“Do you read Sutter Cane?”
Most great directors tend to go down that path towards that one film that defines who they are. A film that summarizes everything that makes them great. For example, Alfred Hitchcock merged all his talent to give us his masterpiece ‘North by Northwest’ (1959), Akira Kurosawa was destined to make ‘Seven Samurai’ (1954), and ‘Barry Lyndon’ (1975) can be seen as Stanley Kubrick’s manifesto. This is the case with John Carpenter’s 1994 tour de force ‘In the Mouth of Madness’. This film is the climax extravaganza of his career before eventually phasing out of film in the early 2000s. The film was panned by critics, performed poorly at the box office, but has nonetheless grown a considerable cult following. So why is it so beloved now? Well I’ll answer that later in the review.
Spoilers down below
Proceed at your own risk
THE STORY
Sutter Cane is one of the world’s most renowned horror authors. His books have sold over a billion copies, translated into eighteen languages, and have outsold Stephen King and even the Bible. Just as he’s due to turn over his latest and final manuscript to his publisher, he disappears without a trace. The publishing company hires freelance insurance investigator John Trent to track down Cane and his manuscript. Earlier before he was hired, Trent came into contact with Cane’s ax-wielding agent who was shot dead by the police. Linda, Cane’s editor, explains that Cane’s novels tend to cause disorientation, paranoia, and memory loss among his fanbase. The deeper he gets into his investigation the more he unearths that Cane’s work affects people in alarming ways.
While Trent is studying Cane’s novels he uncovers a hidden red shape on all of the novel’s covers. He then proceeds to rip out all the front covers of the books, oh my bibliophile heart, then cuts out and rearrange the shapes to reveal a map to the fictional town of Hobb’s End. He brings his findings to the publishing director Jackson Harglow. Harglow assigns Linda to accompany John to help recover the manuscript. John believes that this is an extravagant publicity stunt for the new book, but he goes along with it since he’s curious how it plays out.
Linda not only being Cane’s editor is a huge fan of his work. John views Cane’s work as garbage. As they try to find a town that doesn’t exist, they begin to experience an abnormal phenomenon. At night, she drives past a boy on a bike with playing cards in the spokes. The sounds are overpowering. She looks in her rearview mirror and watches him vanish into the darkness. Then she drives past an elderly man on the same bike. Are they hallucinations? She brushes it off and checks the map. While she’s trying to figure out where they are, she accidentally runs into the same elderly man on the bike. She and John get out to check on the man. He may look old, but he has a voice of a young man. He tells her, “I can’t get out. He won’t let me out.” He then gets up and peddles off into the night.
With even more strange occurrences they astonishingly find the town of Hobb’s End. It’s your usual picturesque New England town, but it’s abandoned. Doesn’t look like it’s been abandoned for a long time since it’s well kept. The streets and shops are completely empty, until there are children chasing a dog through the streets. They check into a hotel owned by the sweet looking, yet sinister, Mrs. Pickman. Nobody in the town has heard of Sutter Cane even though the whole town seems to be straight out of one of his novels. Even Mrs. Pickman is a character in his novel, yet she ever heard of the man. Something is wrong with Hobb’s End and this become apparent once they arrive at the church.
When they arrive at the church all the locals start to appear with shotguns. The church door is locked so they yell out demands that Cane return their children. The door of the church open and in the doorway is one of the children. The door proceeds to open and close until Sutter Cane appears in the boy’s place. Then he sends the hounds to take care of the locals. John still believes that it was all staged. Linda admits that was it was originally going to be publicity stunt, but they weren’t supposed to find anything. After their argument she runs off to confront Cane, where she exposed to his final answer, which drives her insane.
John goes into the bar in town to discover Simon, the bartender, walking around with a shotgun. Simon tells John to get out of Hobb’s End while he still can. John still believes that he’s a paid actor for this publicity stunt. He then goes to the hotel to find Linda there acting weirder than usual. So what does he do? The only rational thing to me, he returns to the bar for a drink. He sees a bloodied Simon sitting down with the shotgun this time. Simon believes that the town and its citizens, including himself, are just characters in Sutter Cane’s book. He then points the shotgun in his mouth. John tries to stop him. His response is “I have to! He wrote me this way.” Then pulls the trigger. I’ll come back to this scene later. John then tries to drive off from Hobb’s End, but keeps teleporting back into town. Unable to leave like the boy on the bike. He ends up crashing the car knocking him out.
