Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind, a production of iheartradioch.
Speaker 2: Hey, welcome to Weird House Cinema. This is Rob Lamb.
Speaker 3: And this is Joe McCormick, and hey, if everything is
Speaker 3: going according to plan, this should have published the moment
Speaker 3: after midnight on the night of Halloween. So so happy Halloween, everybody.
Speaker 3: We are bringing you horror accordingly. Today we're going to
Speaker 3: be talking about the nineteen eighty seven John Carpenter horror
Speaker 3: film Prince of Darkness. And somehow I think this is
Speaker 3: our first John Carpenter movie.
Speaker 2: It is, and we did talk about the Carpenter produced
Speaker 2: and Carpenter scored Halloween three a while back, but this
Speaker 2: is the very first time we're actually going to be
Speaker 2: talking about a John Carpenter directed film, and we managed
Speaker 2: to wait until our one hundred and eightieth Weird House
Speaker 2: Cinema selection to do this, So some of you might
Speaker 2: find that a little surprising. I kind of find it
Speaker 2: a little surprising, I guess in retrospect, because obviously you
Speaker 2: and I are both big John Carpenter fans. Some of
Speaker 2: his films are among our favorites, and we keep talking
Speaker 2: about them on the show anytime there's a John Carpenter
Speaker 2: connection in a movie or in a core episode of
Speaker 2: Stuff to Blow your Mind. We'll talk about it, Lord knows,
Speaker 2: we'll talk about it. Why did it take us so long? Though,
Speaker 2: you know, I despite the fact that obviously we really
Speaker 2: like John Carpenter films, and we also have listeners writing
Speaker 2: and suggesting John Carpenter films a lot. I'll have to
Speaker 2: get your thoughts on this, Joe. But for my own part,
Speaker 2: I feel like I've always kind of been reluctant to
Speaker 2: tackle one of like the all time great favorite John
Speaker 2: Carpenter films, you know, something like The Thing or Big
Speaker 2: Trouble in Little China, because they're just so well known,
Speaker 2: they're beloved and in some respects kind of perfect in
Speaker 2: their own way. And on the other hand, I've been
Speaker 2: perhaps more tempted to cover something like Ghosts of Mars,
Speaker 2: one of his late period pictures, but it also felt
Speaker 2: wrong for our first Carpenter selection to be one of
Speaker 2: his less well received movies. So I think nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: seven's Prince of Darkness is perhaps the perfect pick. It's
Speaker 2: Carpenter during his heyday and also Carpenter at peak creative control.
Speaker 2: It's also one of his truly weirdest films, I think,
Speaker 2: and it has a strong cult following.
Speaker 3: Yeah, this is a Carpenter sleeper the sleeper awakens. In fact,
Speaker 3: even some people who are fans probably haven't seen this one.
Speaker 3: Took me a long time after, you know, I first
Speaker 3: started watching Halloween, An Escape from New York and all
Speaker 3: the big ones everybody sees first to get around to
Speaker 3: Prince of Darkness, and when I did, I was quite
Speaker 3: wowed by it. It remains very much in the top
Speaker 3: tier of horror movies for me, especially in.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: It's a great example of a concept we've talked about
Speaker 3: on the show that I I think maybe applies more
Speaker 3: to John Carpenter films than to anything else, and that
Speaker 3: is a rub the fur movie. Prince of Darkness is
Speaker 3: a rub the fur movie. It is about a textural experience,
Speaker 3: an experience of sights and sounds that conjures a mood.
Speaker 3: This movie is absolutely amazing at creating a feeling and
Speaker 3: a mood through its use of music, through its use
Speaker 3: of imagery, through its use of interesting ideas, and I
Speaker 3: really like the way that it throws different themes together.
Speaker 3: So one of the things that I think must have
Speaker 3: been behind John Carpenter's like creative process for Prince of
Speaker 3: Darkness is he must have read like a pop physics
Speaker 3: book or watched a documentary about quantum mechanics. Because this
Speaker 3: movie is full of ideas about both science and religion.
Speaker 3: He was trying to do some kind of sort of
Speaker 3: sort of Christian infused but also sort of maybe Lovecraftian
Speaker 3: or Eldritch demonic awakening idea, but then also mixing that
Speaker 3: with ideas about quantum weirdness, some stuff about astronomy. He's
Speaker 3: clearly like trying to put a bunch of different kinds
Speaker 3: of themes that are usually kept separate into the blender.
Speaker 3: And that's an impulse I really like. And I think
Speaker 3: if you don't look too close at the way he
Speaker 3: uses the scientific ideas, it really works. If you start
Speaker 3: if you actually know what he's talking about, and start like,
Speaker 3: you know, reading between the lines too much, it kind
Speaker 3: of falls apart. But if you just lean back, you
Speaker 3: kind of you kind of tune out just a little
Speaker 3: bit during the scientific parts. I think it is super nice.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I mean this this is ultimately a pretty
Speaker 2: ambitious film, right, I mean, it's from a number of
Speaker 2: standpoints it's like it was a three million dollar picture.
Speaker 2: It was an independent picture coming off of a lot
Speaker 2: of studio work for car and it attempts to weave
Speaker 2: in all of these quantum physics and quantum mechanics ideas
Speaker 2: that the Carpenter says that he'd been reading a lot
Speaker 2: of this kind of thing, he'd read several books about
Speaker 2: quantum mechanics, and that it had kind of like a
Speaker 2: profound impact on him, Like he described it as kind
Speaker 2: of like a shift in worldview based on what he
Speaker 2: was reading. So you have that going on, and then
Speaker 2: at the same time, this is something that really came
Speaker 2: out when I was listening to the commentary track for
Speaker 2: this film, which I'll discuss more about that in a bit.
Speaker 2: But he's talking with one of the actors in the picture,
Speaker 2: Peter Jason, and it's neat because Jason, of course is
Speaker 2: coming at it with a very actor's standpoint when it
Speaker 2: comes to the questions he's asking Carpenter about the production
Speaker 2: and the process, and Carpenter of course is approaching it
Speaker 2: from the view of the director and the writer, but
Speaker 2: especially from the standpoint of the director. And I think
Speaker 2: one detail that kind of from the commentary track that
Speaker 2: kind of highlights these different views is when they're talking
Speaker 2: about the scenes where they're first going down into the basement.
Speaker 2: We'll get to the basement and all this as you know,
Speaker 2: this sort of ruinous basement that is lit by like
Speaker 2: hundreds of candles, and and you know, they're kind of
Speaker 2: having fun with the picture, riffing almost a certain extent,
Speaker 2: and Jason's like, who who let all these candles? And
Speaker 2: and you know, Carpenter's like, well, you know, this is
Speaker 2: just this is just great lighting. You know, this just
Speaker 2: it just looks really cool, you know. And and I
Speaker 2: think that gets to the rub the fur aspect of
Speaker 2: the picture. And then rub the fur, you know, you
Speaker 2: can talk about again. You can definitely think about it
Speaker 2: in terms of just sights and sounds, but it's also
Speaker 2: there in the ideas, you know, in the way ideas
Speaker 2: are sprinkled through it. And it's not only about like
Speaker 2: what is given to you, but oh also what's not
Speaker 2: given to you. There are a number of scenes in
Speaker 2: this picture where we get audio free clips of characters
Speaker 2: clearly discussing the implications of whatever is going on. So
Speaker 2: we don't even have all the details. We just have
Speaker 2: you know, various nuggets of quanto physics and theology thrown
Speaker 2: at us. And you know again, Yeah, if you lean
Speaker 2: back into the chair and you let them wash over you,
Speaker 2: it's a pretty great experience.
Speaker 3: I agree. I think that's exactly right, and I would
Speaker 3: phrase it this way. I think the use of both
Speaker 3: science and religion, the scientific and religious themes in the
Speaker 3: movie is primarily esthetic. It is not primarily about how
Speaker 3: either one actually works or what is actually true. It's
Speaker 3: to create an aesthetic effect. And that's not a bad thing.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, I think it is used quite well
Speaker 3: as another type of texture. It's an idea texture, a theme,
Speaker 3: texture that fits in with the sights and sounds and
Speaker 3: ultimately the whole. It's all adding up to a feeling,
Speaker 3: a mood, and it is a powerful, powerful mood.
