Prince of Darkness

Rating: R

Run Time: 102 minutes

Director: John Carpenter

Starring:  Donald Pleasence, Lisa Blout, Jameson Parker

In Prince of Darkness, Satan is extraterrestrial subatomic antimatter composed of a large clear cylinder full of swirling green fluorescent fluid…and he’s trying to bring his dad back from the “Dark Side.”  Jesus, beyond merely trying to lead us to salvation by demonstrating for us the supreme sacrifice, also tried to tell us about the green shit in the form of a series of writings that were transcribed over and over again in different languages.  Oh, and the green stuff is emitting data in the form of extremely complicated differential equations that were not thought to exist in the day this substance dates from. 

Now, the heretofore dormant green shit is beginning to stir, it seems, and John Carpenter’s favorite doom-monger, Donald Pleasance, this time a priest and not a psychiatrist, has begun to sound the death alarums in that demonstration of muted hysteria that only Donald Pleasance can do.  Who does he call upon to forestall the end times?  Not any religious group, but two academic researchers and a group of their graduate students.  What do they hope to accomplish?  Well, I don’t know.  What they do is bring in their sophisticated equipment and begin to analyze the mystery.

Prince of Darkness/POD is the second of Carpenter’s self-titled apocalypse trilogy, after the The Thing and before In the Mouth of Madness.  Given that they were released in 1982, 1987, and 1995, and considering that the thematic similarities are really only tenuous, I think it is safe to say there was little or no conscious design on Carpenter’s part at the time to link these films in any substantive way.  It’s easy to suggest the connection at a later time, and I do not doubt Carpenter has an affinity for films whose plot elements include the potential for ultimate annihilation (not only the so-called trilogy, but most of his other films suggest, even if ostensibly on a smaller scale, that the stakes are higher than just the immediacy of the plot his protagonists are involved in: The Fog, They Live, the Escape from… movies; even Assault on Precinct 13 has that apocalyptic quality to it).   

Unfortunately, already in 1987, Carpenter’s star was on the decline, at least in the sense that, after the box-office failure of his greatest film and the commercial success of the simpler Starman, Hollywood now seemed to trust him only to make movies of more limited thematic ambition on similarly reduced budgets.  I do not know if this is the period during which it is said that he returned to “small” filmmaking, but it is certainly a small film, albeit one with very large ambitions that were not ultimately fully realized.  Please don’t understand me; I don’t intend the term “small” in relation to POD to be interpreted in a perjorative sense. 

After all, both Halloween and The Fog were small films in terms of their limited budgets, but they were successful; Halloween is certainly one of the greatest horror films ever made.  Despite being “small,” however, POD has a few ideas running around in it, even if I must admit I was not paying enough attention to discern completely or parse out those ideas.

The opening credit sequence, complete with another familiar Carpenter score, is intercut with a series of short scenes introducing many of the faces we will see throughout the movie.  Most notable is Donald Pleasance, here a priest dealing with the death of a fellow cleric who was apparently the only remaining staff clergyman at a small, abandoned church in a run-down and seemingly largely deserted part of Los Angeles.  Except for the homeless; there is an apparently endless and steady supply of homeless people here (oh, and they are all, without exception, sufferers of schizophrenia, or at least so says one of the graduate students).

This opening sequence is well-paced, as is the rest of the movie.  It reveals the stakes involved, if not in elaborate detail then in general outline, and the players who will be called upon to confront whatever it is in the abandoned church that has Pleasance’s character’s, Father Tensely Nervous, frock in a tizzy.  The music, in tandem with the montage of snippet scenes, creates a suspenseful and anticipatory mood.

Father Fretting Visibly is a priest in the employ of his Eminence the Cardinal, who is never seen.  The old priest dies while waiting to meet with the cardinal, and Father Mutedly Hysterical examines the two objects the priest brought with him, a diary and a key.  He uses the key to enter an ancient structure beneath the church that houses what can only be described as the essence of Evil in liquified form.  The diary reveals the existence of a shadowy sect of priests known as the Brotherhood of Sleep, whose mission it seems is to keep watch over the dormant liquid, lest it become active and conscious again.  The brotherhood would seem also to antedate even the Church itself by two million years, during which time its members arranged for its transference from the Middle East to the New World, enabled by Spanish conquistadors as efforts were made to proselytize the native dwellers of California.

