Imagine This
Q Believers Featured On 'Nightline'; August 2018
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Let me tell you a story. It won't be short -- but it's a good story, and it has a point. You may even Get It before the end.
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In 1994, director John Carpenter released In The Mouth Of Madness, his take on one of H.P. Lovecraft's short stories. Carpenter's career includes films like Carrie, Starman, "Big Trouble In Little China", They Live, "Assault On Precinct 13"; Escape from New York and "-- From L.A.".
Madness was the final film in Carpenter's 'Apocalypse Trilogy' -- The Thing (1982), "Prince Of Darkness" (1987 -- whose posters should state: "This film will not just frighten you; it will fuck you up for life"), and ended with In The Mouth of Madness.
Its script was written by Michael DeLuca (Fright Night; Moneyball; Captain Phillips), and its cinematography by Gary B. Kibbe (Robocop 3; Village of the Damned; Escape From L.A.).
Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 58% rating. In the years since its release, Madness has achieved cult status.
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It's worth an aside to note that in the same year Mouth of Madness was released -- 1994 -- a new cable network began broadcasting in the United States. It used the twelve-year-old, Ted Turner / CNN news-as-entertainment model, and also offered coverage of sports, even a new 'cartoon for adults' program on Sunday evenings.
It was the brainchild of an Australian media boss who aggressively ran tabloid newspapers on three continents. He claimed the network would be "fair and balanced" in its presentation of news (a swipe at the "liberal bias" of the other networks), and it would be known as Fox News.
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John Trent (Sam Neill) is being transferred into a huge mental asylum outside New York City. He's admitted by a Dr. Sapperstein (John Glover) and struggles with a pair of attendants, shouting "I'm not insane!!" In the background, a radio report of "an epidemic of violent psychotic behavior spreading across the country and indeed the world".
Trent is placed in a padded cell, still wearing a straitjacket, still shouting that he is Sane. As other residents of the ward shout back ("Yeah! I'm not crazy either!"), music begins to play on the PA system: The Carpenters' We've Only Just Begun.
Later the same day, a Dr. Wrenn (David Warner) appears to interview Trent, and may work for the government (Sapperstein says nervously, "It must be getting serious out there, if they're sending you guys in"). Did Trent ask for anything? Wrenn says. Yes -- only a single, black crayon.
Wrenn finds Trent has decorated his cell with thousands of crosses -- drawn on the walls, floor, his institutional jumper, and himself, with the crayon. Telling Trent he "wants to help", Wrenn sits down to listen as Trent begins to tell his story.
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Trent is a Phillip Marlowe style, freelance insurance investigator in New York City -- cynical, watchful; always suspicious. After exposing the victim of a warehouse fire as an arsonist looking for a payout, he lunches with the insurance attorney -- who makes a pitch to assist with another client, a publishing company.
Trent accepts -- just as a bald man with an axe (Conrad Bergschmeider) smashes through a restaurant window and stands over him. "Do you read Sutter Cane?" he asks; looking up at the man's face, Trent can see he has two irises in each eye. The man raises the axe; police appear and shoot him down.
Trent meets the publisher, Jason Harglow (Charlton Heston). His company's multi-mega-hit horror writer, Sutter Cane, has disappeared, and blown a deadline to produce his seventh, final book in a series. No one knows where he is. Near-riots have occurred at bookstores across the country over the delay in publication.
Cane's editor, Linda Styles (Julie Carmen) joins the meeting. His six previous books had sold nearly a billion copies, been translated into eighteen languages. Harglow wants Trent to find Cane and bring the manuscript back; Trent agrees.
Styles tells him there's something different about Cane's writing -- it's "been known to have an effect on less stable readers... disorientation, memory loss, a paranoid reaction...
A year ago, Styles says, Cane's work became erratic -- "More bent, more bizarre than usual. He became convinced his work was real, not fiction." Trent chuckles; This shit really sells? "Are you surprised?"
Trent responds, "Lady, nothing surprises me. We fucked up the air, the water; we fucked up each other -- why don't we finish the job by flushing our brains down the toilet?"
So where is Cane? The manuscript? "I don't know. His agent was the last person to see it." Then let's talk to the agent, Trent says. "You already met him," Styles replies. "He attacked you with an axe."
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Styles convinces Trent to actually read Cane's novels. At a bookstore, Trent sees a man staring at him, whose face seems -- bruised; he's wearing plastic-framed glasses repaired with adhesive tape. "Do you read Sutter Cane?" the man asks Trent, then says, "He sees you."
