After its mention in yesterday’s post, it seems apposite to turn the focus firmly on John Carpenter’s In the Mouth of Madness as one of the most signifcant Lovecraftian movies of the 1990s - and one of the better pieces of Lovecraftian cinema produced thus far.
As something which, initially, sets itself up as a piece of schlocky horror, In the Mouth of Madness transforms itself into a staggeringly original low-budget, reality-warping mess of a movie in which a (meta-)fictional variant of Lovecaft’s own fictions literally write themselves into existence; and whilst cosmicism may not be entirely front-and-centre here by way of traditional Lovecraftian tropes, there are a few tentacles along the way - as well as a fairly effective, though briefly-glimpsed (which is probably why it is so effective) manifestation of the movie’s analogues of the Great Old Ones; there is also something of a (pre-Ligotti) Ligottian feel to In the Mouth of Madness by way of the film’s tacit central conceit: that human beings are but empty ciphers - insubstantial puppets dancing unknowingly to the monstrous tune of inscrutably alien forces.
And in the final analysis, In the Mouth of Madness presents us that terminally-important question - a question which is perhaps the only question that is and has ever been worth asking: do you read Sutter Kane?
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