Father No Name (I checked IMDb) seeks the help of physicist and academic, Dr. Howard Birack (huh? He’s played by Victor Wong, the little Asian actor with the gimp eye, and he doesn’t look like a Howard Birack; maybe he was adopted), an unbeliever who instead is a proponent of the idea that the explanations we seek are to be found at the subatomic level.  Given what he read in the diary, the cleric would seem to agree, and thinks even the answer to the question of evil’s origin can be explained with recourse to science.  He hopes the academics will be able to, essentially, prove the existence of evil to a non-believing world.

Among these academics are several graduate students of Birack’s and another professor.  Dr. Birack does not share with anyone, at least initially, the cause for concern that was impressed upon him by Father Pleasance, so, all those students an academics get to work.  Among them is Brian Marsh (Jameson Parker, of “Simon & Simon” fame) and a whole bunch of other folks whom you may or may not have seen in other films.   Jessie Lawrence Ferguson is Calder, a big, tall black guy with this creepy laugh-cry he does after his zombification…oops, spoiler.  Sorry.        

Well, no sooner do the academics get their equipment hooked up and running than they discover something the deceased priest must have instinctively sensed: the liquid is becoming active, changing, awakening.  It calls to the homeless crowd outside the church, which it has been causing to stir for a while, to effectively barricade the researchers within, trapping them.  It begins to zombify certain team members, who kill and zombify others, until there is only a small group of survivors who remain.  It selects a surrogate, who has what looks like a raised burn or infected area on her right upper arm that looks like an ankh, to be the vessel to contain Satan.  He must apparently take corporeal form to enact what he wants to do: bring back his Father from the Dark Side. 

What’s that you say?  Satan has a father.  Of course, you didn’t know that?  You must have missed that CCE lesson.  Oh, and Satan and his father are antimatter.  Because if, like, God is like God God, then, the Anti-Christ (and his dad) must be the anti-God.  And if God is created of matter (which was not even postulated in this movie, which no one in this movie ever even suggests was either proven or considered, which is antithetical to most Christian teaching which suggests God is Spirit, which is entirely unknown period anyway), well then, certainly, Satan must  be antimatter.  What you just heard was the sound of me throwing down the bullshit card, because that, my friends, is bullshit…bullshit.              

The idea that, in an increasingly secular, not necessarily rational, but secular, world, the idea of Ultimate Eeevilll being real and Satan being it greatest adherent is an outmoded, unsophisticated concept is not only a product of Enlightenment thinking but a latent byproduct of the anti-authoritarianism of the 60s and 70s.  If you don’t believe in God, then you certainly don’t believe in the anti-God either.  POD condemns neither the rational-scientific nor the spiritual.  The film demonstrates the two working harmoniously.  In fact, Carpenter may posit some co-existence between the two forces.  There may be a rational explanation for God.  Yet rational and knowable are not synonymous.  And one thing I always admire about John Carpenter, one attribute of his film making that I love, is this: his characters are generally resilient and strong; his men and women are equal to the challenge presented by the adversary; they may not ultimately triumph, but they will fight and demonstrate courage in extremis. 

There is a certain cynicism that purports to be realism that we see increasingly in modern cinema; I don’t know if art reflects life or not in this instance.  Just as in the realms of spirituality or religion, the adherents of resistance to the adversary (whatever it be) are treated with contempt for being naïve and unsophisticated.  The nihilism that informs most modern horror, whether apocalyptic or not, suggests that human weakness is the norm (courage, whether physical or moral, is merely a chimera).  What a dire future there is for us if their sensibility triumphs.

Oh, and Alice Cooper cameos as one of the homeless people.