Speaker 2: Well, I'll tell you what. I have an elevator pitch
Speaker 2: for this movie, and it is the following. The Devil's
Speaker 2: in the details and also in a big cylinder of
Speaker 2: green liquid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, you know, it's it's an idea that works better
Speaker 3: in practice than it does in theory. If you were
Speaker 3: to actually explain the concept here that yeah, Satan is
Speaker 3: physically real and he is a volume of green liquid
Speaker 3: inside a jar. I don't know. That just doesn't sound
Speaker 3: as effective as the movie actually is.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think in one of our most recent episodes
Speaker 2: of Weird House, or maybe it was a core episode,
Speaker 2: I mentioned in Passing like movies that talk about evil
Speaker 2: as an actual physical presence or substance, and this movie
Speaker 2: kind of gets into that territory, but also ultimately I
Speaker 2: think makes it work within the context of the film
Speaker 2: in ways that it maybe doesn't in others.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we were talking about this in the House of
Speaker 3: Ushare episode.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right, Well, let's go ahead and listen to
Speaker 2: a little bit of trailer audio here, which is we're
Speaker 2: not going to listen to the whole trailer, but hopefully
Speaker 2: we'll get just a little splash of some of the
Speaker 2: dialogue from it, and a little taste of that excellent
Speaker 2: John Carpenter Alan Howarth's score that we're going to be
Speaker 2: talking about. H h H. All right. Uh, so, hey,
Speaker 2: if you want to go see Prince of Darkness before
Speaker 2: we proceed here, it is widely available. Uh you know,
Speaker 2: you can stream it, you can rent it, you can
Speaker 2: buy it physically. I watched it on the Shout Factory
Speaker 2: Blu Ray, which is pretty great, complete with three bonus
Speaker 2: interviews and a full audio commentary track from Carpenter and
Speaker 2: actor Peter Jason, who has a minor part here but
Speaker 2: is a friend and frequent Carpenter cast member. This was
Speaker 2: his first Carpenter film. Carpenter's audio commentaries with folks are
Speaker 2: always entertaining and insightful. This one's no exception. I actually,
Speaker 2: I generally say I don't have time for audio commentaries
Speaker 2: on movies anymore, and that's mostly true. And yet somehow
Speaker 2: I ended up watching this movie all the way through
Speaker 2: and then watching half of it again with the commentary track.
Speaker 2: It's just that get.
Speaker 3: I remember listening to a Carpenter and Jamie Lee Curtis
Speaker 3: commentary track somewhere that was adorable.
Speaker 2: It was great. Oh yeah I haven't I haven't done
Speaker 2: that one. But yeah, they're generally very well regarded. You know.
Speaker 2: It's just very cool to hear Carpenter, you know, shoot
Speaker 2: the ball with people that clearly he you know, pre
Speaker 2: picks knowing that this is somebody that he has rapport
Speaker 2: with and can chat with about the film.
Speaker 3: I think Peter Jason does he play the He's like
Speaker 3: a chemistry professor in this movie who spends a significant
Speaker 3: amount of time walking around doing like kazoo noises with
Speaker 3: his mouth.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, that's the one.
Speaker 3: Peter, I've got the perfect part for you.
Speaker 2: All right. Well, let's let's talk about the folks involved here,
Speaker 2: starting of course with John Carpenter. He directed it, He
Speaker 2: wrote it under a pseudonym, but it's pretty obvious that,
Speaker 2: you know, everyone knows this is a John Carpenter scripted film.
Speaker 3: Did he call himself Martin quator Mass.
Speaker 2: Yes, yes, a reference to the to the to the
Speaker 2: films that he was inspired by. That also, you know,
Speaker 2: have some direct inspiration on the plot of this picture,
Speaker 2: you know, ancient evil buried beneath the ground, that sort
Speaker 2: of thing.
Speaker 3: Nice.
Speaker 2: And of course yes he did the score as well.
Speaker 2: Born nineteen forty eight, living legend director of some of
Speaker 2: the most iconic horror and sci fi films of the
Speaker 2: late seventies and the entire nineteen eighties, who also played
Speaker 2: a very key role in the birth of an entire dark,
Speaker 2: ambient synth wave sound like there's just you know, there
Speaker 2: are other important influences on that kind of sound out
Speaker 2: there from horror and sci fi soundtrack. But John Carpenter
Speaker 2: is a very important part of that equation.
Speaker 3: I had some plans to talk about this later, but
Speaker 3: I might as well mention it now. I think that
Speaker 3: John Carpenter not only creates great scores electronic scores for
Speaker 3: his own movies. I think in many cases the movie
Speaker 3: is only as effective as it is with his score.
Speaker 3: Not to take away from the rest of the movie.
Speaker 3: I mean, like, you know, he's got a great sense
Speaker 3: of word up put the camera. You know, he's got
Speaker 3: a good photographic style, and I like the stories he
Speaker 3: writes and all that. So other filmmaking elements are strong
Speaker 3: as well, but it is the score or he creates
Speaker 3: for the film that locks it all into place, that
Speaker 3: creates the feeling that you associate with the movie. Try
Speaker 3: to imagine Halloween without the John Carpenter score, just suben
Speaker 3: what you would imagine for some other generic horror movie score.
Speaker 3: It would still be, I think, a pretty good movie,
Speaker 3: but it would not be anything like what it is.
Speaker 3: And I think the same is true for all of
Speaker 3: the movies that Carpenter scores himself. It's definitely the case here.
Speaker 2: Yeah, absolutely, So we really don't have to tell most
Speaker 2: of you who John Carpenter is. You know, he's responsible
Speaker 2: for such iconic films as Seventy Eights, Halloween, eighty one's
Speaker 2: Escape from New York, eighty two is The Thing, eighty
Speaker 2: six is Big Trouble in Little China in nineteen ninety
Speaker 2: four is in the Mouth of Madness, just to name
Speaker 2: a few. He came out of the USC School of
Speaker 2: Cinematic Arts in the late sixties and ultimately skyrocketed with
Speaker 2: the success of Halloween. This film, eighty seven's Prince of
Speaker 2: Darkness is notable for being his first independent film after
Speaker 2: a string of big student udio commercial movies, coming immediately
Speaker 2: on the heels of the box office disappointment of Big
Speaker 2: Trouble in Little China, which of course has gone on
Speaker 2: to become a much loved cult classic. But at the time,
Speaker 2: you know, it did not succeed.
Speaker 3: I think a lot of people didn't get it when
Speaker 3: it came out. It was only kind of looking back
Speaker 3: that people started to realize the genius.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he's coming off of that. Carpenter has said
Speaker 2: in interviews that he was worn out by the big
Speaker 2: studio process and really wanted to make a lower budget
Speaker 2: film that was completely on his own terms. And that's
Speaker 2: what Prince of Darkness is. It's a weird, doomy contemplation
Speaker 2: on religion and quantum mechanics, which Carpenter, you know, always
Speaker 2: a science nerd, had been reading about leading up to
Speaker 2: this production. And it's also a film that may comment
Speaker 2: to some degree, maybe even almost subconsciously or subliminentally, on
Speaker 2: on his desire to break free from the tyrannical order
Speaker 2: of big studio productions. You know, like you can maybe
Speaker 2: pick cup on a little sort of like post studio
Speaker 2: angst in the way that he's formulating things.
Speaker 3: Oh, there is a great part where they're discussing the
Speaker 3: secrets kept by the Brotherhood of Sleep, and Donald Pleasant
Speaker 3: starts talking about how, you know, we fed the people
Speaker 3: what we thought they wanted a lie. It was all
Speaker 3: a lie. I want to tell them the truth now.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, So it's it's in a way, this movie's
Speaker 2: kind of it has a meanness and also kind of
Speaker 2: a graphicness that you don't see in a lot of
Speaker 2: other Carpenter films. I mean not to say, yeah, you
Speaker 2: can look at the thing and it's grotesque, but this
Speaker 2: movie is also pretty violent and grotesque in its own way.
