Prince of Darkness (film)

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Prince of Darkness
1987 US Theatrical Poster
Directed by	John Carpenter
Produced by	Larry J. Franco
Written by	John Carpenter (as "Martin Quatermass")
Starring	Donald Pleasence Jameson Parker Victor Wong
Music by	John Carpenter Alan Howarth
Cinematography	Gary B. Kibbe
Distributed by	Universal
Release date(s)	1987
Running time	102 min.
Language	English
Budget	$3,000,000 (approximate)

Prince of Darkness (also known as John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness) is a 1987 American horror film directed, written and scored by John Carpenter, starring Donald Pleasence, Victor Wong and Jameson Parker. The film is the second installment in what Carpenter refers to as his "Apocalypse Trilogy", which began with The Thing and concludes with In the Mouth of Madness.

Contents 1 Plot 2 Production 3 Response 4 Cast 5 Trivia 6 External links

[edit] Plot

A priest (Donald Pleasence) invites Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and his students to investigate a mysterious cylinder in the basement of an abandoned Los Angeles church. The cylinder contains a constantly swirling, green liquid. Throughout the night, it begins to possess the students one by one and uses them against the remaining survivors. After researching the text found next to the cylinder, it is discovered that the liquid is actually Satan himself.

The text also reveals that Satan is the son of an even more powerful force of evil, an Anti-God, who is trapped in another dimension. Satan possesses one of the students and attempts to bring his father through a dimensional portal, using a mirror.

At the climax of the film, Catherine Danforth (Lisa Blount), one of the students, stops this from happening by tackling the possessed student, and both o them fall through the portal. Before she or the Anti-God can escape, the priest shatters the portal, trapping Satan, the Anti-God, and Danforth in the other realm.

Following the climax, the students return home. Brian Marsh experiences the recurring dream that is shown in progressive installments throughout the film, as different characters each fall asleep. In it, a distorted voice states that what he is seeing is not a dream, but is rather a transmission from the year 1999 (the events of the film take place in the late 1980s) that cannot be transmitted to the conscious mind. The dream appears to be a video of the front of the church in which the film is set. The voice states that the message is being sent to create a "causality violation", and prevent the events being shown from taking place. The camera pans toward the front of the church, from which a silhouetted figure, with arms outstretched and shrouded in smoke, is emerging. While previous versions of the dream stopped here, this final version shows the figure stepping through the threshold, revealing itself to be Danforth.

Marsh appears to awaken, and rolls over to find Satan, in the form of the possessed student, lying in bed with him. Marsh then awakens screaming, recovers, and approaches his bedroom mirror, hand outstretched. The film cuts to black just before his fingers touch the mirror.

[edit] Production

Due to the limited level of creativity allowed in his films, John Carpenter stopped working with Fox and was silent with films for a while.^{[citation needed]} Around the time he was doing press information on his previous film, Big Trouble in Little China, he researched quantum physics and how they could be used as a storyline in a movie.^{[citation needed]}

Because of the mentioned low-creativity standards, to make a film John Carpenter wanted to film with a small film business that would allow his needs. So he met with Shep Gordon (Executive Producer of Prince of Darkness and Agent of Alice Cooper's, explaining Cooper's cameo in the film) and found out about Alive Pictures, who worked with Universal.^{[citation needed]}

This film was shot in 48 days.^{[citation needed]} With a budget of approximately 3 million dollars, John Carpenter brought back to the film people that he had worked with previously, including Victor Wong and Donald Pleasance. Peter Jason, soon to become a Carpenter favorite, was also in the film.

[edit] Response

Critically, the film was poorly received at the time of its initial release, accused of being dull with an over-complicated plot, wordy script, wooden acting and uneven pacing, while offering insufficient 'horror' for Carpenter fans. It is generally thought to have done poorly at the box office, but as the movie's budget was under $3 million and the eventual gross was $14 million, it managed a profit for the studio. Over the years, the film's critical reputation has improved considerably and it has obtained a cult following. The first of a three film deal Carpenter had with Universal, it was followed by They Live (1988) and Memoirs of an Invisible Man (1992).

