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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
Back in October of 2022, The Movie Sleuth’s very own
Michelle Kisner took a comprehensive look at John Carpenter’s 1994 surrealist
supernatural horror exercise In the Mouth of Madness starring Sam Neill
as part of the site’s ongoing 31 Days of Hell series covering horror
films in the month of Halloween. A
sharp-edged homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft with its title derived from
his very own novella At the Mountains of Madness, the film for Carpenter
represented the third and final installment of his loosely defined Apocalypse
Trilogy preceded by The Thing and Prince of Darkness
respectively. While the film broke even
at the box office, in time honored tradition the critics had their guns out for
Carpenter and naturally savaged his latest offering. However in the years since, it has amassed a
staunch cult following as one of the director’s very best later tier films
since Vampires and as such is something of a companion piece to Misery
in terms of excoriating the nature of fandom of horror literature and
portraying the gradual unraveling of a psyche.
Penned by Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare screenwriter
Michael De Luca who for years was the CEO of New Line Cinema who also distributed
the film, In the Mouth of Madness tells the story of insurance
investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) who has been tasked with tracking down the
mysterious and popular horror novelist Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow) who
vanished without a trace. On the cusp of
releasing his newest novel In the Mouth of Madness, a skeptical John believing
the whole thing to be a viral marketing stunt and Sutter’s editor Linda Styles
(Julie Carmen) venture out to New Hampshire in search of the author. However, the pair soon begin experiencing strange
phenomena such as landmarks from Cane’s books appearing, roads vanishing and real
events begin eerily echoing that of Sutter’s next book which conceptually leads
to the end of the world. Soon John tries
to leave the small town of Hobb’s End in his car before encountering portals,
loops and worm holes either real or imaginary, eventually building towards an
explosion of mad surreal imagery as our (with the protagonist) perception is
blurred.
Previously released on a Shout Factory blu-ray disc in 2018
in a then-new 4K scan of original film elements, boutique releasing label Arrow
Video have gone ahead and done another scan this time of the 35mm camera
negative. While porting over many of the
extras available on the Shout Factory edition, the Arrow box includes many
newly filmed extras and audio commentaries.
Featuring lossless DTS-HD 5.1 surround audio and stereo 2.0 sound
options, it also features not one but two archival director commentaries with
John Carpenter. With a bevy of vintage
making-of featurettes, the set includes new interviews with Jürgen Prochnow,
producer Sandy King Carpenter and new video essays praising John Carpenter and
the legacy of his film.
Of Carpenter's
films, In the Mouth of Madness is probably the horror maestro’s last
truly great film on par with his 1980s films ranging from The Thing to They
Live and Prince of Darkness.
Featuring one of Sam Neill’s best horror performances just a few years
before his space horror turn in Event Horizon with one of Carpenter’s
most labyrinthine go-for-broke endeavors, Arrow Video’s 4K UHD disc release of In
the Mouth of Madness is a welcome upgrade and further cements the film’s
reputation as one of the most underrated Lovecraftian freakouts of the 1990s.
--Andrew Kotwicki
