Retro Review: John Carpenter’s ‘Prince of Darkness’
Prince of Darkness (1987)
Directed by John Carpenter
Starring Donald Pleasence, Jameson Parker, Victor Wong, Alice Cooper, Lisa Blount, Dennis Dun, Susan Blanchard
Review by Sam Hawken
John Carpenter has had a lot of comebacks. As his films have grown more and more disappointing to fans, it’s become something of a habit to proclaim his latest project a return to form. Ghosts of Mars was supposed to be a comeback. Vampires was supposed to be a comeback. And on and on.
Interestingly enough, the first film viewed as a “return to his roots” kind of venture was Prince of Darkness in 1987, and it followed a string of actually GOOD movies for which he needed to make no apology. The previous year he’d done his masterful action-comedy Big Trouble in Little China and he’d released a string of excellent movies before that. But Prince of Darkness was supposed to be a little, low-budget, independently-funded movie that was more in keeping with Halloween than the studio stuff he’d been doing for years at that point.
For many, Prince of Darkness represents the first of many missteps in Carpenter’s career. He had near-total control over the production, serving as writer (under a pseudonym), director, and composer of the soundtrack. He was without the guiding hand of longtime producer/partner Debra Hill, though, and makes me wonder what the movie would have been like if she’d been involved.
Not that Prince of Darkness is at all bad. It’s a little movie by design and necessity, but that doesn’t mean it’s lacking. Carpenter’s going for a strong mood and he succeeds very well.
The plot is simple. An old priest dies and leaves his secret stewardship of a strange, otherworldly object to another, ill-prepared man of the cloth (Donald Pleasence). This object, a canister containing a whirling green substance that fairly bursts with malevolent presence, is believed to be evil incarnate and it has begun to find its way out. Pleasence’s character enlists a quantum physicist and his students to study the object and the thing inside in a last-ditch effort to do something about it before it escapes and inflicts its evil on the world. Things do not go well.
As I mentioned before, Prince of Darkness is more about mood than anything else. The movie is creepy, with a long, thoughtful set-up that slowly ratchets up the weirdness. Earthworms congregate on the windows of the church where the canister is kept. Ants gather in strange groups. Homeless people stand silent vigil and, sometimes, commit violent murder on those who wander away from the group. All of these things are due to the growing influence of the thing in the canister, the thing that may be the mythical Prince of Darkness.
So effective is Carpenter in setting up this overall FEEL that the movie actually suffers a little bit once the action proper gets going. There are weird, spitting zombies and a grotesque transformation that gives the Prince of Darkness form, and some tense moments of isolation and danger to the remaining good guys, but his film is all about the set-up, not necessarily the payoff. I find I don’t really mind that much.
Carpenter also tries to make his audience think a little. I mentioned that quantum physics are involved, and that’s not just window dressing. Sure, we’re not talking about an in-depth examination of particle and anti-particle, superposition of states and the existence of the tachyon, but Carpenter takes some time to imply (strongly) that the things we perceive as being supernatural could easily be scientific phenomena at a level we do not yet understand. It might be a messy procedure to get from that to zombies, but you have to give points to Carpenter for trying.
Prince of Darkness also showcases one of Carpenter’s lesser-heralded filmmaking traits: his tendency to cast lesser-known actors in prominent roles. You have to remember that before Carpenter cast Kurt Russell in Escape From New York, this was an actor best known for being a child actor with Disney and for once having played Elvis in a TV movie. He wasn’t a STAR, in other words. Similarly Jamie Lee Curtis was no one before Halloween. And so on. Carpenter casts for skill first, names a distant second.
Granted, Donald Pleasence was a known quantity, but only Carpenter’s predilection for unorthodox casting can explain how we get Jameson Parker from Simon & Simon in a lead role. Similarly we’d seen Victor Wong and Dennis Dun in Big Trouble in Little China, but they weren’t exactly household names. That said, they’re all good. Parker even gets to borrow the patented Mustache of Sex from Carpenter collaborator Tom Atkins.
Slightly shaky resolution aside, Prince of Darkness works. It’s the confluence of Carpenter’s relentless, creepy building of atmosphere, a collection of naturalistic actors and a script that asks a lot of questions. Maybe we don’t get the answers we WANT from the movie, but Prince of Darkness is a film much like The Thing, in that it leaves us hanging on at the end, wondering how or if the characters will deal with those plot threads left unaddressed. The incompleteness of Prince of Darkness is part of its appeal. Like the mood-setting before it, the script tries to get the audience thinking about the world outside the frame.
In a way it’s too bad that Prince of Darkness was considered a “comeback” movie. It’s different than anything Carpenter had done before, with the possible exception of The Fog, and so it’s not a callback to anything. It may very well be a return to his original way of making films — small budget, independent production, non-stars — but this is more of an attraction to those interested in the business of moviemaking, not the rest of us who just want a good, creepy yarn to put us to bed at night. People expecting another Halloween were set up for disappointment right from the get-go, perhaps leaving them with the feeling they’d just seen the return of Halloween III.
But for the audience that appreciates the movie for what it is, not what it might have been: You will not be saved by the Holy Ghost! You will not be saved by the god plutonium! In fact, you will not be saved at all!
