Editorials
[It Came From the ‘80s] The Devil is Liquid in John Carpenter’s ‘Prince of Darkness’
It Came From the ‘80s is a series that pays homage to the monstrous, deadly, and often slimy creatures that made the ‘80s such a fantastic decade in horror.
In John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness, science and religion collide. Science fiction meets horror. It’s the second film in what Carpenter referred to as his Apocalypse Trilogy, sandwiched between The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness. This time, it’s Satan and his father the Anti-God that threaten to destroy all of humanity. When most horror movies involving the devil take the possession approach, Carpenter uses it as a launching point for a demonic siege with the end goal of summoning the Anti-God to usher in the apocalypse. And Satan is swirling green liquid.
Penned by Carpenter under pseudonym Martin Quatermass (an homage to Quatermass and the Pit creator Nigel Kneale), Prince of Darkness begins with the passing of an elderly priest. On his person is a small box containing a key, which leads another Priest (Donald Pleasence) to investigate. He discovers it unlocks the basement of an older church, St. Godard’s. In it is a large ancient canister full of swirling green liquid, and it’s evil. It prompts him to enlist quantum physicist Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and his students to join his search for answers.
The group learns the liquid is sentient, broadcasting complex data that they analyze. As they realize the truth about it, that perhaps God and Satan were extra-terrestrials and Anti-God exists in the realm of anti-matter, the liquid begins to infect the students one by one. There’s nowhere to flee, either, as a growing mass of crazed homeless people surrounds the church to slay anyone trying to escape.
The first to fall is Susan (Anne Howard). Alone with the canister, it injects some of its liquid straight into her mouth, beginning a gruesome transformation from human to minion of evil. For the makeup effects, Carpenter turned to Francisco X. Perez (credited as Frank Carrisosa), a protégé of Stan Winston and Tom Burman. He was initially hired to do general makeup on the film, but after discussions on the transformation sequence Perez drew up sketches of ideas. Carpenter was so impressed he let Perez handle the transformation.
Prince of Darkness was an indie project, so the budget was limited. Meaning Carpenter had to get creative. The heroes of the film have recurring nightmares, which are actually tachyon transmissions from the future as a warning. To give the dreams that otherworldly quality, Carpenter simply shot them on video and then filmed them off of a TV.
That iconic moment in the climax that sees the gnarled hand of Susan pulling the Anti-God into our world through the mirrored world? Carpenter and crew ingeniously drained their camera crane of its mercury, and put it in a container. It gave the effect of liquid mirror glass. The arms in this shot are prosthetics. After Carpenter was satisfied with the effect, they put the mercury back in the crane and forged on. It was the trickiest effect of the film.
As with a lot of Carpenter’s films in the ‘80s, Prince of Darkness was maligned by critics upon release and didn’t fare well at the box office. Inspired by the quantum physics he’d been studying, Carpenter created a world where logic is reversed and reality loses all meaning. Logic isn’t of any use, and evil exists. He poses a simple question: what if blind faith and love were the only things that stood between humanity and the black bottomless pit? There’s a hefty weight behind the simplicity. The ideas and surrealism mean it’s not one of his most celebrated works, but Carpenter has never been afraid to go full throttle on his vision. Including the application of physics and liquefying the devil.
Steven Spielberg has always been conversant in the cinematic language of the horror genre, despite relatively few credits in the genre. His contributions as a writer and producer on things like Poltergeist are legendary, and films like Duel and Jaws certainly wield the horror genre in remarkable, often chilling ways. He may not be a horror filmmaker, but he knows when he needs to scare us, and he has the tools to make that happen.
I didn’t go into Disclosure Day, Spielberg’s alien epic, expecting outright horror, and indeed the film leans much more into thrilling than frightening. This is not a horror film, but for a few minutes in the middle, much to my surprise, it became one.
Spielberg has filmed more than his fair share of scary scenes over the years, but with Disclosure Day, he directed a new contender for the scariest scene of his entire career.
SPOILERS AHEAD for Disclosure Day!
Josh O’Connor in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
Among the various alien secrets laced throughout Disclosure Day are a trio of palm-sized rods, the color of pencil graphite. These rods, originating from another planet, can be used for a number of things, but for the purposes of this scene, the most important is “diving,” gripping the rod in one bare hand and using its power to “dive” into the mind of another person.
