Horror legend John Carpenter turns 78 this Friday, and Halloween Night: John Carpenter Live from Los Angeles is now streaming on Screambox. Bloody Disgusting is celebrating with John Carpenter Week. Today, Jenn Adams reads Sutter Cane.
We know that art has a way of imitating life, but what happens when life imitates art? The line between fiction and reality is often closer than we’d like to admit, particularly when we’re talking about the horror genre.
In 2020, many readers noticed disturbing similarities between Stephen King’s 1990 apocalyptic novel The Stand and the unprecedented spread of COVID-19, not to mention connections between recent political developments and his 1979 supernatural thriller The Dead Zone. You see, it’s one thing when life imitates the art of benign genres like romance, comedy, or action-adventure, and quite another when replicating stories from the world of horror. John Carpenter explores the line between terrifying fiction and reality in his mind-bending 1994 film In the Mouth of Madness. Third in the director’s “Apocalypse Trilogy,” the story follows a world-famous horror author with fiction so believable it drives his readers to the brink of insanity.
The film opens with a treat for any bibliophile: an extended view of the printing process that brings a hard-bound horror novel to life. Reminiscent of the iconic crayon factory montage featured on Sesame Street, we watch in close-up as pages stream through an industrial printing press along with a glossy dust jacket. Set to an original score heavily influenced by Metallica’s “Enter Sandman,” this opening presents the horror novel as a dangerous item set to be unleashed upon an unprepared world. Next, we meet an insurance investigator named John Trent (Sam Neill) as he’s dragged into the padded cell of a mental institution. Telling his story to a visiting doctor, Trent — now covered in protective black crosses scrawled in black crayon — tells us that his trouble began when he was assigned to locate the bestselling author Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow).
While presented with this unusual case, Trent is nearly killed by an ax-toting madman with malformed pupils who asks, “Do you read Sutter Cane?” before attempting to chop the investigator to bits. No fan of genre fiction, Trent picks up the novels of his latest target at a bookstore wrecked by an angry mob. It seems hordes of violent readers have been terrorizing sellers across the city when they cannot meet Cane’s presale demands. Though his latest novel, In the Mouth of Madness, is just weeks from a scheduled release, the reclusive author has disappeared and failed to deliver the final chapters. Trent is contracted by Arcane Publishing to either locate the mysterious novelist and return his missing manuscript or uncover the circumstances of his demise.
After piecing together images from paperback art, Trent creates a map to Hobb’s End, the fictional setting for several of Cane’s most disturbing stories. He’s accompanied on this strange journey by literary agent Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), one of two people on Earth who’ve read portions of the upcoming novel. As they search for the elusive and ultimately fictional town, Styles questions Trent’s reliance on absolute truth. After all, “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.” Her statements will prove eerily prophetic. While navigating through seemingly endless fields of corn, Styles finds herself driving through a midnight storm that leads to an elongated covered bridge. Flashing with supernatural light, this bridge hides a portal between worlds, and Styles exits in the picturesque hamlet of Hobb’s End, somehow bathed in bright daylight.
Located in rural New Hampshire, Hobb’s End pulls the audience into an area scholars now refer to as Lovecraft Country. The famous horror fantasy novelist H.P. Lovecraft wrote many stories featuring fictional New England villages hiding dangerous secrets from beyond the stars. Exploring themes of cosmicism, a philosophy positioning humans as an inconsequential piece of a vast universe, Lovecraft’s 1931 novella At the Mountains of Madness introduces a race of ancient gods known as Elder Things who colonized Earth eons before the dawn of man. Alongside nods to Arkham, a town featured in Lovecraft’s work and the name of his posthumous publishing house, Cane’s other novels also mirror the author’s famous catalogue. For example, Cane’s The Thing in the Basement nods to Lovecraft’s The Thing on the Doorstep, and Cane’s The Hobb’s End Horror is a parallel to Lovecraft’s classic The Dunwich Horror.
Recognizing elements of Cane’s disturbing work, Styles begins to suspect that they are now living in the pages of the author’s latest story. She will eventually locate the writer in a blood-soaked sanctuary within the town’s sinister Black Church, where he’s diligently typing the story’s final chapters. As he works, a barricaded door pulses under the force of otherworldly monsters. Cane’s novel describes these beings as” a murderous race of creatures whose vile existence contaminated time itself.” Styles learns that they have been telling Cane a story about the grisly end of humanity, and his powerful prose is making it real, one reader at a time. He forces Styles to read his dreadful conclusion, and she is forever altered by the knowledge of the horrors to come. Cane claims that reading these pages “starts the change” and “helps you see” the looming threat of these ancient monsters, priming humanity to be wiped out. From this moment on, she will serve the story itself, sacrificing herself to guide Trent in his role as the bearer of Cane’s apocalyptic tome.