John wakes up in a confessional and a bright light comes from the other stall. Sutter Cane begins to speak to John from the other side of the confessional about belief. Talking about how he is now God and then they appear in his study. Cane hands him the novel ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ to bring to the world, since that’s what he wrote him to do. So John is simply a character made up by Sutter Cane. Cane then tells him to leave his realm since the Old Ones are about to come and he won’t stop them. John runs as fast as he can away from the monsters. Then John appears in the real world as if nothing has happened. He’s still holding onto the book, which he quickly drops to the ground. Trent only had to deliver ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ to reality. So in dropping it on the ground, his mission was complete and reality was infected.
John goes to see Harglow to warn him not to publish the book, but Harglow points out that John gave him the book months ago and it has been out for weeks now. And of course the movie will be out within the next month. John goes to a bookstore to kill whoever reads ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ hence why he is in the asylum.
LOVECRAFTIAN INFLUENCE
I’ve been a fan of H.P. Lovecraft since I was a boy and it’s always been difficult to find a good Lovecraftian horror film aside for a select few. If you’re a fan of his work you can definitely see the influence that Lovecraft had on the film. First off are the titles of Sutter Cane’s novels are copied of those of Lovecrafts. ‘The Whisperer of the Dark’ from ‘The Whisperer in Darkness’, ‘The Thing in the Basement’ from ‘The Thing on the Door-Step’, ‘Hobb’s End Horror’ from ‘The Dunwich Horror’, ‘Haunter Out of Time’ from both ‘The Haunter of the Dark’ and ‘The Shadow Out of Time’, and lastly the title of the film itself based on ‘At the Mountains of Madness’. An insane narrator, a trope commonly used by Lovecraft, tells the film’s story in flashbacks. The surname of one of the characters Mrs. Pickman comes from Lovecraft’s story ‘Pickman’s Model’. Sutter Cane’s writing even contains direct passages from Lovecraft’s work. For example, when John is reading aloud from one of Cane’s book while they are walking to the church at Hobb’s End. The passage was “the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe”. That was a direct passage from Lovecraft’s ‘The Haunter of the Dark’. Then there’s the references to the ‘Old Ones” by Sutter Cane. The monsters that eventually come to life in the end are references to the Cthulhu Mythos. ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ is hands down the best Lovecraftian horror film to date.
FREE WILL
Do we have free will or is everything predetermined for us? This is the age old question in both psychology and philosophy. In ‘The Matrix’, Morpheus asks Neo if he believes in fate and Neo responds with no. Morpheus questions why he chose that answer and Neo responds, “ because I don’t like the idea that I’m not in control of my life.” As a psychology major I was always fascinated by this question of if free will was real or if it was just an illusion. ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ in a way brings up the question free will throughout the film.
John believes no one pulls his strings, that he’s independent, and that he has free will. Near the end John discovers the ultimate truth that he is simply living a life of a book character that is at the beckon call of Cane. Cane sees himself as a god. He develops characters and plays their every action in advance. He writes their eventual ends in his infallible Word. His creations can refer to his Word to see how it turns out, but they have no free will to change the outcome. He was cruel to give his many creations consciousness and allowing them to believe in the illusion that they are real people.
Sutter Cane: You are what I write, like this town. It wasn’t here before I wrote it and neither were you.
John Trent: No, I know what’s real. I know what I am. And nobody pulls my strings.
Sutter Cane: You think my agent attacked you by accident? He read about you in there. He knew you’d bring it back and start the change. Make what’s happened here happen everywhere. He tried to stop you.
John Trent: I’m not a piece of fiction!
Sutter Cane: I think, therefore you are.
