Prince of Darkness

Prince of Darkness (1987) begins in the basement of an abandoned church in Los Angeles, where a cylinder that has stood for centuries holds a swirling green liquid. A priest calls in a physics professor from the university, and the team seals itself in the building to study it. The idea is to describe religious evil in the language of physics. Satan is not a being but matter; theological texts are read as equations and the characters talk quantum mechanics. Carpenter constructs the combination seriously and never turns it into a joke. He wrote the screenplay under the pseudonym Martin Quatermass, a salute to the British writer Nigel Kneale and his character Bernard Quatermass. The physics department in the film is called Kneale University. This is the middle film of Carpenter's unofficial Apocalypse Trilogy, between The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness. Alice Cooper plays a possessed homeless man called Street Schizo. Producer Shep Gordon was also Cooper's manager and suggested it. Cooper wrote a song called Prince of Darkness for the film and allowed the impaling device from his stage show to be used in one scene. It cost three million dollars and grossed 14.2 million worldwide. It runs 102 minutes. Good for: Carpenter, cosmic horror, and atmosphere built on very little money. Less good for: there are too many characters and most die before you know them. The scientific dialogue is meaningless in places. The first hour is very slow and the ending is left unresolved.