Speaker 2: It's often situated with the Thing and in the mouth
Speaker 2: of Madness as being part of his Apocalypse trilogy. Yeah,
Speaker 2: it's one of the bloodier ones. It also is clearly
Speaker 2: a siege film, which he's quick to point out, and
Speaker 2: it has a Howard Hawksian ensemble cast featuring several actors
Speaker 2: that Carpenter handpicked to work with, again, you know, mostly
Speaker 2: like people he liked working with and was excited to
Speaker 2: have on a production like this. He made a reported
Speaker 2: fourteen point two million off of a budget of three million,
Speaker 2: and so he followed it up with They Live, which
Speaker 2: was nearly identical in terms of creative control, budget and
Speaker 2: box office. Carpenter's last full length directorial effort was twenty
Speaker 2: tens The Ward, but he's remained active, of course as
Speaker 2: a composer, often working with his son Cody.
Speaker 3: Now did you say in one of the commentaries you
Speaker 3: were listening to that Carpenter admitted to his obsession with
Speaker 3: video games? Because I don't remember where I came across this,
Speaker 3: but I generally had it in my head that Carpenter
Speaker 3: is like obsessed with playing like I don't know, NBA JAM,
Speaker 3: like like sports video games for the PlayStation and stuff.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, I mean numerous interviews will bring up video games,
Speaker 2: and even in this commentary track, which was I think
Speaker 2: you know, over a decade ago that it was recorded,
Speaker 2: you know, he's mostly like, yeah, I'm not as tuned
Speaker 2: into the you know what people, you know, what's going
Speaker 2: on with horror movies. These stays and most just to
Speaker 2: sports and video games. And I've seen other interviews where
Speaker 2: people ask him what's what he's playing, and there's always
Speaker 2: some sort of like shooter or sports game. I guess
Speaker 2: that he's into, so, you know, you know, more power
Speaker 2: to him. He's a big gamer.
Speaker 3: Yeah, fair enough, John. You know, you made a bunch
Speaker 3: of good ones. You don't have to keep up with
Speaker 3: what's what's great this here? Yeah, play video games.
Speaker 2: I should also point out Carpenter points to several influences
Speaker 2: on the plot of this picture, one of them being
Speaker 2: Gregory Benford's novel Timescape from nineteen eighty that's a I
Speaker 2: haven't read it, but apparently it's a novel that involves
Speaker 2: messages from the future sent via hypothetical faster than lie
Speaker 2: Tachyon particles.
Speaker 3: Oh this ties into one of my favorite things in
Speaker 3: the movie, The Dreams sent from the future. I guess
Speaker 3: we'll get into that in the plot section. But I
Speaker 3: love that convention here and the way it's realized as
Speaker 3: a kind of staticky like you know, third generation VHS
Speaker 3: copy video message is so good.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, again, this is a fairly expansive ensemble cast,
Speaker 2: and we can't cover everyone here or do go into
Speaker 2: great detail, so I'm probably gonna have to be a
Speaker 2: little briefer than usual. All right. First of all, top billing,
Speaker 2: we have Donald Pleasants playing an unnamed priest. He's just
Speaker 2: credited as priest.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I was trying to so some sources I found
Speaker 3: online called him. I think father Loomis. I don't think
Speaker 3: that name is ever said in the movie, and I
Speaker 3: don't see that in anything official. That might just be
Speaker 3: something the Internet made of.
Speaker 2: He is very Loomis esque, Like, it's impossible not to
Speaker 2: compare this role as a troubled priest fighting against evil
Speaker 2: to the other major role in which he played a
Speaker 2: troubled priest fighting against evil as Loomis and Halloween. It's
Speaker 2: also similar to the character he played in The Devil's
Speaker 2: Men that we previously discussed on the show.
Speaker 3: Oh No, The Devil's Men he's much better in this
Speaker 3: than he was in The Devil's Men. Yeah, but it
Speaker 3: is very similar to his Halloween performance. In both cases,
Speaker 3: he is playing a He is playing a haunted, disturbed
Speaker 3: cleric of sorts who is motivated by a fear of
Speaker 3: what's to come and guilt for what he in some
Speaker 3: small part, played a role in releasing into the world.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. Pleasants lived nineteen nineteen through nineteen ninety five,
Speaker 2: and he, of course not only appeared in Carpenter's Halloween.
Speaker 2: He was also an Escape from New York, in which
Speaker 2: he played the President of the United States.
Speaker 3: May God have messy on you all.
Speaker 2: He often played these really like, very dry, serious characters,
Speaker 2: but it's said to be quite humorous behind the scenes,
Speaker 2: and you know, everybody seems to have really nice things
Speaker 2: to say about working with him. All Right. Up next,
Speaker 2: we have the actor and character that are essentially positioned
Speaker 2: as the leading man. But again very strong ensemble sensibilities here.
Speaker 2: But this is the character Brian Marsh played by Jamison
Speaker 2: Parker born nineteen forty seven.
Speaker 3: Is this supposed to be our Tom Atkins for the film?
Speaker 2: I think so, our mustachioed, handsome eighties leading man. Sometimes
Speaker 2: he just hangs out like he's working alone in his
Speaker 2: apartment or house at night. He's just he's got his
Speaker 2: shirt open so he can show off his muscles to nobody. Yeah,
Speaker 2: he's got some muscles, though he does. He's a man's
Speaker 2: in good shape. Jamison Parker was mostly known for playing
Speaker 2: the Simon without a mustache on TV Simon and Simon,
Speaker 2: So in this movie he's the one with the mustache.
Speaker 2: And he worked several times with Simon and Simon co
Speaker 2: star Gerald McRaney the dad from a Never Ending Story.
Speaker 2: So I mean this is mostly what he's known for, also,
Speaker 2: of course remembered for this picture. And you know, he's
Speaker 2: perfectly fine in this no complaints. Again. He's essentially the
Speaker 2: leading man that exists mostly within an ensemble cast of characters.
Speaker 3: You know, I will say I love Love Prince of Darkness,
Speaker 3: but I will say I think deeply developed characters is
Speaker 3: not this movie's strong suit. Instead of having characters that
Speaker 3: we get to know super well and are very well defined.
Speaker 3: And we have a lot of characters, I would say
Speaker 3: the most interesting singularly defined character in the movie is
Speaker 3: the physics professor Barak played by Victor Wong.
Speaker 2: Yes, Victor Wong, who of nineteen twenty seven through two
Speaker 2: thousand and one Chinese American character actor, easily best remembered
Speaker 2: for his role as the wizard egg Shin in Carpenter's
Speaker 2: Big Trouble in Little China, but he also had a
Speaker 2: great role in the cult classic monster film Trimmers, which
Speaker 2: also had a great ensemble cast, and he was also
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty seven's The Last Emperor. Other credits include
Speaker 2: eighty five's Year of the Dragon, eighty six is Shanghai
Speaker 2: Surprise that as some Madonna movie memory serves, and also
Speaker 2: The Golden Child with Eddie Murphy nineteen ninety three, is
Speaker 2: the Joy Luck Club in nineteen ninety seven, seven Years
Speaker 2: in Tibet.
Speaker 3: I always love Victor Wong. Of course, I love him
Speaker 3: in Big Trouble in Little China, and I love him
Speaker 3: in this. He has such a strong, like good magic,
Speaker 3: comforting aura. He's almost like the which Glinda when he appears,
Speaker 3: you know, Does that make any sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, it's like there's he He's able to bring
Speaker 2: a certain wisdom to everything that he's saying, you know.
Speaker 2: And we'll get into when we can do. Examples from
Speaker 2: his various physics lectures. But I think it's interesting because
Speaker 2: I think that you could say the same for Donald
Speaker 2: Pleasants and Victor Wong. Both of them are really great
Speaker 2: at making you believe the things that they're saying. No
Speaker 2: matter what kind of dialogue they're given. You're like, Yeah,
Speaker 2: this guy knows what he's talking.
Speaker 3: About, absolutely. And I really like the way he plays
Speaker 3: this character too, So not just in delivering say, these
Speaker 3: these strange physics lectures about you know, the other characters
Speaker 3: say about like the student characters say about him that
Speaker 3: he is a physics professor, but he's almost more interested
Speaker 3: in turning his students into philosophers than scientists, because he's
Speaker 3: really captured by the ideas the implications of the quantum
Speaker 3: mechanics that he teaches, and so he does come off
Speaker 3: he does portray that well as like the man apped
Speaker 3: up in not just how the science works, but what
Speaker 3: it means for our lives, and he clearly like he
Speaker 3: gets lost in thought about that and wants other people
Speaker 3: to understand to the extent he does, how strange all
Speaker 3: this is and how much it should shake them to
Speaker 3: their core. But I also like the way that he
Speaker 3: plays this role as as physically feeble but mentally tough.