At home, Trent reads the novels, while a TV commentator asks: "Horror writer Sutter Cane: A harmless pop phenomenon? Or a mad prophet of the printed page?
"... Police believe recent riots started because stores could not meet the demand for advance orders of Sutter Cane's latest novel, 'In The Mouth Of Madness'. When does fiction become religion?"
Trent dozes, dreaming he's walking home, posters advertising Sutter Cane horror novels on nearby walls. He sees a cop in an alley, viciously beating a kid who had been tagging a wall. The cop sees Trent and barks, "You want some too, buddy?"
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Trent realizes each Cane novel has a shape, outlined in red over the cover art. Clipped into puzzle-pieces, they form the shape of New Hampshire -- where Hobb's End, fictitious setting of Cane's novels, is located.
Hobb's End isn't shown on any map of the Live Free Or Die state -- but Trent convinces Harglow and Styles that it may be real, "another vanished town in America". Harglow agrees to allow Trent, and Styles, to travel to New Hampshire, locate the town, the author, and the manuscript.
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Trent again has the dream of the cop, beating the kid in an alleyway -- only now, a crowd of people appears behind Trent, with axes, blocking any escape. At its center is Cane's agent.
"He sees you," the agent says; the crowd hacks him into pieces. The cop stops beating the kid long enough to look at Trent -- his face mottled, diseased, malignant; "You want some too?" he bellows.
... and, Trent wakes up at home, having fallen asleep on his sofa over one of Cane's novels, relieved to find it was just a dream... until he turns to see the diseased cop sitting next to him, and wakes up, again; a dream within a dream.
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Trent and Styles drive on two-lane roads through endless late-Summer cornfields; Trent singing "America The Beautiful". Night falls. Styles tells Trent she's attracted to Cane's fiction because it scares her. And she likes being scared. Trent is amused. "What's to be scared about? It's not like it's real." Styles says:
"It's not real from your point of view -- and right now, reality shares your point of view. Reality is just what we tell each other it is. What scares me about Kane's work is, what happens if reality shared his point of view? ...Sane and insane easily switch places if the insane were to become the majority. You'd find yourself locked in a padded cell, wondering 'What happened to the world?' "
"It wouldn't happen to me," Trent says. "Oh, it would, if you realized everything you knew was gone," said Styles. "That'd be pretty lonely, being the last one left."
After an unsettling encounter with a kid on a bicycle - who becomes an old man on a bike ("I can't get out," he moans. "He won't let me out") - Trent lets Styles drive while he sleeps. On the radio, a talk show host asks, "Doctor, what are you saying? That there's this disease spreading across the country?"
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As Styles drives, the yellow centerline in the road disappears. Below the car, she makes out thick clouds illuminated by lightning -- then, suddenly, she's driving over the road planks of a New England covered bridge and out into late afternoon daylight. A sign nearby announces: Welcome To Hobb's End / The Heart Of New Hampshire / Enjoy Your Stay.
The town has a Pepperidge Farm-style quaintness, but seems completely deserted. Trent and Styles drive to a rustic hotel, which features in Cane's novels, run by a Mrs. Pinkham -- who figured in Cane's novels as an axe murderess. They check in.
Trent keeps looking for the con. If it were a Cane novel, they should see a huge, black church from the hotel ... and they can. They drive there. Trent reads from one of Cane's novels,
" 'This place had been the seat of an evil older than mankind and wider than the known universe... pain and suffering beyond human understanding. ... [inhabited by] a murderous race of creatures whose vile existence contaminated time itself, affecting history..."
Suddenly, cars roar up; a group of men with shotguns climb out -- one demanding Cane release his son from the church. Its doors open to reveal a little boy, then close. When they open again, a man stands just inside -- Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow).
The boy's father comes forward, but the doors bang close. A large pack of Dobermans appear, and attack. Styles and Trent are able to get to their car and flee back to the hotel.
Styles finally admits Trent was being played in a publicity game. "Only, you and I weren't supposed to find Hobb's End, but we didn't stage any of this. It's all in Cane's book. That's how I know it's real."
What's the new book -- 'In The Mouth Of Madness' -- about? Trent asks. "It's about the end, to everything," Styles says. "And it starts here, with an evil that returns and takes over, piece by piece... It's about people turning into creatures that aren't human anymore."
