Regular readers will know that I love John Carpenter films.  Indeed, two Carpenter films featured in the Top 3 of my favorite movies of all time—Big Trouble in Little China (1986) and The Thing (1982).  I’ll watch pretty much anything Carpenter directs.  He has such a distinct visual style, his films are instantly recognizable.

One Carpenter film I’ve always struggled with, though, is 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness.  I’ve probably watched this film three times—it’s a perennial offering on Shudder—and each time I love the aesthetics of it, and the iconic lines—“Do you read Sutter Cane?”—but I’m never quite sure what to make of it.

To be clear, that’s more due to my own shortcomings, not the film’s.  It is a flick that requires careful watching, and while you can certainly enjoy the ride passively, you’ll miss out on a lot of little details.  I suspect that my struggle to understand the film is because I’ve always opted for the passive experience while viewing it; that is, I’ve usually been doing something else at the same time, and haven’t absorbed the ins-and-outs of the plot adequately.

The net result is that I always walk away from the film a bit dissatisfied.  Yes, I’ve seen incredible Carpenter cinematography and Sam Neill chewing the scenery, but I don’t quite get what’s going on.

The plot really isn’t that complicated.  Sam Neill portrays John Trent, an insurance investigator who makes the job look cool.  Arcane Publishing hires Trent to track down Sutter Cane, a horror novelist known for his gruesome storytelling style that is so vivid, it drives some readers to madness.  “Sutter Cane” is a clear stand-in for Stephen King, who the film even references directly:  “… Stephen King—Cane outsells them all.”

Trent takes a deep dive into Cane’s books, and discovers that the covers of the books form a map of New Hampshire, with the location of the seemingly fictional Hobb’s End (a nod to King’s Derry, Maine) on the map.  He travels with the lovely-yet-lazy-eyed Linda Styles, Cane’s editor, to the town.  Along the way they experience odd occurrences.  Styles drives through a covered bridge, experiencing a strange light show of flashing lightning, emerging on the other side in the middle of the day—even though she was just driving in total darkness.

Hobb’s End is just like the location in Cane’s books, and pretty soon events in the book begin to play out in reality.  At the center of town is a malevolent church, with Cane appearing enigmatically within.  Styles succumbs to Cane’s insanity when seeing his final book, In the Mouth of Madness, and begins kissing Cane.  Mutated townspeople attack Trent, and in his attempts to flee Hobb’s End, he keeps getting teleported back to the center of town.

Finally, Cane confronts Trent, telling him that readers’ belief in Cane’s stories have unlocked ancient gods, The Old Ones, who Cane is helping to bring back to usher in an apocalypse.  Further, Cane reveals that Trent is just another character Cane has written, and his actions are foreordained as a result.

Trent seems to escape to the real world at this point, tearing through a wall made of Cane’s writing while being pursued by otherworldly monstrosities.  When he reports what he has fond to Arcane Publishing, the publisher tells him that Trent was sent alone to Hobb’s End, and that there was no Linda Styles.  Further, In the Mouth of Madness has been in publication for weeks.

Trent encounters a reader with mutated eyes, and attacks the man with an axe.  Naturally, he’s arrested and locked up in an asylum, only to wake up later to find the place abandoned.  As he wanders into the streets, reports abound of crazed humans and horrible monsters attacking people.

I think where I get a bit confused is that Trent is a fictional character, but he’s a character that exists in reality.  I suppose the idea is that he is essentially a predestined puppet with Cane pulling the strings. But for what purpose?  If the book is already out in publication, why have Trent go through this entire lengthy process?  I mean, yes, part of it is that we need a film, and the journey is quite fun.  But what is the meaning of Trent?

I invite more astute readers to weigh in with their theories.  I do like this movie, but the central conceit of it still confounds me.  I also love the Lovecraftian elements, and the film is a love letter of sorts to that master of weird fiction and eldritch horror.