Speaker 3: Like he sort of plays the character. He's very kind
Speaker 3: of slow moving and almost sort of with a limb
Speaker 3: or something and the way he walks, but he he
Speaker 3: doesn't get as easily mentally shaken as a lot of
Speaker 3: the other characters.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, again, it's you know, it's probably that strong
Speaker 2: wisdom rating for his character. All right, let's see. Next,
Speaker 2: we have the character Catherine Danforth played by Lisa Blount,
Speaker 2: who lived nineteen fifty seven through twenty ten. Along with
Speaker 2: most of the characters, she's part of the Professor's assembled
Speaker 2: science team, and as we'll see, she's also the love
Speaker 2: interest of the character Brian Marsh best known for her
Speaker 2: Golden Globe nominated performance in nineteen eighty two as an
Speaker 2: officer and a gentleman. Her other credits include nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: one's Dead and Buried, nineteen eighty four's Radioactive Dreams and
Speaker 2: What Waits Below, eighty seven's Night Flyers, and nineteen eighty
Speaker 2: nine Blind Fury. She also produced three projects, including the
Speaker 2: Academy Award winning short film The Accountant in two thousand
Speaker 2: and one that starred and was directed by her husband
Speaker 2: Ray McKinnon. And co starred Walton Goggins, both both fine actors.
Speaker 3: Oh Goggins connection. As I said earlier, a lot of
Speaker 3: the student characters, maybe including our supposed leading man Brian,
Speaker 3: are not super well defined. I think Catherine is one
Speaker 3: of the slightly more interesting ones. She has there's something
Speaker 3: unspoken about her backstory, Like there are moments she has
Speaker 3: with Brian where they're talking about, like why she seems
Speaker 3: to have a kind of pessimistic outlook about say love,
Speaker 3: or or about the future. Why she seems to have
Speaker 3: a lot of doubts about herself, and she often doesn't
Speaker 3: want to explain what the cause of that is, and
Speaker 3: so we're just sort of left to fill that in ourselves.
Speaker 3: But yeah, she's presented as this character who has I
Speaker 3: don't know, who has a kind of darkness, who has doubts,
Speaker 3: but she does essentially save the day in the end,
Speaker 3: The bridging into the dark world where the Father of
Speaker 3: Satan resides more on that later is ultimately that is
Speaker 3: stopped by an act of heroism by Catherine.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, all right. Next we have the character Walter
Speaker 2: played by Dennis Dunn born nineteen fifty two. This is
Speaker 2: another big trouble in Little China Alumni. He also appeared
Speaker 2: in nineteen eighty five's The Year of the Dragon and
Speaker 2: eighty seven's The Last Emperor American actor of Chinese descent
Speaker 2: with the credits and TV film and stage. His role
Speaker 2: is interesting because he is the funniest character, but he
Speaker 2: is also it's important distress, not a comic relief character,
Speaker 2: Like he is not there just to make a few
Speaker 2: jokes and then get killed by a monster or anything
Speaker 2: like that. Like, he has a lot of personality and
Speaker 2: he brings a lot of legitimate humor to the role.
Speaker 2: But he's also a character that you're pretty invested in,
Speaker 2: so I don't know, he feels almost like co male
Speaker 2: lead in the film.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I would say it's not that he functions as
Speaker 3: comic relief within the plot. I would say that the character,
Speaker 3: the main characteristic of his character is that he is
Speaker 3: a jokester, and he in fact deals with fear by
Speaker 3: making jokes, which is a thing a lot of people do.
Speaker 3: You know, that's a common character. You know, you can
Speaker 3: recognize that character trait in others. The people whose impulse
Speaker 3: when things start getting tense or scary is to start
Speaker 3: trying harder and harder to be funny.
Speaker 2: Yeah, all right. Next we have Kelly. Kelly is played
Speaker 2: by Susan Blanchard born nineteen forty four. She's another member
Speaker 2: of the science team. I don't remember what her discipline
Speaker 2: is off the top of my hand.
Speaker 3: She has a bit the physics group, but physics.
Speaker 2: She's physics, the blonde member of the team. She becomes
Speaker 2: really important in the final act, So more on that
Speaker 2: in a bet. She also appeared and they Live and
Speaker 2: was on tpe's policewoman. All right. Then we have the
Speaker 2: character Susan Cabot played by Anne Marie Howard born nineteen sixty.
Speaker 2: This is the science team member with the piercing eyes.
Speaker 2: Do you remember what her discipline is.
Speaker 3: I don't remember her discipline. But she's the one who's
Speaker 3: working down in the basement with the cylinder of goo.
Speaker 3: She has the glasses. Multiple characters refer to her by
Speaker 3: saying glasses.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then of course she becomes the first person
Speaker 2: to be possessed, so minor spoiler there, but hey, and
Speaker 2: she loses the glasses and becomes the creepy possessed woman
Speaker 2: for the rest of the film, which she does a
Speaker 2: great job at.
Speaker 3: She goes around essentially a urinating satanic fluid out of
Speaker 3: her mouth into other people's mouths.
Speaker 2: Exactly, which is great. I mean, how many other films
Speaker 2: do you have this sort of like possessed zombie vampire
Speaker 2: that uses like a project green liquid to infect others?
Speaker 2: That is pretty great. This is essentially her first film role,
Speaker 2: which she followed up with a stint on Days of
Speaker 2: Our Lives and has had a long career acting in
Speaker 2: mostly television. I think some solid stage credits as well.
Speaker 2: All right, up next, we have the character Lisa played
Speaker 2: by Ann yin one of only a handful of credits
Speaker 2: for her that include According to IMDb, anyway, there's always
Speaker 2: possibility something's crossed here, but they have listed a nineteen
Speaker 2: eighty Chinese film called What Is Love? And then she
Speaker 2: does a few other things. She does this movie, and
Speaker 2: then finally has an episode of TVs in living color,
Speaker 2: and then I don't know what happened to her after that,
Speaker 2: but I thought she was pretty good. Here. She's like
Speaker 2: a computer person, right.
Speaker 3: No, no, no, she's well, she's using a computer. But no,
Speaker 3: she's brought in as a theology student because they need
Speaker 3: someone to translate the ancient languages in the book that
Speaker 3: is kept by the Brotherhood of Sleep.
Speaker 2: That's right, So she's doing a lot of translation work
Speaker 2: on the computer.
Speaker 3: Yes, she's like just looking at the book and apparently
Speaker 3: not needing to use any reference resources or anything. She
Speaker 3: just like looks at the Brotherhood of Sleep book and like, okay,
Speaker 3: that's Coptic, and then just starts typing in English on
Speaker 3: the computer, doing it straight from the head. I mean,
Speaker 3: that's impressive. I think even most professional, you know, language
Speaker 3: scholars probably need to use some reference materials when they're
Speaker 3: translating things. But yeah, so she's the one who's like
Speaker 3: translating the book, so she gives us a lot of
Speaker 3: like creepy statements that are coming from this ancient tone.
Speaker 3: But then also she has one of my favorite scary
Speaker 3: moments in the movie where after she gets possessed by
Speaker 3: the Satanic fluid, she's sitting at the computer and just
Speaker 3: like staring ahead, not looking at the screen, but like
Speaker 3: looking off to the side and just typing repeatedly over
Speaker 3: and over, and then you see the screen and it
Speaker 3: just says, I live, I live like a million times.
Speaker 2: Peter Jason, in the commentary tract did comment that Hey,
Speaker 2: she's like acting and using a computer and it looks believable.
Speaker 2: I can't do that. He's like making a case like
Speaker 2: most actors can't do that. We don't know how to
Speaker 2: use computers. That's why we're acting. So I found that amusing.