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Styles runs off, taking the car and driving to the church, where she finds Cane typing the last page of manuscript. "It's funny; for years, I thought I was making all this up," he says. "But They were telling me what to write -- giving me the power to make it all real. And now it is. All the Things, trying to break into our world."
Cane holds her head over the title page of the manuscript. "See the instrument of their homecoming -- the new bible -- that starts the change... helps you see..." He slams her head forward; she absorbs the entire book in a few seconds. Her eyes bleed.
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"No one's believed enough to make [a new reality] real... My books have sold a billion copies; I've been translated into 18 languages. More people believe in my work than are reading the bible... When people begin to lose the ability to know the difference between fantasy and reality -- then The Old Ones can begin to make the journey back. The more people who believe, the faster the journey."
Cane tells Trent he wants him to deliver the manuscript for "In The Mouth Of Madness" "You take it back to the world," Cane says. "This town wasn't here before I wrote it -- and neither were you. I made all this. I made you. I am god now !" Trent tries to run, chased down a long tunnel by a pack of Old-One monsters...
-- and, Trent suddenly finds himself back in The World, on a gravel road in the middle of somewhere, New Hampshire. He drops the manuscript as if it were a box of plutonium, hitches a ride to a town, takes a motel room.
The next day, an unnamed someone has delivered a package for him. A large envelope. "But nobody knows I'm here," Trent says; the motel clerk smiles. "Well, somebody does." In the envelope is Cane's manuscript. Trent burns it in the bathroom sink of his motel room, a page at a time.
Back in New York, he meets with the publisher, Harglow, and describes everything that had happened to him and Styles over (what to him have been) the previous ten days. Harglow says, "That's a hell of a story" -- But Trent already located Cane and the manuscript, and delivered it -- a month ago. And Linda Styles? "I've never heard of her".
Trent, who knows Cane's novels are altering reality -- that Trent himself may be nothing more than a character in Cane's imagination -- is horrified that Madness has already been published; Harglow shrugs. "The movie comes out next month," he says.
Trent becomes increasingly paranoid. Finally, he appears at a bookstore, where huge lines of customers wait to buy Madness. He's dressed identically to Cane's agent, earlier, and carrying an axe. He asks a man in line, "Do you read Sutter Cane?", kills him with the axe, and is taken into custody.
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In the asylum, Trent has come to the end of his tale. Declared mentally incompetent to stand trial, he's been institutionalized -- "and, it's safer, these days, being in here," Trent tells Dr. Wrenn. "In ten years, maybe less, there will be no people. The human race will just be a bedtime story for their children. Nothing more."
Wrenn walks out of the cell. Dr. Sapperstein asks if he believes what Trent has been saying, and Wrenn slowly walks away without a word.
Conditions in the world outside the asylum begin to break down. Then, some Things begin rampaging through the wards; Trent can't see them clearly, hiding in his locked cell. The next day, his cell door magically opens, and Trent walks away from the asylum and into a world as deserted as Hobb's End had appeared.
A radio in an abandoned ambulance announces: the world appears to have been overrun with monstrous creatures, including mutating humans, and that outbreaks of suicide and mass murder are commonplace. Trent walks into a nearby urban area, sees a theatre showing the film version of Cane's novel -- the marquee mentions him, specifically, by name -- and goes inside.
Trent finds a seat in the empty theatre, carrying a super-sized tub of popcorn. The movie is precisely the film that we've all been watching, so far, and Trent begins laughing hysterically. He has ended up exactly as Styles had said ("That'd be pretty lonely, being the last one left").
Trent starts laughing as he watches himself self on screen, insisting he isn't a puppet, and that reality is concrete, knowable; the Truth. But Cane's version was believed by enough people to make Styles' description come true -- "Reality is just what we tell each other it is." There is no concrete truth; everything can be altered, with enough collective belief.
Cane allowed The Old Ones to break through into this dimension and destroy it, just for the pure gibbering delight of destruction. Was Trent ever an actual person, or just a character in Cane's novel? What is real? As the end of humankind sinks in, all Trent can do is laugh.
The central plot of In The Mouth Of Madness is the social construction of reality -- what we collectively agree is real -- and Magical Thinking: if enough people surrender to a belief in artifice and fantasy, can unbelievable things be made concrete and real, just from a sheer act of will?
What the film does not do is show what happens when that kind of magical thinking is translated -- from the personal to the societal and political.
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