In the Mouth of Madness: Carpenter's Lovecraft Endgame

Mon, 14 Oct 2024 08:00:00 +0000

In the Mouth of Madness is the film where John Carpenter stopped adapting H. P. Lovecraft and started diagnosing him. Released in 1994 to indifferent business and a muted critical reception, it has aged into one of the most rigorous cosmic-horror films ever made, and arguably the truest translation of Lovecraft’s actual method — his fixation on forbidden texts, on knowledge that unmakes the knower — that the cinema has managed. It is also the closing panel of Carpenter’s self-described Apocalypse Trilogy, and the bleakest of the three.

Jacob's Ladder: The Nightmare of the Unravelling Mind

Tue, 10 Sep 2024 08:00:00 +0000

Jacob’s Ladder is a horror film about a man losing his grip on the difference between memory, hallucination, and hell, and its great formal wager is that the audience should lose that grip alongside him. Adrian Lyne, a director better known for glossy erotic thrillers, made in 1990 one of the most disorienting American horror films of its era by refusing to give the viewer solid ground for almost its entire length. It was a commercial disappointment on release and has since become a cornerstone, its imagery lifted wholesale by video games and imitators who mostly missed why it works.

1990s Horror - vo.rs

In the Mouth of Madness: Carpenter's Lovecraft Endgame

Jacob's Ladder: The Nightmare of the Unravelling Mind