“Reality is not what it used to be.” What is the difference between reality and fantasy, sanity and insanity? This border is certainly blurred after watching John Carpenter’s “In the Mouth of Madness,” “In the Mouth of Madness” is the final installment in Carpenter’s ‘Trilogy of Apocalypse,’ which includes “The Thing” and “Prince of Darkness.”
It is one of Carpenter’s best pictures, focusing on Lovecraftian cosmic horror and investigating the theme of reality’s fragility! “At the Mountains of Madness.” a Lovecraftian novel, also inspired the film’s title. Sutter Cane, played by Jurgen Prochnow, is the adversary who has the capacity to flick the switch, turning sanity into insanity and blending reality.
The protagonist, John Trent, is played by Sam Neil. What is John Trent’s background? Is he a real independent insurance investigator or just another character in Cane’s novel? The film follows Trent, who was hired by the director of Arcane Publishing to find the missing horror author Sutter Cane. As Trent looks for Cane, things spiral out of control. Julie Carmen plays Linda Styles, while Jurgen Prochnow plays Sutter Cane in the film. Let us see how weird you can make the movie’s plot.
Reality isn’t what it used to be – In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
The movie commenced with a scene in the psychiatric hospital where John Trent is brought in as a patient while he keeps shouting, “I am not insane”. The other patients also started repeating his words, proving that even madness was relative. Soon, we find out that Dr. Wrenn had visited Trent, who had painted the walls of the ward and even himself with crosses and narrated his past story. It is worth mentioning that one of the mental patients in the asylum was featured by Carpenter.
Trent had been a brilliant freelance insurance investigator, and while he was having lunch with the owner of an insurance company, the owner requested him to work for Arcane Publishing, one of the leading publishing houses of New York. During their conversation, a man attacked them with an ax.
He asked Trent whether he reads Cane’s novels, but the man was shot dead by the police before Trent answered. Eventually, Trent meets the director of Arcane Publishing, Jackson Harglow, who assigned him to find Sutter Cane and bring back his latest novel, “In the Mouth of Madness,” to their office. You heard it right.
The name of Sutter Cane’s novel is indeed “In the Mouth of Madness.” Harglow introduced Cane’s editor, Linda Styles, and asked her to accompany him on the mission. It was also revealed that the person who had attacked Trent was Cane’s agent, who was driven insane after reading the manuscript of the latest novel.
Linda explained that Cane’s novels had caused disorientation, paranoia, and memory loss among the “less stable readers.” As Trent went to the bookstore to get some of the stories by Cane, he saw that Cane’s fans were vandalizing the book store to get the latest novel. Trent was confident that all these incidents were nothing but publicity stunts before releasing the novel.
When Trent started reading old novels of Sutter Cane, he began hallucinating visions where he saw humans converted into monsters, but he ignored them. Suddenly, Trent notices strange red lines on the covers of Cane’s novels. When appropriately aligned, it formed the outline map of New Hampshire state, and a red mark was supposed to be Hobb’s End town. Trent was confident that Sutter Cane was hiding in that town as he and Styles set out for the town.
While driving, Styles had some bizarre hallucinations. She went past a cyclist who was a mere teenager, but after a few minutes of driving, she saw the same cyclist, but he had turned very old. She was so engrossed in these events that she hit the cyclist and when she went to help him, he said, “I can’t get out. Let me out”. Then he just got up and left. Soon after, while Linda drove, she found that their car had entered a strange tunnel.
When they came out of the tunnel, it was broad daylight and they had reached the fictional Hobb’s town. Linda again hallucinated a group of children chasing a dog aggressively, which Trent was unable to see. The town was picture-perfect, but Linda stated that the town and its places were all related to Sutter Cane’s novels. Even Mrs. Pickman of Pickman Hotel was a character written by Cane, who kills her husband according to his novels.
Though Styles and Trent thought that Mrs. Pickman was charming and decent, the audience could see her husband tied up behind the counter. This scene forces the audience to believe that Linda’s predictions about them living inside Cane’s story seemed correct. But Trent still didn’t believe her and tried to convince her of the difference between fiction and reality.
But then, one after the other, unexplainable bizarre incidents started occurring in the town, which even convinced Trent that there was something uncanny about the town. Linda went to the town’s church where she met Sutter Cane, who revealed that he had been writing what “they” wanted him to write for years.
At first, no one really understood what he meant by “they,” but then it was revealed that ”they” were the ancient monsters who were eager to reclaim planet earth. We realized that Cane himself had been transformed into a monster.
Trent found out that Mrs. Pickman, Linda, and all the townsmen had been converted into fierce monsters. He tried to escape from the town in his car, but no matter how hard he tried, he was teleported back to the aggressive, monstrous townsmen who were trying to attack him every time. Finally, when Trent tried to run them over, he crashed his car and fainted.
When he awakened, he found himself in the confession box with Cane and Linda, where Cane revealed that the public’s belief in his writings had freed an ancient race of monsters, arriving to reclaim the earth. Cane also stated that Trent is merely a character in his novel whose responsibility is to return the manuscript to Arcane Publishing. After passing the manuscript to Trent, Cane tore off his face and opened the portal for the monsters to appear. He points to the tunnel, which was the same tunnel that brought them to the town.