The film is very popular in Japan and Spain. In Japan, the film was re-named John Carpenter's Paradigm and Spain released the film under the title Prince Des Tenebres. Both countries created their own artwork for the film. The Spainish DVD has an extra not on the UK disc, a two minute feature with John Carpenter talking about the film.

Carpenter's inventive skills in editing and mood-setting music are in evidence throughout the film, however some critics and fans believe the standard horror trajectory of the story keeps it from becoming a classic. The film was shot through a slightly anamorphic lens, giving a subtle distortion to every scene. An eerie and fragmented foreshadowing dream sequence occurs repeatedly during the film, apparently a transmission from the future year of 1999, each time showing a little more and also providing a final twist.

Although Carpenter wrote the screenplay, in the film's credits the writer is listed as Martin Quatermass, a homage repeated in the film with Kneale University. These were in reference to the British film and television writer Nigel Kneale and the famous fictional scientist he created, Professor Bernard Quatermass. The storyline features elements associated with Kneale (the ancient evil aspect of both Quatermass and the Pit and The Quatermass Conclusion, the idea of messages from the future from The Road, and the scientific investigation of the supernatural from The Stone Tape). Carpenter would return to the idea of clerical secrecy in Vampires.

Kneale, however, was irritated with this use of the character's name in the film's credits, as he feared that the impression may be given that he had something to do with the film. Previously, he had written the original screenplay for the 1982 film Halloween III: Season of the Witch for Carpenter, but had been so incensed with all of the changes director Tommy Lee Wallace had made to it that he had his name removed from the credits.^{[citation needed]}

[edit] Cast

Actor	Role
Donald Pleasence	Priest
Jameson Parker	Brian Marsh
Victor Wong	Prof. Howard Birack
Lisa Blount	Catherine Danforth
Dennis Dun	Walter
Susan Blanchard	Kelly
Anne Marie Howard	Susan Cabot
Ann Yen	Lisa
Ken Wright	Lomax
Dirk Blocker	Mullins
Jessie Lawrence Ferguson	Calder
Peter Jason	Dr. Paul Leahy
Robert Grasmere	Frank Wyndham
Alice Cooper	Street Schizo
Jessie Ferguson	Dark Figure

[edit] Trivia

• The film features a cameo by Alice Cooper, playing a murderous vagrant who kills one of the hapless students (Thom Bray, who played Boz in the popular 1980's detective show Riptide) with a bicycle frame. This effect was borrowed from one of Cooper's stage shows.
• Samples from the dream message can be heard on DJ Shadow's Endtroducing... at the end of both Changeling and Stem / Long Stem. It's also heard on the beginning of Marilyn Manson's version of "Down in the Park".
• The short-lived 1980's UK horror genre magazine Fear ran a competition to devise a plotline for a sequel to the movie.
• The television version of the movie adds more scenes of Brian tossing in bed when it gets closer to the end (most notably when Brian is trying to climb back into the church).
• In the theatrical trailer (available on the Region 2 DVD release), there is a scene not in the movie (Brian putting his hand all the way onto the mirror).
• In the television version of the film (that comes on the Sci-Fi channel every year), some scenes from the film that were taken out were replaced with deleted scenes not on any dvd copy. The ending is altered, giving an "it's all a dream" impression, rather than the cinema release edit.
• The abandoned church makes another appearance as the scene of discovery for a murdered, beheaded young woman in the movie "Showdown in Little Tokyo".
• 80's/90's New York hardcore/punk Band BUGOUT SOCIETY has a song called "Integratin' Satan" which is inspired by the film's use of math to fight The Devil.
• The ending sequence where Brian wakes up to see Satan has been used many times by the YTMND community for creating animated GIFs. They mostly include the sequence but with Satan replaced by something else.

[edit] External links

• Prince of Darkness at the Internet Movie Database
• Prince of Darkness at theofficialjohncarpenter.com