PRINCE OF DARKNESS@35

In an extended title sequence we see disparate events coalesce as a grunting synthesiser motif plays over electronic choirs and flourishes. An old priest dies and a middle aged one takes a key from among the deceased's effects. A class of postgrad phsyics students receive a lecture about quantum from their professor. The latter visits the middle aged priest at a convent. Later they meet at an old church in Los Angeles, descend into well beneath it and find a strange elaborate bottle that contains a flourescent green substance. It has started moving in the container. The students meet at a noticeboard where they find they have all been pressed into a weekend of testing at the church. Bunk beds and technology are moved in as the students arrive and variously whinge about their cancelled weekends and puzzle over what they are doing there.

There are too many things to spoil in this film and if you were tempted to seek it out (I hope I can help that motivation) you will appreciate discovering them for yourself. I can say they involve a pop understanding of quantum science (made very accessible for the likes of me) an ingenious use of the notion of time travel, remote mind control, shared dreams, and an audacious weaving of those with some grand and strange concepts from religion. All of that with a large cast in a single location performing a talky screenplay and it still moves at a clip.

John Carpenter's mid '80s form a middling period. After stunning audiences with the likes of Halloween and The Thing his genius for lean horror cinema found less adaptability with the more sc-fi Starman and the Stephen King Christine. Because of this even Carpenter fans can overlook some treasure among the work that the mainstream productions toned down and Prince of Darkness, outside of a small subset of this, finds itself on skid row. But anyone adventurous with their movies enough to know the joys of finding the low budget/big ideas gems like Videodrome, Society or Cube with take to this one.

The action genre performances might stick out here and there and the horror effects were eclipsed by even mainstream genre films soon after this one but nothing can beat the immediate value of atmosphere from the first frame that happens here and is sustained the whole running time. Is Donald Pleasance's priest too starkly melodramatic? His counterpart in Victor Wong provides a sharp balance. Is the jokey character funny? No, but he's meant to be annoying which he is.  Is the central romance between Lisa Blount and Jameson Parker a little flavourless? Yes, unless you pay attention and know that he's going slow in respecting the pain of her past. Are some characters so obviously created for getting knocked off? It's a horror movie. Yes.

The sense of brooding and approaching cataclysm start even before the credits as the initial synthbass figure stutters over the Universal production badge. This is one of my favourite Carpenter scores and for sustained dread with a sense of epic it is matchless in his compositional work. The use of video for the dream sequences is such a stark contrast it brings a new element in that, while liberally used now, remains unnerving after many viewings. Practical effects as well, still impress like cockroach man and the bizarrely blistered skin of the possessed team member, the contrast between the red of her flesh and the crystal blue of her eyes still makes me squirm. 

The effectiveness of the atmosphere makes the film survive its own cliche. Another possessed character, fresh from having his neck bandaged after he tried to cut it open with a splintered chair leg, stands at the top of a staircase laughing. It should be corny but it's scary. The student staring at the computer screen and typing "I Live" over and over is eerie enough but then this turns into a message that kicks that out the door. The distressed audio of the voice in the communal dream. The death by bike frame scene should be funny but it's horrible. Too many to mention. If The Exorcist still works because of its intense gravity Prince of Darkness finds tonal success in embracing the generic traits it's found on the shelves and committing to them. They do, after all, bear the parade of big ideas and allow the film as a whole to work consistently, however odd that consistency is.

The big ideas here have a special context. Carpenter had wanted the Halloween franchise to develop beyond a single figure and explore more territory associated with the spirit of Halloween. The third entry dispenses with the slasher and takes up a plot that combines corporate amorality with supernatural maleficence and suggests an ancient connection. If that reminds you of things like The Stone Tape (and if it does, we're friends for life) then it's because master of the big idea melange Nigel Kneale was commissioned to write it. Call it a culture clash but the collaboration ended in acrimony (should point out that Carpenter was a producer, not director of this one) and the result was, while pretty good, far more conventional than Kneale would have written. Prince of Darkness with its big collision and then coherance of religion and science and the ghostly thought that we humans might not be nearly as important as we'd like to believe, is a tribute to Kneale. Carpenter's writer credit is under the nom de plume of Martin Quatermass, a clear bow to Kneale's proto Dr Who character and Kneale's work in general. It's a kind of apology by deed.

This film has a big significance for me and my cinephilia. After university I affected a ridicule of genre cinema and an annoyance at anyone who watched it to bolster their undergrad seminar papers. All through that I still had a love of the atmosphere it created. I didn't bother seeing Prince of Darkness at the cinema but a little over a decade later, out of curiosity more than anything, I set the VCR after seeing the title in the overnight listings in the Green Guide (couple of things there that seem to only exist in nostalgia). I watched it the following night and was completely wowed. Later, I woke at about three in the morning with a full understanding of the final dream and couldn't get back to sleep. If I'd been a closetted horror fan before that I burst through the doors armed with a lifelong committment. Oh, and Alice Cooper's in it.