In the Mouth of Madness

In the Mouth of Madness (1995) is about an insurance investigator looking for a missing horror writer. Sutter Cane is the best selling horror novelist in the world. He disappears before delivering his new book. The publisher hires an investigator named John Trent, a man who believes everything is a fraud and assumes this is a publicity stunt. Laid side by side, Cane's book covers form a map. It shows a town in New Hampshire called Hobb's End; the town appears in his novels and does not exist. Trent drives there and finds it. The idea is that Cane has so many readers, believing so completely, that what he writes becomes true. Mass belief alters reality. At some point Trent realises he is a character in the book and that whatever he does he is living what was written. It closes Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, after The Thing and Prince of Darkness. The shared idea of the three is that there is something humanity cannot comprehend and that trying to understand it breaks people. The influence of Lovecraft is open and the film does not hide it. The last scene takes place in a cinema: Trent watches his own story as a film and starts laughing. Sam Neill stars. The effects are practical and deliberately ugly. It did not do well and was later counted among Carpenter's best. It runs 95 minutes. Good for: cosmic horror, Carpenter, and metafiction. Less good for: some scenes are graphic and the film explains nothing.