Speaker 2: So I'm gonna skip various members of the science team here,
Speaker 2: but yeah, I'll mention that. Yeah. Peter Jason born nineteen
Speaker 2: forty four appears here in the first of seven collaborations
Speaker 2: with John Carpenter. Alice Cooper the rock Star born nineteen
Speaker 2: forty eight has a small role as a possessed man who,
Speaker 2: as we'll discuss, also essentially brought his own special effects
Speaker 2: with him for one scene, and then visual effects supervisor
Speaker 2: Robert Grassmere is also in it as an actor. He
Speaker 2: has a memorable role in the film because he gets
Speaker 2: to die not once, but twice. This was only Grassmere's
Speaker 2: third movie as a visual effects supervisor, but he went
Speaker 2: on to serve on such films as eighty seven's The
Speaker 2: Running Man, nineteen nineties Predator, two, ninety three's Demolition Man,
Speaker 2: and twenty twenty one's Barb and Star Go to to
Speaker 2: del mar So. In a lot of different films.
Speaker 3: Oh, but if we're talking about the scientists, we got
Speaker 3: to talk about one of my favorites, which is Calder
Speaker 3: the microbiologist.
Speaker 2: I think, yes, he's tremendous. Jesse Lawrence Ferguson who lived
Speaker 2: nineteen forty one through twenty nineteen. He's kind of forgetable
Speaker 2: early on, he's just you know, he's just one of
Speaker 2: the scienced crew. But he goes on to seemingly just
Speaker 2: have a blast playing a possessed version of his character,
Speaker 2: engaging in all manner of like strange facial expressions, and
Speaker 2: I think he's the only one that laughs. And he
Speaker 2: has this just completely unhinged laugh that he does that
Speaker 2: really adds to the creepiness during the final part of the.
Speaker 3: Pictures, it's so good. Hats off to him. It's like
Speaker 3: I am the devil now and it's hilarious and it's on.
Speaker 3: But it's a laugh that he's not just laughing maniacally
Speaker 3: like outright laughter. It's like he is trying to keep
Speaker 3: from laughing, but he can't stop himself. And that's what
Speaker 3: makes it so good. Demonic laughter like bubbling out of him.
Speaker 2: It's so good. Yeah. Now, he was an actor of
Speaker 2: stage and screen, who appeared in a fair number of things,
Speaker 2: including nineteen eighty four's Buckarou Bonzi eighty six is Neon Maniacs.
Speaker 2: I do not remember him from Neo MANIAX, but I
Speaker 2: have seen that film, nineteen nineties dark Man and nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety one's Boys in the Hood. Great voice, great voice, talent,
Speaker 2: let's see of note. Gary B. Kibbe is cinematographer on
Speaker 2: this who of nineteen forty one through twenty twenty. He
Speaker 2: previously worked as a camera operator on some films, and
Speaker 2: this was his first film as director of photography. Followed
Speaker 2: by They Live, he went onto work on several different
Speaker 2: John Carpenter films and then finally, Yes, the score. We
Speaker 2: already credited Carpenter, and again this is one of several
Speaker 2: collaborations with musician Alan Howarth. You can find the score
Speaker 2: wherever you get your music streaming or otherwise. But if
Speaker 2: you want something physical, Sacred Bones Records, who have worked
Speaker 2: extensive with John Carpenter, have a really beautiful box set
Speaker 2: that includes a blu ray of the film. Real quick,
Speaker 2: now that I'm looking at the picture of the blu ray,
Speaker 2: I'm again reminded of the box art for this film.
Speaker 2: The poster art for this film with like the screaming
Speaker 2: face and the green lightning stemming from some sort of
Speaker 2: a church. Long before I ever actually watched this picture,
Speaker 2: I do distinctly remember seeing that VHS box art on
Speaker 2: the shelf at VHS rentals stores, and it always kind
Speaker 2: of like scared me and captivated me from a very
Speaker 2: young age. So solid, solid poster.
Speaker 3: Whose face is this? Is this anybody from the movie,
Speaker 3: Not that I recall, I.
Speaker 2: Don't know for certain. It may yeah, it may just
Speaker 2: be nobody. It's just an evocative poster, which is, you know,
Speaker 2: sometimes the case.
Speaker 3: Can I say something about the marketing for the movie.
Speaker 3: I am impressed that they managed to resist just putting
Speaker 3: Alice Cooper on the cover.
Speaker 2: Yes. I also think it is very admirable that despite
Speaker 2: the fact that Alice Cooper has a song title Prints
Speaker 2: of Darkness that is like technically on the soundtrack, and
Speaker 2: yet is not the closing credits song, or at least
Speaker 2: I don't it's not the initial closing credit song. Maybe
Speaker 2: they play it later on after I stop watching the credits.
Speaker 2: But this is a film that has tremendous music obviously,
Speaker 2: and a tremendous endpoint like the final shot in the
Speaker 2: film is perfect, and the music matches with it perfectly
Speaker 2: and feeds into the end credit song that is Carpenter
Speaker 2: and Howarth. I wouldn't change that for the world. I'm
Speaker 2: so glad we don't switch over into a rock number
Speaker 2: at that point.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that's right. I mean, as I said earlier, the
Speaker 3: use of music in this movie is perfect, and it
Speaker 3: is what makes the film work as well as it does.
Speaker 3: Not that there aren't a lot of other great things
Speaker 3: about the movie, but the music is the glue that
Speaker 3: holds everything together and does the most work of anything
Speaker 3: to establish the intended feeling of the movie. So yeah,
Speaker 3: you couldn't mess with that, I think. Yeah, I totally agree.
Speaker 3: If as soon as you cut to the credits you
Speaker 3: went to a rock song, I think that would be
Speaker 3: a real bummer. That would really spoil it.
Speaker 2: All. Right, Well, let's dive into the plot proper here.
Speaker 3: So the action opens with that ominous theme music. It
Speaker 3: consists of a deep electronic pulse that bounces kind of
Speaker 3: like a hammer on a harpsichord string. But then it
Speaker 3: also has these high synthesizer tones that sound kind of
Speaker 3: like choirs, but not so much singing but sighing. I
Speaker 3: love that sighing voice they've created there. I don't know
Speaker 3: exactly what that is, but this music keeps playing as
Speaker 3: we go through the opening shots of the movie, and
Speaker 3: the first I would say the first ten minutes or
Speaker 3: so of the movie function kind of like a montage
Speaker 3: where we don't follow any individual character or character all
Speaker 3: that long. Instead, it's more like a montage where we
Speaker 3: cut back and forth between credits and then different characters, settings,
Speaker 3: and important props. So it's kind of like a survey
Speaker 3: of the game pieces being laid out on the board,
Speaker 3: except it is charged with this incredibly strong combination of dread, anticipation,
Speaker 3: and unstoppable forward momentum, all created by the music. And
Speaker 3: I think, somewhat famously, this opening credits montage goes on
Speaker 3: for like nine or ten minutes.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Yeah, it's a good one though. It really brings
Speaker 2: the intrigue following these characters around, establishing who they are
Speaker 2: and what's happening in this world.
Speaker 3: So the first thing we see is the full moon
Speaker 3: in a black sky with reflected moonlight almost a shade
Speaker 3: of pink.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is one of many great Matte paintings in
Speaker 2: the film by Jan Dan Janfirth. Here, anytime you see
Speaker 2: characters looking up at the sky and there's something weird
Speaker 2: going on with the sky, it's a great mapping.
Speaker 3: And by the way, I'm going to describe this opening
Speaker 3: montage in a good bit of detail to kind of
Speaker 3: help create the feeling. But then, so after we see
Speaker 3: the moon, we see inside a room and the moonlight
Speaker 3: falls through a circular window that's criss crossed with bars.
Speaker 3: Underneath the window, an old an old man lies alone
Speaker 3: in a small bed. Across from him, there's a heavy
Speaker 3: black wooden door on the far wall, a crucifix, a candlestick,
Speaker 3: and a framed image of a saint, So we think
Speaker 3: this guy's probably a priest. Then we close on his face.