The town of Hobb’s End didn’t exist till Cane wrote it. John was reading the books within the book to find its location. The church at Hobb’s End was the bridge between fiction and reality. Only two people read the first couple of chapters of the manuscript though: Cane’s agent and Julie. The agent saw what Cane was trying to do so he tried to prevent it by killing John, but if he read it wouldn’t he know that he couldn’t prevent it? That Cane already predetermined his end and John was going to get the book to the public anyways. That he too does not have free will. His decision has already been made. Much like a chess game played on the computer. It calculates for hours trying to compute the best move. It may be evaluating millions of positions. The end decision is ultimately fixed by the input state. It’s a choice, but its not free. The agent’s end decision was fixed by Cane, the writer. It was just a process that guided to a conclusion and that conclusion was forced by prior causes. So not free. Julie was just an instrument to get John to Hobb’s End and once she did that she was written out of the book. When John tries to prevent Simon (a resident of Hobb’s End) from committing suicide he tells John, “I have to! He wrote me this way.” This brings me to another thing that peaked my interest.
LAST TUESDAYISM
The plot twist that John was created by Cane is intriguing. The concept is pretty disturbing. It’s like the idea of Last Tuesdayism. It’s the idea that the universe was created last Tuesday, but with the appearance of it being over a billions years old. That all the books, films, galaxies, and your memories were all formed at the time of creation, which was last Tuesday. So all our memories of what happened before that are false, which is a scary thought. That means history was a lie: the holocaust never happened, there was never an Abraham Lincoln or JFK, and no atom bomb was ever dropped. People would be able to get out of jail because the crime that happened before last Tuesday didn’t even happen. So how would John know if his memories are real or false.
REALITY
Simon: The thing I can’t remember is what came first… us or the book.
John: We are not living in a Sutter Cane story! This is not reality!
Simon: Reality is not what it used to be.
Reality is brought up a lot throughout the film. Up until this point John keeps saying, “this is reality.” In this scene though he says, “this is not reality!” Earlier Linda told John, “ A reality is just what we tell each other it is. Sane and insane could easily switch places, if the insane were to become the majority. You would find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering what happened to the world.” This of course was foretelling what would happen to him. One person’s perception of reality is wholly different from another persons. Reality is based on conjecture. The film explores the idea that reality is a delicate thing, that if the “sane” would suddenly become “insane” all would be lost. Cane has such a power that his magnum opus makes everyone insane and he throws reality in the blender.
THE COLOR BLUE
Sutter Cane tells John that his favorite color is blue. As his influence grows you see more and more of the color blue from blue houses, blue shirts, to close ups of people’s eyes are blue. Even the opening credits are all in blue. Seeing the color blue everywhere proves Sutter Cane’s power.
FINAL THOUGHTS
Sam Neil is truly superb as the practical, jaded, and chain-smoking insurance investigator with is Humphrey Bogart detective persona. He is constantly questioning everything that is thrown at him. It may be a Lovecraftian horror film, but it does pull from some of the classic noirs. When he says, “Lady, nothing surprises me. We’ve fucked up the air, the water, we’ve fucked up each other. Why don’t we finish the job by just flushing our brains down the toilet?” Now that’s a chain-smoking detective line from a noir film if I ever heard one.
Just as impressive is Jurgen Prochnow as Sutter Cane. From his grand entrance that looks like it came from a Classic Universal Monster film you just know that he’ll steal every scene that he is in. He brings that depravity to the character. Frances Bay plays the horrifyingly sweet, but deadly Mrs. Pickman. There’s a nice brief appearance of Charlton Heston as Harglow. Lastly, there’s the film debut of Anakin Skywalker himself Hayden Christensen.
The practical effects were quite well done. It’s what one would expect from John Carpenter. The effects have actually haven’t really aged due to the practical effects, miniatures, animatronics, and some good ole rubber suits. When the “Old Ones” were released by Cane, those monsters alone required over thirty puppeteers to operate. I loved that grotesque horror imagery.
The film is criminally underrated and for a long while was widely overlooked and misunderstood, but has since gained a cult following. So at the beginning of this review, I asked the question why is this film so loved by many now? Not only is it a tremendously well-written and paced Lovecraftian story with great performances and effects, but its depth. Not many horror films have meaningful depth. There’s narrative depth between its layered cerebral, philosophical, psychological, and physical horror. ‘In the Mouth of Madness’ really rewards the viewer with multiple viewings, which is a rare testament to the film. It’s one of the boldest, unique, and most memorable films in the horror genre.
5 out of 5
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