“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.”
Since I was a teenager, I’ve always been on the lookout for another Sphere. Not the ham-handed 1998 movie, but the Michael Crichton novel, published the same year as the release of John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness. Carpenter’s movie bears a certain resemblance to Crichton’s book: both are about a team of scientists in an isolated location examining an impossible artifact, with deadly results. The novel, for me, is a deeply satisfying and creepy attempt to show what happens when the irresistible forces of the scientific method and human intelligence meet the immovable object of the alien and inexplicable. The space where our means of understanding the world encounters that which resists all understanding has always been fertile ground for horror; the unknown is one of the deepest foundations of fear, and by demonstrating an extensive but ultimately futile attempt to make the unknown known, a good storyteller can create a very intense fear, the way a stronger light casts a darker shadow. Sphere is one of the purest examples of the form, but of course it is much older than that. Lovecraft toyed with it in his more science fiction stories; on that side of the divide, the eerie mystery Solaris by Stanislaw Lem also comes to mind. For horror, Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House (1959) is another fine example, and like Sphere shows that what happens when a scientific viewpoint is confronted with the impossible is that the human personalities become the driving narrative force. In Hill House, the presence (if there is one) seems to fixate on poor, weak Eleanor. In Sphere, the scientists’ fears, needs, and resentments take on physical form. Solaris examines this more directly, as the influence of an alien planet generates flesh and blood reminders of loss. Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness has more than a few problems, but the main one is that its human personalities are not sufficiently complex to drive the story, leaving mood and action to carry the bulk of the film. My search continues.
What’s most frustrating about Prince of Darkness is how the right elements are there at the start. The film opens in intriguing fashion as an old priest is found dead and holding an ornate metal box. The box holds a key, and the key unlocks a door in an old, unused church, leading to a staircase down into the basement. Something in that basement inspires the priest (Donald Pleasance) who has journeyed there to contact a physics professor, Birack (Victor Wong, a Carpenter alum from Big Trouble in Little China), and ask him for assistance in studying… well, it’s all rather vague. Birack summons a handful of grad students, including Brian (Jameson Parker) and Catherine (Lisa Blount), who have recently begun a relationship, and Walter (Dennis Dun, also from Big Trouble), who is kind of jerk. Without telling them much, Birack asks them to join him for a weekend at the church in a scientific investigation that will, of course, count positively toward their grade in his class. This is all a strong, interesting set-up that effectively teases the mystery of what exactly they plan on investigating–and once it has been revealed as an ancient Latin text and a giant tube of green, shifting liquid, the mystery of what exactly it is and means.
The problem with the film is that, although the supernatural force at work here continues to develop, the characters pretty much don’t. The only thing resembling an arc over the course of the film is with Catherine. Before the investigation, Catherine stops Brian from telling her he loves her, afraid to commit to the relationship. Once the horror is underway, a scared Catherine decides that he should tell her, that “it’s the only thing that matters.” Every other character in the film is essentially static, including the priest. Pleasance is wasted, a great actor reduced to mumbling scenery and given the same nervous note to play throughout. Walter comes off as weirdly racist–the diversity of the cast, including Dun and Wong, is nice, but Walter’s continued telling of racist jokes is less so, and even with some of the other characters telling him he’s an asshole, it still comes off as gross and pointless. (Equally “…is that offensive?” is the one black character expressing his possession by singing “Amazing Grace.”) It’s not as though Walter learns a lesson over the course of the movie. Nor does Brian really even have a standard “skeptic to believer” arc. Even Professor Birack begins the film lecturing on physics with a strong veneer of mysticism (“None of [our beliefs] is true! Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level… into ghosts and shadows”), and never really alters his willingness to view what’s happening through either the lens of science or the supernatural.
Most disappointing, in terms of hoping for that Sphere feeling, is that Carpenter’s scientists never really feel like scientists. After they arrive, there’s a series of scenes in which they set up equipment without exactly knowing what they plan on testing. Next should come the Act 1 scenes where characters test the oddity and then find disturbing results–that’s the low hanging fruit of the genre, like the chalk talk in a heist movie. But Carpenter skips the part where they actually do the tests. All we get is the results, delivered in hushed, disbelieving tones, as when Brian confronts Professor Birack:
Brian: “Nothing, anywhere ever is supposed to be able to do what it is doing.”
Professor Birack: “Settle down, now. Go back to work.”
Brian: “A life form is growing out of prebiotic fluid. It’s not winding down into disorder, it’s self-organizing. It’s becoming something, what? Animal, a disease, what?”
The professor shows Brian some of the translations of the mysterious Latin text, which suggest that the green liquid is some form of ancient imprisoned evil, and tells him “The hardest thing to hear, for any of us, is something we don’t agree with.” What undercuts this conflict is that we haven’t seen any of this firsthand. When Brian describes a life form growing from prebiotic fluid, that’s all news to us. We haven’t seen this discovery, there’s been no visual representation of it, no moment when the emotions of the scientists confronting their data are expressed to us. Imagine Ash in Alien describing Kane’s facehugger to us without us ever actually seeing it or Ash examining it. The value of genre is the recipe–add the ingredients in the right order and it works well enough the way it should. Carpenter skips a step, and so his cake never rises.
