expect a lot more horror and the genius of Carpenter.
Guess what, Prince of Darkness was actually partially inspired by the 1980 Italian horror film Inferno, directed by Dario Argento. What is even more fascinating is that the script for the film is a tribute to the work of British sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale, particularly his well known BBC horror TV film The Stone Tape. It is still one of Carpenter’s most underappreciated works, which has one of his best music scores and also very well blended with a lot of amazing eerie and gory scenes.
Well, with that, guys, we have come to the end of another incredible video. We hope you enjoyed watching it. Make sure to click that subscribe button and hit the like button on your way out, so that we can keep bringing more such videos to you. Until then everyone, stay safe and have a good one!