Hacker Cinema
Prince of Darkness
1987 · Film · 102 min
Directed by John Carpenter
A priest discovers an ancient canister containing a strange liquid in an abandoned church. When a group of graduate students and scientists are tasked with studying it, they unknowingly unleash an evil force waiting to destroy all of humanity.
4 positive5 neutralfrom 9 commenters
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9 comments on Hacker News
It goes on my list of 'dreamlike' movies, they don't always fully add up consciously but you can feel your unconscious going into overdrive while watching them (or maybe there is a surface plot that mostly adds up, like EWS, but there is clearly something going on at a least one other level). The viewing experience is often downright hypnotic for me.
A few off the top of my head, this is a very personal list and I can't even claim that all these movies are 'good' in any particular sense. Just that they put me into this state: * basically anything in lynch's cannon. I'm not always the biggest fan of his stuff, but sometimes they hit me hard. * Cronenberg's Videodrome and it's spiritual sequel Existenz * Donnie Darko & Southland Tales (objectively just an awful movie) * Prince of Darkness * Enter the Void (not for the faint of heart) * Paprika * Solaris (the original mostly, there are some qualities in the remake) * Stalker * Dark City * Sorry to Bother You * The Fountain * 8 1/2 * The Ninth Gate * and certainly Eyes Wide Shut
I believe Prince of Darkness is the one that had (incidental to everything else, not an important plot point) a possessed Alice Cooper impale a guy with a bicycle. If that’s not enough to move a film out of the doghouse…
the older film Prince of Darkness deals with sending messages back in time, too...
"Prince of Darkness": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/
I've always liked the movie because it attempts to examine religious lore with science, faith vs. logic. It touches on many explanations for things they're experiencing: multiple universes, tachyons, etc.
My favorite story of practical effects on a John Carpenter film is about the portal at the end of Prince of Darkness, where a character reaches through a mirror to hell. The effect was achieved using a large pool of mercury, which the crew had "liberated" from the hydraulic system of a rented piece of heavy machinery. They filmed for one night, got the shots they needed then replaced the mercury before anyone noticed.
This was a terrible idea for many, many reasons. But they got the film made.
This?
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0093777/?ref_=m_tttr_qt
Prince of Darkness (1987)
Chuck "SFDebris" Sonnenburg made a great point about this in his review of Carpenter's Prince of Darkness: time travel is the ultimate gamble, because you don't know and can't control how it is going to come out. It's the thing you only do when literally anything else is preferable to the status quo. I don't think the situation of humanity at the end of Episode 2 meets that standard. It's bad, sure! But there are countably infinite ways in which it could be much worse.
I first saw it a few years back, and it ranks with Prince of Darkness as one of the scariest things I've ever seen.
I think the transition from Lovecraftian "cosmic horror" to modern jump scares is one of the biggest shames of modern cinema. It's easy to copy gore or other ick factor stuff that are part of the classic great horror flicks, but getting the essential creepiness of The Omen, or the alienation of Rosemary's Baby takes talent.
The other two films in what Carpenter calls his "Apocalypse Trilogy" are also well worth watching: "Prince of Darkness" and "In the Mouth of Madness". Neither has aged quite so well, but both are good and interesting horror films.
I feel that "Suspiria" and "Don't Look Now" are actually the best horror films ever made, but de gustibus non est disputandum, as they say.