"This is not a dream... not a dream."
A non-spoiler look at John Carpenter's 1987 film Prince of Darkness
This movie…
Holy shit.
Before I go any further, I should preface this piece by saying that I led a fairly religious lifestyle for the first 35 years of my life. I wasn’t Catholic, but I was very much a devout Christian and movies like The Exorcist and The Omen scared the absolute daylights out of me because of my attachment to the idea of a cosmic battle happening between forces of good and evil that were beyond my comprehension.
And worse… I was taught that those forces had us humans, essentially, at their mercy.
I didn’t catch Prince of Darkness when it came around the first time. I wasn’t really connected to the bleeding edge of cinema at the tender age of nine, and certainly not new horror movies. I basically had to live off of whatever came over the pirated HBO feed when it was working, or hope that a broadcast network would show an edited version of something… which is actually how I saw The Exorcist for the first time as a kid on WGN…
But I digress.
What can I say about this film?
It’s not a narrative masterpiece. The story is clunky in a couple of places and sometimes it feels like the script is trying a little too hard to merge the seemingly disparate worlds of science and religion. Also, the performance of Father Loomis by Donald Pleasance does feel a bit heavy-handed, especially in the third act. That’s not often a criticism one would make in a film like this, but there it is.
Still, a tightly woven story and intricate character development aren’t really the reasons one watches a John Carpenter film, are they?
What Prince of Darkness lacks in narrative cohesion, it more than makes up for in mood and visual tone. From the first notes of the haunting opening score, there is an incredible sense of foreboding and dread that lies heavy over the whole film. You just know in your gut that something really, really awful is about to happen… and whatever that terrible thing could be, it’s got far-reaching implications for all of us.
At its core, Prince of Darkness is a story of the ongoing struggle between good and evil as mythologized by the Judeo-Christian framework. I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie, but suffice it to say that this overarching theme is the foundation that supports all the other elements of fright that make their way into the film. Those of us who come from a religious background are quick to pick up on these elements, and so the movie plays directly into our fear of Satan, The Devil, or whatever else you want to call him.
I think that’s ultimately why this movie hits so deeply for some people and not so much for others. If you weren’t raised in an overly religious environment, these existential fears of eternal suffering and the Devil always “trying to get you” are probably something you didn’t encounter very often. For those of us who lived under the constant threat of eternal damnation, however, there was this ever-present feeling that there was a powerful force of malevolence out there who was at least almost as strong as God… and it wanted bad things to happen to you.
You can imagine what kind of primal fear that might evoke in a person.
I certainly carried that fear for a lot of my life, and that’s why this movie scared the absolute dogshit out of me the first time I watched it.
If I’m honest, it still does.
Many people take comfort in the idea that there is an all-powerful, all-loving force watching over them and keeping track of the intimate details of their lives. The flip side of that coin, however, is that to believe such a thing, one must also believe in the existence of an all-seeing, all-evil force who is doing the exact same thing. It’s this underlying tension between the two forces and the accompanying feeling of cosmic paranoia that Carpenter really taps into during the film’s best moments.
Getting back to the nuts and bolts of the movie, the performances of the supporting cast range from just average to excellent—the role of Professor Birack as played by veteran character actor Victor Wong certainly falling into the latter category. Donald Pleasance is solid as always for the first two-thirds of the film as Father Loomis, but as I briefly mentioned before, his character becomes a bit much by the end of the whole affair. Dare I say even a bit melodramatic. But even then, it’s not the end of the world and something that can certainly be overlooked.
Though this movie does lay it on thick sometimes with the jargon, there are some interesting ideas here about the intersection of science and faith. It’s not the most adept handling of the subject I’ve ever seen, but in this particular setting, it does create some thought-provoking questions about the relationship (if any) between religion, physics, and the universe—as well as our still limited understanding of creation’s origins. To be fair, dealing with these kinds of existential topics in a 1980s horror film was a lofty ambition, so I don’t judge the movie too harshly for the moments where it handles the subject matter clumsily.
All told, though, I think the true hidden gem of this movie is the performance of Jameson Parker as Brian Marsh. If you grew up on 1980s network television like I did, then you likely only knew this guy from his role as A.J. Simon on the popular prime time hit Simon & Simon that ran on CBS pretty much the entire decade. The whole show had kind of a cheeky and quasi-comedy feel to it, so I was pretty surprised to see Parker cast as the male lead in a pretty intense psychological horror film.
He holds his own, though. His performance is entirely believable and even evokes a sense of empathy from the viewer. This seemingly run-of-the-mill graduate student and his cohort are dropped into a fucked up melting pot of circumstances that progressively become creepier and more violent. You see him struggle with being a man of science and yet coming face-to-face with phenomena he couldn’t possibly explain away with an equation or a theorem.
It’s his performance in the movie’s final masterfully crafted scene, however, that I believe truly captures the realism he brings both to the role and to the story itself.
Ultimately, this film is worth watching and belongs in your collection if you truly consider yourself a fan of vintage psychological/supernatural horror. The story is admittedly weak in some places, but it’s held together enough by mostly solid cast performances and a handful of inspired creative choices that keep you engaged throughout the film. The climax is totally worth the buildup and the ending leaves you with just the right amount of psychological discomfort and unanswered questions to keep your mind churning for a little while longer.
Plus, this is John Carpenter we are talking about here.
So you know the movie is shot beautifully and accentuated by a stylized synthesizer soundtrack that evokes a very real feeling of dread. Once again, we get an effort from a filmmaker and a creative team around him that shows they definitely care about the craft of horror movie-making beyond simply using cheap jump scares, artificially created fear, and substandard cinematography.
It’s not the cream of the crop, but for a good retro scare, you could do a whole hell of a lot worse than Prince of Darkness.