Speaker 3: He seems to be struggling. He's drawing his last breath,
Speaker 3: and then his hand falls away from something that he
Speaker 3: has been clutching. It is a tiny silver box. Then
Speaker 3: we get the title John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness. Next,
Speaker 3: we open on daylight on a university campus and there
Speaker 3: are students gathered under shady green trees. They're walking along
Speaker 3: paved pathways between the buildings and well in with one
Speaker 3: of our main characters. This is Brian Marsh played by
Speaker 3: Jamison Parker. He's fit, blonde with a mustache, wearing a
Speaker 3: neatly tucked red polo shirt, carrying a leather satchel, and
Speaker 3: he walks to the foreground of the shot and pauses
Speaker 3: while the music kind of pulls you along, and this
Speaker 3: is the camera getting to know him. Across the courtyard
Speaker 3: he sees another major character, Catherine Danforth played by Lisa Blount,
Speaker 3: talking to another woman before class. Catherine is red haired,
Speaker 3: dressed casually in a denim jacket, holding a stack of
Speaker 3: books and binders in the crook of her arm. She
Speaker 3: looks she's like a good natured nerd. Then back to
Speaker 3: the room of the priest in the morning, a nun
Speaker 3: knocks on the door, comes inside and finds him dead
Speaker 3: with the silver box resting on his midsection. Later we
Speaker 3: see the nun talking to donald pleasants, also a priest
Speaker 3: dressed as a priest. Don't know if that needs to
Speaker 3: be said, but yeah, we established he's a priest. She's
Speaker 3: talking to him about the fact that she found this
Speaker 3: other priest on His name was Father Carlton, and he
Speaker 3: was taken to the hospital but he never woke up again.
Speaker 3: Donald Pleasant asks why Father Carlton was here in the
Speaker 3: first place. Where are they? Well, they appear to be
Speaker 3: in some kind of headquarters of the Catholic hierarchy, because
Speaker 3: the nun says he had an appointment with his Imminence
Speaker 3: this afternoon. Oh, his Eminence, so important business going on
Speaker 3: within the church. Donald Pleasance sits down and begins investigating
Speaker 3: what happened here by reading doctor Carlton's handwritten journals, and
Speaker 3: the header on this handwritten journal entry is the Brotherhood
Speaker 3: of Sleep. Now it cuts away before you can read
Speaker 3: everything on the page. I actually did stop to see
Speaker 3: what it actually says and take down everything. It's actually
Speaker 3: not as interesting as they didn't intend for you to
Speaker 3: read this whole part. It starts with, like I can
Speaker 3: no longer keep silent as to this dreadful secret. We'll
Speaker 3: get more intriguing Brotherhood of Sleep stuff as we go along.
Speaker 3: It does eventually zoom in on one particular part that
Speaker 3: says says the sleeper awakens, I have witnessed his stirrings,
Speaker 3: felt the cold, hellish blast. Now next we're going to
Speaker 3: meet the character of the physics Professor Howard Barrack played
Speaker 3: by Victor Wong. He is walking class with a heavy briefcase,
Speaker 3: dressed in a wool blazer with at least five pins
Speaker 3: in his shirt pocket, so he is a professor, but
Speaker 3: he's also dressed very classically professorially, and he comes off
Speaker 3: as preoccupied with his obscure curiosities in research questions. And
Speaker 3: as he heads to class, something gets his attention in
Speaker 3: the sky, so he puts things down and he crosses
Speaker 3: his fingers over his eyes to block the light, and
Speaker 3: then looks up toward the sun. We see the sun
Speaker 3: shining through the clouds, and then right next to the
Speaker 3: sun in the middle of the day is a crescent moon,
Speaker 3: and then the camera shows us He doesn't see this,
Speaker 3: but the camera shows us nearby on the ground red
Speaker 3: ants swarming ferociously over a mound in the grass. And
Speaker 3: this will establish a theme that happens a lot in
Speaker 3: the movie, where characters stop and they kind of look
Speaker 3: up in the sky or look toward the sun as
Speaker 3: if they feel like something is wrong. And then we
Speaker 3: see the sun and it's just sort of hidden by
Speaker 3: the clouds sometimes or partially hidden. He is like shining
Speaker 3: through some thin clouds. And music lets It's like the
Speaker 3: music lets us know that there is something wrong with
Speaker 3: the sky, something wrong with the sun, but nobody's ever
Speaker 3: able to say what it is. People don't really talk
Speaker 3: about it. It's just this feeling of unease about the atmosphere.
Speaker 3: And I love this.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Now, a quick note on the bugs. There are
Speaker 2: a lot of bugs in this picture. And there's just
Speaker 2: one really brief moment in the audio commentary where Peter
Speaker 2: Jason asks Carpenter says, like a lot of bugs here,
Speaker 2: where'd they come from? And Carpenter's like, oh, you know,
Speaker 2: we had a bug wrangler. And Jason says that sounds expensive,
Speaker 2: and Carpenter says, it's not that bad. I don't know why.
Speaker 2: I love that exchange so much.
Speaker 3: Compared to getting Alice Cooper.
Speaker 2: Come on Alice Cooper, by the way, that it was
Speaker 2: kind of funny he was cast in the film because
Speaker 2: his agent was one of the producers of the picture.
Speaker 2: So like that was kind of like the meet up,
Speaker 2: like how they kind of like I think they also
Speaker 2: met at WrestleMania or something, WrestleMania three, I want to say,
Speaker 2: And so he was like, I'd love to be in
Speaker 2: a horror movie and big horror movie fan, and they're like,
Speaker 2: you know, it came together. And then also, as we'll discuss,
Speaker 2: Alice Cooper had a particular impalement gag that he would
Speaker 2: do on stage and they were like, oh, that's great,
Speaker 2: let's do a version of that in this picture.
Speaker 3: And they do, Oh, is this where he stabs the
Speaker 3: stabs the nerdy guy with a bicycle.
Speaker 2: Yeah? Yeah, I think the stage version is a microphone
Speaker 2: stand and they adapted it for to be a bicycle
Speaker 2: in this Yeah, it's pretty great. Though more on that
Speaker 2: when it occurs.
Speaker 3: I can't promise more on that because I don't know
Speaker 3: what else to say. He just gets stabbed with the bicycle.
Speaker 2: Well, okay, I'll go ahead and say. What happens is
Speaker 2: Alice Cooper's character, who zombified, stabs a guy through with
Speaker 2: the bicycle. He's got half a bicycle with like a
Speaker 2: you know, like a part of the frame sticking out
Speaker 2: that you can pail somebody with, and then that leaves
Speaker 2: the guy to like slump over, impaled over like the
Speaker 2: bicycle wheel and so forth. However, nobody then you kind
Speaker 2: of expect a zombie to then come behind the victim
Speaker 2: pick up his legs wheelbarrel style and then turn him
Speaker 2: into a wheelbarrow and wheelbarrow him off. That does not happen.
Speaker 2: It's still a great scene though, all.
Speaker 3: Right, So the montage continues. Oh, we get one I
Speaker 3: thought quite funny shot of Donald Pleasant standing in the
Speaker 3: courtyard of this you know, church office building, dramatically opening
Speaker 3: the silver box and pulling out a comically oversized key.
Speaker 3: And then we get one of these classroom scenes with dialogue.
Speaker 3: So some of these scenes are silent, some have talking
Speaker 3: in them. In this one, we hear Professor Barak delivering
Speaker 3: a lecture on quantum physics to a classroom of graduate students,
Speaker 3: including Brian and Catherine, the characters we saw earlier, and
Speaker 3: a bunch of the other characters that we'll see get
Speaker 3: possessed by the devil or killed later. And I'm just
Speaker 3: going to read the quote what Professor Barack says. He says,
Speaker 3: let's talk about our beliefs and what we can learn
Speaker 3: about them. We believe nature is solid and time, a constant.
Speaker 3: Matter has substance and time a direction. There is truth
Speaker 3: in flesh and the solid ground. The wind may be invisible,
Speaker 3: but it's real. Smoke, fire, water, light. They're different, not
Speaker 3: as to stone or steel, but they're tangible. And we
Speaker 3: assume time has an arrow because it is as a clock.
Speaker 3: One second is one second for everyone. Cause precedes effect,
Speaker 3: fruit rots, water flows downstream, where born, we age, we die.
Speaker 3: The reverse never happens. None of this is true. Say
Speaker 3: goodbye to classical reality because our logic collapses at the
Speaker 3: subatomic level into ghosts and shadows.
Speaker 2: That's pretty great, especially the way it's punctuated there, and
Speaker 2: it ties into one of the basic themes of the
Speaker 2: film that everything you thought you knew about science, religion,
Speaker 2: and the universe is wrong. So you know, some strong
Speaker 2: cosmic horror elements there, like the safety net that you
Speaker 2: thought was there is not there at all, and the
Speaker 2: yawning cosmos is more terrifying than previously assumed.