The person holding the rod in this scene is Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of shadowy cybersecurity firm Wordex, who is hellbent on keeping human knowledge of extraterrestrials secret from the general public. Scanlon’s trying to find whistleblower Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor), who’s got all of those alien secrets tucked in a backpack while he’s on the run, and while Daniel’s more experienced mind is protected from diving, his girlfriend Jane’s (Eve Hewson) is not. So, monitored by medical personnel at Wordex headquarters (diving is dangerous), Scanlon pushes his way into Jane’s mind to find the location of Daniel’s safe house.
A telepathic invasion is scary enough on its own, but Spielberg doesn’t stop there. When Scanlon dives into Eve’s mind, he appears to her to be sitting across the kitchen table, like he’s in the room. Her bright blue eyes turn Scanlon’s dark brown, and she loses much of her control over her own body, not to mention her mind. Moments before, Daniel finally shared with her the secrets in his backpack, so Jane is shocked, conflicted, deeply vulnerable when Scanlon slips inside her head. This is not just telepathy. This is possession.
Spielberg underscores this not just through the visual language of the scene, as Jane breaks out in a sweat and struggles to sit upright as Scanlon invades her mind, but through Jane’s background. As she revealed to Daniel earlier in the film, Jane is a former novitiate nun who left her convent when she began to question her calling. She still believes firmly in God and, more importantly, believes that perhaps proof of alien life should be kept secret from the public because, in her eyes, it would upset the entire balance of faith in the world. God is a defining factor for humankind, Jane argues, and showing humanity proof of creatures from the stars would undercut that in dangerous ways.
This context, combined with the crucifix necklace Jane’s holding in her hand at the time of the dive, makes this scene the closest thing Spielberg will ever shoot to something out of The Exorcist. It’s not just a battle of wills, but a battle of faith. As an amoral technocrat worms his way into her memories, her beliefs, her faith, Jane turns the crucifix into a weapon, squeezing it until her hand bleeds when she discovers that a pain response can momentarily push Scanlon out of her head.
Of course, when you put a crucifix and a bloody hand together, it conjures images of stigmata. Screenwriter David Koepp pushes the allusion further by having Scanlon quote Christ on the cross to Jane by way of convincing her that she must be the one to stop Daniel by any means necessary.
It’s easy to see why this is scary, right?
On a very basic level, you have a powerful, wealthy man subduing and assaulting an innocent young woman, which is frightening enough. Then, the layers of the scene kick in. Scanlon doesn’t just assault Jane, but possesses her, seizes her memories, her knowledge, and finally her own free will, all while Jane literally clings to her faith in an effort to fight back. Disclosure Day is, among other things, a story about who has a right to the truth, and Scanlon believes that he should be the arbiter of that truth. Not just the truth as he sees it, but the truth as Jane sees it as well. If they don’t see eye to eye, he’ll make her.
But the possession, as it turns out, cuts both ways. Using the rod to dive is, for a normal human being, an intensely strenuous process. Scanlon admits that previous attempts almost killed him, and for some members of his time, so much as touching the rod results in a near-death experience. Even accessing an unprepared mind like Jane’s takes a lot of Scanlon, and when she kicks him out by squeezing the crucifix – again, so much meaning embedded in the details here – his team holds him back and tries to offer medical intervention. But Scanlon persists, pushing them away, and keeps diving back in.
This means that Jane can’t escape him because he just won’t stop pushing back through her defenses, but it also means that each time Scanlon enters her mind, and thus the safe house, he looks more monstrous. By the end, through a combination of lighting and makeup, Firth barely looks human, conjuring up images of the possessed Father Karras at the end of The Exorcist.
Colin Firth (center, standing) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
On a pure, visceral craft level, all of this is quite frightening, but the real trick to making this scene into Spielberg’s most terrifying lies in the more existential horror surrounding all of this. Disclosure Day is a film about the battle for the truth over extraterrestrials, but it’s also about a fight against an impossibly powerful surveillance state, the devaluing of human and alien lives in favor of some nebulous collection of assets, and the value of the individual in a world that increasingly lumps people into demographic boxes and writes them off.
In this scene, the surveillance state becomes supernatural, a human life is worth less than a piece of information, and an extragovernmental technocrat would rather sacrifice his own humanity than see reason. In 2026, few things could be more terrifying than that. Spielberg knows this and wields it mightily, proving once again that, while he’s not a strictly horror filmmaker, he can direct horror with the best of them.
Disclosure Day is in theaters now.
Eve Hewson (second from left) in DISCLOSURE DAY, directed by Steven Spielberg.
You must be logged in to post a comment.