As Trent ran through the tunnel, the grisly monsters chased him. They almost got him when Trent tripped and fell, but instantly found himself on the country road. Back in reality, Trent destroyed the manuscript and went to meet Harglow after returning to New York. After narrating his story to Harglow, he said that Trent had been sent to fetch the manuscript alone and not with Linda. He had delivered the manuscript months ago as it was on sale, and a film had been adapted from it. Trent encountered a reader of the new novel whose eyes were bleeding and killed him with an ax. He was arrested and eventually sent to a mental asylum.
After Trent finished narrating his story, Dr. Wrenn considered it to be a meaningless hallucination and left. The next day, Trent found that the asylum had been abandoned, and he heard the news that monstrous creatures had taken over the world, while suicides and mass murders were occurring at random.
He went to watch the film, “In the Mouth of Madness,” and found out that he was the main character and all that had happened to him was being shown in the movie. Trent started laughing hysterically on seeing the movie before he broke down to cry as he realized that he had been a character of the novel all along.
Trust me, friends, I know this is a brief synopsis of the movie, but every second, every scene, and every dialogue of the film is essential. The movie is just another masterpiece from the master director. The character of Trent has been one of the best performances of Sam Neil, with a perfect script by Michael De Luca.
The film is a classic tribute to H. P. Lovecraft, as the film refers to many of his stories and themes. Mrs. Pickman borrows her name from Lovecraft’s Pickman family. The Sutter Cane novels have titles inspired by Lovecraft stories like, Whisperer of the Dark was taken from Lovecraft’s “The Whisperer in Darkness”, The Thing in the Basement was taken from Lovecraftian story, “The Thing on the Doorstep” and so on. The film has developed a cult following and has earned a lot of positive reviews in the following years.
Power Hungry Lovecraftian Horrors
Carpenter’s homage to Lovecraft is not confined to similar titles. There are moments in the film when quotations from Lovecraft’s short stories are narrated. When Trent and Linda approached the church in Hobb’s End town, this is what Trent read about the church loudly, “the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe.” This quote is taken directly from Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.”
When Linda confronted Cane inside the church, Cane confessed that he had been writing whatever the ancient monsters wanted him to. Carpenter wanted the apocalypse of this film to be the cosmic ‘Old One’ evil kind. Thus, the monsters in this film can be considered as Carpenter’s vision of Cthulu Mythos. From the church scene, we get the first look at the monster that was coming to reclaim the earth.
There was an artwork hanging in the reception of the Pickman hotel displaying a couple, with the church of Hobb’s End in the background. The position of the couple kept changing, and finally, Trent was shocked to see that the human couple in the artwork had changed entirely into a monster couple. This signified that the time had arrived when all the human beings of the town would be converted into monsters.
Soon, we find that Linda and Mrs. Pickman had been transformed into gruesome monsters. Thereafter, Trent found that the townspeople had also been converted into aggressive monstrous beings who threatened to attack him. During the climax, Cane revealed that the ‘Old One’ monsters were ready to enter the world of reality through people’s belief in Sutter Cane’s horror stories dictated by them.
Until then, Cane had successfully held them back behind a massive door located in the church’s basement. Finally, when Cane opened the portal for them in the church, the wall of monsters entered our world and wreaked havoc all over the planet.
Mrs. Pickman’s creature was fashioned using miniatures. There was a shot where Lyna acts monstrously by spinning her head around. This scene was performed by a contortionist wearing an upside-down prosthetic mask. But one of the best creations in Carpenter’s career is the full-sized “wall of monsters” that needed over thirty people to operate. The entire production was a group effort by KNB EFX Group that included Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger for special makeup. These Lovecraftian monsters were almost on the same standard as ‘The Thing’, being so massive and tentacle-heavy.
Reality Vs Fiction as seen In the Mouth of Madness
“In the Mouth of Madness” is a metafiction depicting a story within a story. Whatever we see in the movie is the storyline by the fictional horror writer Sutter Cane, which Trent realizes at the end of the film. The meta-theme has also been used in the dream sequence, where we see Trent experiencing a dream within a dream. Reality and fiction have been tossed repeatedly in this movie, so the audience gets absolutely confused.
There was a scene where Styles told Trent that if most people started believing in fiction, it wouldn’t be long before fiction got converted into reality. The Hobb’s End town itself was a fictional town from the horror story by Cane that we find out towards the end. Watching a young cyclist transforming into an older man within minutes, crossing a tunnel at night and arriving at the other end at broad daylight, changing the artwork in the hotel reception, all confirm the fictional image of the town.
This film highlights the fact that fiction remains imaginary as long as you don’t believe it but gets converted into reality when you start believing in it. As soon as the readers started believing the fictional horror stories by Cane, fiction was transformed into reality, hence opening the portal for the monsters to enter the planet.
Would you believe that the cover pages of all the novels written by Sutter Cane were different scenes from this movie? The cover page of “Haunter out of Time” shows the scene where the Old One’s monsters were whispering the stories to Sutter Cane. “The Hobb’s End Horror” shows the old church and Mrs. Pickman’s monster, while “The Breathing Tunnel” depicts the scene when Trent runs through the tunnel to reach the real world.
Even if I assume that after reading Cane’s novel, Trent became mentally unhinged and everything else was his hallucination, then the question arises, how was the film made with Trent as the main character? Even I feel confused now. In my opinion, watching the film once is not enough to solve the interconnected mystery of reality Vs. fiction and sanity vs. insanity. If you come up with any other theories, please let us know in the comments section— Till then, let us believe in fiction as well as reality.