Speaker 3: Yes, it's cosmic in that sense in that the threatening,
Speaker 3: the threatening malevolence in this movie is not just like
Speaker 3: a single embodied entity that's coming in to attack us,
Speaker 3: but it is threaded through the very physics and fabric
Speaker 3: of the universe. There's like something in the laws of
Speaker 3: physics in all of the atoms and particles and bits
Speaker 3: of energy in the universe that contains bits of this
Speaker 3: malevolence and evil. It's just waiting for us in the
Speaker 3: universe itself.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now after this, we get our first establishing shot of
Speaker 3: the church where most of the movie will take place.
Speaker 3: This is a church called at Goddard's in the film.
Speaker 3: It's a stately old brick chapel topped with an ornamental cross,
Speaker 3: with columns on the front and a fire escape leading
Speaker 3: down the side. It's situated on a kind of run
Speaker 3: down looking city block. Actually, when you get some other angles,
Speaker 3: you see more activity going on, sort of across the
Speaker 3: street or further down the street. But I think just
Speaker 3: by showing a tighter shot they create the feeling that
Speaker 3: maybe not much is going on here. We see a
Speaker 3: building with some shuttered windows. There's trash piled up on
Speaker 3: the sidewalk, So I think the idea is that this
Speaker 3: is a sort of it's on a disused city block,
Speaker 3: maybe nobody goes to this church anymore. And the church
Speaker 3: is surrounded by a white iron fence with an extremely
Speaker 3: creepy bronze statue of a cloaked figure out front. Is
Speaker 3: that supposed to be the Virgin Mary? I can't quite tell.
Speaker 2: This is a real church in LA by the way,
Speaker 2: at the time it was the abandoned former Japanese Union
Speaker 2: Church of Los Angeles, and today it's the Union Center
Speaker 2: for the Arts. You can visit it in LA's little
Speaker 2: Tokyo district. And I was reading a little bit about it,
Speaker 2: like it also has an important role in Japanese American history.
Speaker 2: I believe this is a place during Japanese Internment that
Speaker 2: a lot of people's affected people's possessions were stored. And
Speaker 2: of course, you know, the people affected by this often
Speaker 2: lost a great deal of what they previously owned, you know,
Speaker 2: real estate or otherwise. But yeah, it's currently the Union
Speaker 2: Center for the Arts, and you can visit it, get
Speaker 2: your picture taken in front of it, just you know,
Speaker 2: be respectful, obviously, don't spit any green stuff out of
Speaker 2: your mouth at it, and so forth.
Speaker 3: So we zoom in here in front of the church
Speaker 3: and see Donald Pleasant standing out front on the sidewalk,
Speaker 3: and he looks filled with worry and doubt. He goes inside,
Speaker 3: walks down a long hall and finds that the silver
Speaker 3: key from the box he opened it unlocks a heavy
Speaker 3: iron door marked with a sign of the Cross. He
Speaker 3: pushed open the door and goes inside. Later we see
Speaker 3: him typing out a letter to Professor Barak, saying he
Speaker 3: has discovered a most unusual phenomenon that should be of
Speaker 3: interest to him, and it's urgent that they meet it once.
Speaker 3: And then we pop in on another one of Barak's lectures.
Speaker 3: This time he's saying from Job's friends insisting that the
Speaker 3: good are rewarded and the wicked punished, to the scientists
Speaker 3: of the nineteen thirties, proving to their horror, the theorem
Speaker 3: that not everything can be proved. We've sought to impose
Speaker 3: order on the universe, but we've discovered something very surprising.
Speaker 3: While order does exist in the universe, it is not
Speaker 3: at all what we had in mind. And then after
Speaker 3: class we see a conversation between Brian and another student,
Speaker 3: This is Walter played by Dennis Dunn. They see a
Speaker 3: nun delivering Donald Pleasantce's letter to their professor and they're like, oh,
Speaker 3: a nun. That's interesting, and then they remember it.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 3: Apparently Professor Barack participated in a series of televised debates
Speaker 3: on the BBC. I think with Donald Pleasance. I wonder
Speaker 3: what they were debating.
Speaker 2: I mean, I don't know evolution, free will. I'm guessing
Speaker 2: it's something a little headier like free will. That's gonna
Speaker 2: be my inclination here.
Speaker 3: But apparently they were good natured debates because they have
Speaker 3: something of a friendship now, and you know that Donald
Speaker 3: Pleasance can call upon Barack for help. So they meet
Speaker 3: up in this ornately decorated room and Donald Pleasance gives
Speaker 3: the diary to him to read, imploring him for help.
Speaker 3: Now we get one of these scenes where, just like
Speaker 3: the ominous tension is mounting because we see Brian alone
Speaker 3: in his apartment playing solitaire and watching a TV news
Speaker 3: report about a recently detected super nova five hundred million
Speaker 3: light years away, the light from which is just now
Speaker 3: reaching us. And then also on Brian can't see this,
Speaker 3: but we see that red ants are massing inside the
Speaker 3: back panel of his television set. This is funny because
Speaker 3: we've done episodes in the past about ants getting inside
Speaker 3: of electronics devices. Did we talk about Prince of Darkness.
Speaker 2: In that I don't think we did. I'd kind of
Speaker 2: forgotten about this element of the picture. Ants going into
Speaker 2: the television set. Yeah, but it is. It is not
Speaker 2: just something you've seen in horror movies. I forget the details.
Speaker 2: I think the Crazy Ant was one of the main
Speaker 2: ones that has been recognized as a TV crawler. But
Speaker 2: in general, you want you want your insects to stay
Speaker 2: out of your television sets.
Speaker 3: Raspberry Crazy Ants was that it sounds delicious. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 3: but what's this all working up to? Our cleric and
Speaker 3: our wizard. Donald Pleasance and Victor Wong have to visit
Speaker 3: the dungeon together. So they arrived by limousine and they
Speaker 3: head into Saint Godard's I like this idea that like
Speaker 3: professors and priests travel by limousine, do they? But they
Speaker 3: arrive at the church and they go in. Of course,
Speaker 3: we learned that the priests who died earlier, he was
Speaker 3: the guardian of this church. This is where he lived,
Speaker 3: and he was tasked with keeping watch over something in
Speaker 3: the basement below. Pleasance unlocks the heavy iron door and
Speaker 3: leads the professor down into the underground chambers, which we
Speaker 3: learn were built in the fifteen hundreds by the Spanish.
Speaker 3: And as they move along, we get some exposition on
Speaker 3: the Brotherhood of Sleep. They have existed for going back
Speaker 3: a couple thousand years in secret, not even known to
Speaker 3: the Vatican, though through hidden mechanisms they wielded enormous power
Speaker 3: within the church. And finally the two men arrive at
Speaker 3: their destination, a subterranean stone cathedral lit by hundreds of candles,
Speaker 3: and at the far end the goo oh boy. This
Speaker 3: is what it's all about.
Speaker 2: Yeah, And this is a great set piece, you know,
Speaker 2: and it is just about like all the feelings that
Speaker 2: it invokes, because you have like tons of crucifixes on
Speaker 2: the wall, so it's like holiness, established religion, Catholicism. You
Speaker 2: have all the candles as well as part of this
Speaker 2: like sacred scene that you're greeted with. But then in
Speaker 2: the center this unholy cylinder, a swirling with green liquid
Speaker 2: slime or energy that's dripping in corrosion. And next to
Speaker 2: it you have computer equipment with that wonderful like black
Speaker 2: and green screen that you know, sinks nicely with the
Speaker 2: green glow of the cylinder, And so you have all
Speaker 2: the key elements of the picture kind of merged together,
Speaker 2: you know, science, religion, unholy terror from beyond realms that
Speaker 2: can be touched by our sanity and so forth.
Speaker 3: Yeah, the green screen matching the green of the US
Speaker 3: almost implies that the essence of the devil is already
Speaker 3: in what makes the computer work.