Though initially skeptical, Trent can no longer deny strange occurrences plaguing Hobb’s End. The children have transformed into violent miscreants, and the horrified investigator watches as a grieving father dies by suicide after claiming, “I have to, he wrote me this way.” Trent finally confronts Cane in his sanctuary, turned writer’s studio, where he sees the fearsome creatures with his own eyes. Warning, “I can’t hold them back any longer,” Cane begins tearing himself apart to reveal a life-sized hole in a novel’s page. Styles narrates this moment, reading from the manuscript’s final chapters. We watch in horror as “Trent stood at the edge of the rip, stared into the illimitable gulf of the unknown, the Stygian world yawning blackly beyond. Trent’s eyes refused to close. He did not shriek, but the hideous, unholy abominations shrieked for him, as in the same second, he saw them spill and tumble upward out of an enormous carrion black pit choked with the gleaming white bones of countless unhallowed centuries.” It’s a thrilling moment for genre readers as we see Cane’s powerful fiction dictate reality.
Trent is chased back through an exit portal into the sunny reality of a country road. But every attempt to destroy Cane’s manuscript proves unsuccessful, and the sinister author seems to haunt his every thought. Losing track of linear time, Trent learns that his own face graces the new novel’s cover and Styles is nothing more than a figment of Cane’s imagination. In the Mouth of Madness has been on shelves for weeks, and a film adaptation will hit theaters soon. Outside the safety of Arcane Publishing, waves of random violence sweep the nation as readers devour the latest Cane horror. While admittedly extreme, this fervor for new horror releases mirrors the real-life popularity of Stephen King.
Though the Master of Horror is known for relatable characters and more grounded stories, he has written his share of horror fantasy, most notably his sprawling The Dark Tower series. Told over the course of eight novels and a handful of short stories, the saga follows a gunslinger known as Roland Deschain on an interdimensional quest to save the Dark Tower, the nexus of all known realities. Published over the course of 22 years, readers salivated for more entries in this hybrid series, particularly when a cliffhanger ending to the 1991 entry The Waste Lands was left unresolved for six interminable years. In an introduction to his 1996 novel The Green Mile, King muses about the power fiction holds over the reader, remembering a fan letter he once received.” One of these contained a Polaroid of a teddy bear in chains, with a message cut out of newspaper headlines and magazine covers: RELEASE THE NEXT DARK TOWER BOOK AT ONCE OR THE BEAR DIES, it said. I put it up in my office to remind myself both of my responsibility and of how wonderful it is to have people actually care—a little—about the creatures of one’s imagination.”
Caught in the grips of Cane’s own literary force, Trent’s life spirals out of control. As he hides within the confines of his padded cell, he listens as the world descends into violence before gingerly tiptoeing out the door. The film adaptation has indeed unleashed irreversible chaos, and humanity teeters on the brink of collapse. Trent emerges from the asylum to radio reports of widespread attacks and survivors transforming into tentacled monsters. Seemingly the only sane man left on earth, he wanders into a deserted movie theater and sits down to enjoy In the Mouth of Madness with John Trent. Watching his own story play out onscreen, Trent laughs at his naivete and insistence on objective reality.
While fantastical, Carpenter’s film undoubtedly rings true to readers of horror fare. We may know the book we’re reading is fictional, but that feels less true when we turn out the lights. How many times have we put down a particularly terrifying novel and suspiciously eyed the closet door? We tell ourselves it’s just a story, but we nonetheless turn the lights back on and cautiously investigate that suspicious noise. Though rational thoughts try to prevail, somewhere deep down, we fear the monster may have found a way to creep off the page.
In the empty theater, Trent throws back his head and laughs, knowing that the line between fantasy and fiction has been irrevocably erased, no doubt remembering Styles’ ominous words. Before arriving in Hobb’s End, Styles explains, “what scares me about Cane’s work is what might happen if reality shared his point of view.” Carpenter’s film asks us to consider this harrowing possibility and the transformative nature of collective belief.
Each time we sit down with a horror novel, are we merely indulging in a harmless story or contributing to a movement that could change the world?
Follow along all week long as we salute John Carpenter.