This failure to include actual scientific analysis only gets more noticeable as the story continues. There are plenty of examples in the Sphere genre of characters using scientific and logical analysis to try to understand something alien or supernatural. Science fiction examples range from Alien to Star Trek, and scientists study horror in works like Theodore Sturgeon’s Some of Your Blood, or the crowd-sourced horror fiction site The SCP Foundation. What all of these works have in common is the way their characters try to understand the unknown, and to solve the problems it presents in a rational, analytical fashion. They may be forced to run, fight, shoot, or swim, but the action is guided in part by decisions based on careful thought. The way the characters approach their dilemmas in Sunshine, for example, is a thousand years from the operative methods of the students in Prince of Darkness. Before they understand that they’re in danger, they wander around looking for missing members of the team just like the victims in any old “pick them off one by one” horror movie. (It’s emblematic of the facile approach the film takes to its religious/scientific conflict that, rather than continuing to study the anomaly while maintaining the existence of a non-religious explanation, several of its characters simply decide to leave.) Once they do understand what’s happening–that the presence in the tube is somehow possessing, even re-animating their colleagues, in order to attack them–these supposed scientists are wholly reduced to fighting the possessed pawns with two-by-fours.
To be fair, they do have a few conversations where Birack makes wild guesses about what the anomaly is doing, and there is a discussion about the shared dream they’ve all been having. But those are not significant in terms of what the characters choose to do. Their theories about the anomaly do not lead them to take any specific action against it–they don’t theorize, test, and exploit a weakness, or adapt their behavior to match some greater understanding. The odd, videotape-of-a-videotape dream they all have, which they believe is a warning from the future, is again useless. All the message from the distant future of 1999 can tell them is that there is some future cataclysm that must be averted. Great, but I can’t see how they would have done any differently even without experiencing the message. They can’t leave, because the anomaly has gathered a bunch of homeless around the building to kill anyone who tries to run away. The climactic solution, in which the Prince’s chosen vessel is tackled through a mirror portal into the anti-matter dimension (it’s a long story) and then Pleasance shatters the portal with an axe, does not seem like anything they wouldn’t have done in any case, simply to destroy the monster that was imprisoning and attacking them. You could argue that Catherine, who actually does the tackling and therefore gives her life to stop the Prince, needed to know the extent of the stakes, but if the film shows her putting any of this together during these scenes, it was too subtle and I didn’t notice.
I don’t want to imply that Prince of Darkness is wholly without value. There is, in fact, a lot to like here in terms of the shifting evil, the atmosphere of tightening tension, and the fun special effects. I loved the way the green liquid was used, flowing upwards into pools on the ceiling (obviously just regular pools of water shot upside-down) and being sprayed from one possessed person’s mouth into the next victim’s, as if the Prince’s army were just really enthusiastic about the sharing the refreshing taste of Mountain Dew. Carpenter’s score is a constant, sometimes subliminal presence throughout, reminding us why we should be nervous even during the movie’s long, structureless middle. Several moments manage to be truly creepy, as when one of the possessed characters tells our heroes “I’ve got a message for you, and you’re not going to like it. Pray for death!” and then collapses into a pile of dark, squirming bugs. The final scene, in which Brian discovers that their efforts only assured that his lost Catherine would now be the form of the destructor, and reaches out to test whether the mirror by his bed is still solid and real, is like the perfect conclusion to some other, better movie.
Despite the skillful direction and inventive effects, it’s tough to ignore that Prince of Darkness tries to set up a conflict between science and religion in order to explore the eerie space where both meet the unknown, but ultimately fails to follow through. The debate over whether this thing is some kind of alien life form that does obey scientific principles or truly the offspring of some cosmic Lovecraftian darkness is pretty much over before it begins. Professor Birack never seems to balk at the idea that they’ve stumbled onto an authentic evil entity currently attempting a mystic ritual, no matter how many times he says the word antimatter, and his students can’t seem to articulate an alternate point of view with any detail or force of argument. For his part, Pleasance’s priest is willing enough to let a team of scientists into the church to poke at an object kept secret by a sect of the Church for thousands of years. (The Catholic Church, keeping secrets? Shocking.) The conflict doesn’t have teeth, because Carpenter simply doesn’t seem interested in actually engaging with it. The symptoms and tactics of the Prince, while entertainingly varied, are not really all that far removed from standard movie demon stuff (spitting, possession, swarming insects), and that seems to be where Carpenter’s interest truly lies, rather than in sincerely grappling with competing philosophies, or even than in telling a story of psychological depth about the characters forced to confront the unknown.
And John Carpenter is fully capable of such things. He did it once before, in 1982’s The Thing. That carefully controlled, snowbound, claustrophobic masterpiece of unease again featured a group of scientists and professionals in an isolated location challenged with understanding and surviving a hostile, alien entity. In that film, his characters rise to the challenge, coming up with hypotheses and tests, making plans based on what they know, thinking strategically and approaching their problems rationally. The result is deeply engaging and one of the best horror films of the decade. One of the reasons is that Carpenter had more time on The Thing both before and during production to prepare, storyboard, and rewrite, particularly due to an unexpected six week break in filming, as described by the film’s co-producer Stuart Cohen. John Carpenter is a filmmaker whose oeuvre is often characterized by films of interesting ideas and strong execution without the careful refinement that would elevate them into greatness. Prince of Darkness has its proponents, no doubt attracted to its eerie tone, its inventive effects, and the veneer of scientific seriousness, just as the fairly similar Event Horizon has its fans. But to me it feels like a first draft. I wish Carpenter had been able to take the time to go back and flesh out the characters and help their emotional and intellectual viewpoints drive the story. As it is, we receive his broadcast as a dream only: enjoying its images and mood, but missing out on any real message transmitted to us from the distant past of the year one, nine, eight, seven.
Every year, Kyu attempts to watch and review 31 horror movies in 31 days. This year, it’s Killtoberfest 666, because there’s a limit to what Satan can do as a volume of liquid. Check out past Killtoberfests along with this year’s reviews, and be sure to follow us on Twitter @insidethekraken to track Kyu’s progress.