Speaker 2: You know, it's probably too late for this year, but
Speaker 2: if you need a head start on next year's Halloween costume,
Speaker 2: somebody please dresses the cylinder of green liquid from Prince
Speaker 2: of Darkness. You can just be straight up the cylinder
Speaker 2: from Prince of Darkness, or you could be the sexy
Speaker 2: cylinder from Prince of Darkness. You could be this is
Speaker 2: a great toddler outfit as well, So please somebody make
Speaker 2: this happen and send his photographs.
Speaker 3: All my favorite Halloween costume ideas are things that nobody
Speaker 3: would get.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this one would prey one of those where I
Speaker 2: would get really excited about it and then nobody would
Speaker 2: guess it. Like maybe it would be like are you
Speaker 2: the ooze from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles? And I'd be
Speaker 2: just like, yah, fine, that's what I h.
Speaker 3: There's a line about this later in the movie that
Speaker 3: Victor Wong says that made me laugh, where he's talking
Speaker 3: about the devil and he's like, there could be a
Speaker 3: limit as to what he can do as a volume
Speaker 3: of liquid.
Speaker 2: That's true. He's got to get out of there Yeah.
Speaker 3: You know. Another bit of imagery here that I would
Speaker 3: like to point to rob is on the walls in
Speaker 3: this room with all the candles, there's also this swarm
Speaker 3: of crucifer fixes, multiplicity of apotropaic crucifixes, which kind of
Speaker 3: reminds me of in the Mouth of Madness.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, in the padded cell that that John Trent
Speaker 2: occupies in that picture. Yeah, he's he's put these drawn
Speaker 2: crucifixes over everything, and also all over his clothing and
Speaker 2: over himself. I'm speaking of Halloween costumes. I did dresses
Speaker 2: him for Halloween one year, and virtually nobody got it.
Speaker 2: I got you got it. Yes, a few people got it.
Speaker 2: But when I just walk around on the street, people
Speaker 2: are like, huh, I guess he likes Jesus. And that
Speaker 2: was No.
Speaker 3: We ran into you guys at the Halloween parade and
Speaker 3: I got I think that was. Was that the year
Speaker 3: that Rachel and I were dressed up as Jack and
Speaker 3: Wendy Torrence?
Speaker 2: Yes, I believe so. Yeah, some people got the people
Speaker 2: who got it loved it.
Speaker 3: Only some people got that one as well.
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it does. It is a great part of
Speaker 2: the scene. It's kind of like this idea that this
Speaker 2: is how much just insistent faith has we've had to
Speaker 2: muster to keep this thing in check for so long,
Speaker 2: and it no longer is working. The fail safes are failing,
Speaker 2: and stuff is beginning to corrode and leak out.
Speaker 3: Yeah. So right next to this volume of liquid there
Speaker 3: is a huge ancient book on a lectern. So like,
Speaker 3: what is this book? Is it the Diary of the
Speaker 3: Keepers of the Ooze? I think the answer is yes, Yes,
Speaker 3: that is what it is. It's this extremely old tome
Speaker 3: written in many different languages. They say it's full of
Speaker 3: overwriting and emendation, attempts to erase certain parts. And so
Speaker 3: the professor is asking what is it? And Donald Pleasant says,
Speaker 3: it's a secret that can no longer be kept. Do
Speaker 3: you feel it? It was never here before, it started
Speaker 3: a month ago, a change in the earth and the
Speaker 3: sky his power. Okay, so that's the religion. But we
Speaker 3: got to check back in with the science again. So
Speaker 3: we go back and there's a funny scene between Lisa
Speaker 3: Blount and Dennis Dunn where they are walking across campus
Speaker 3: and they're talking. They're wrestling with the weird implications of
Speaker 3: the quantum mechanics they're studying. Specifically, they're talking about Shredinger's cat. Now,
Speaker 3: note that this is one of the mini pop invocations
Speaker 3: of quantum physics that just takes the Copenhagen interpretation as
Speaker 3: a given. It is not the only interpretation, so you
Speaker 3: don't have to go with that. But they're talking about, like, wait,
Speaker 3: why am I even studying this? And one of them
Speaker 3: makes the joke says, particle beam weapons research grants being
Speaker 3: a millionaire by the time I'm forty. Ah, yeah, that's
Speaker 3: what it is. And again I was like, is that
Speaker 3: a normal outlook for physics grad students?
Speaker 2: I don't know. That's how Walter sees it.
Speaker 3: Okay, that's right. I mean he's at least a maybe
Speaker 3: he's joking. He's a jokester. But so they find that
Speaker 3: a group of they go to class to find like
Speaker 3: a posted note that indicates a number of physics grad
Speaker 3: students have been recruited by Professor Barack for a special
Speaker 3: project that's going to take up their weekend. So all
Speaker 3: their weekend plans are canceled now and this leads to
Speaker 3: scenes where Catherine and Brian are getting to know one
Speaker 3: another better as well. So remember Brian is sort of
Speaker 3: the tom Atkins guy. He's the blonde mustache and they're
Speaker 3: talking about the counterintuitiveness of quantum mechanics and Catherine says,
Speaker 3: I want the clockwork back, and then Brian goes on
Speaker 3: to make a sexist comment about how women as beautiful
Speaker 3: as her don't usually work in physics departments, and she
Speaker 3: reacts bluntly. She's like, that is a stupid and sexist
Speaker 3: thing to say, and then he goes for the classic Oh,
Speaker 3: I was just joking, don't get offended, and then she's
Speaker 3: the one who apologizes to him. I can't believe he
Speaker 3: got away with that one. Also, if it's the joke,
Speaker 3: what's the funny part. It didn't seem like a joke anyway.
Speaker 2: He's not the funny one. Walter's the funny one. Though
Speaker 2: he makes some bad jokes too, but at least there's
Speaker 2: charm in the delivery.
Speaker 3: Yeah. But then he sort of, at least euphemistically apologizes
Speaker 3: by saying something like, you know, this wasn't the way
Speaker 3: I'm in for our conversation to go, And all eventually
Speaker 3: gets smoothed over because it does seem that they like
Speaker 3: one another, and they end up agreeing to go on
Speaker 3: a date later. But I think there is something kind
Speaker 3: of revealed about Catherine's character here in that, like they
Speaker 3: have this little tense moment, and it seems to me
Speaker 3: she's in the right, like what he said was dumb,
Speaker 3: and then she's the one who ends up apologizing. So
Speaker 3: it seems like it's something about her character here that,
Speaker 3: at least at the beginning of the story, she's capitulating
Speaker 3: when she doesn't need to.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it is interesting to think about this scene
Speaker 2: in terms of the ultimate trajectory for both of these characters.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we do get a scene of like a briefing
Speaker 3: from Professor Barack in front of the grad students where
Speaker 3: we learn that, okay, you've all been drafted to become
Speaker 3: live in researchers for a special project at this abandoned church.
Speaker 3: They're all going to go to Saints and live there
Speaker 3: at least for the weekend to do research. They will
Speaker 3: receive class credit, and he can't tell them what they're
Speaker 3: going to be researching. So we go on to see
Speaker 3: Professor Barack arriving at the church to begin the project,
Speaker 3: and when he gets there, he looks down the sidewalk
Speaker 3: and he sees a woman standing in the distance as
Speaker 3: if in a trance, looking up at the sun, and
Speaker 3: she has ants crawling on her face, and this will
Speaker 3: become the beginning of a theme where we see a
Speaker 3: lot of visions like this. I'll explain more as we
Speaker 3: go along. But we also get a conversation between Barak
Speaker 3: and the priest played by Donald Pleasance where they're talking
Speaker 3: about what all of this means, and Donald Pleasant says
Speaker 3: that they must translate the book of the Brotherhood of Sleep,
Speaker 3: and Barack must quote prove it scientifically, prove what they
Speaker 3: don't say yet. But as the weekend approaches, we get
Speaker 3: a few storylines further developing. So Brian and Catherine's romance deepens,
Speaker 3: they go on a date, they get to know each
Speaker 3: other better, and they appear to be falling in love.
Speaker 3: But at the same time as that sort of positive
Speaker 3: storyline is developing, there's a negative one too. We get
Speaker 3: more ominous signs from the atmosphere. Something about the sunshine
Speaker 3: feels wrong and hostile, And then around Saint Goddard's people
Speaker 3: begin to gather. There is like a conclave of silent
Speaker 3: entrance to drifters led by a disheveled Alice Cooper, and
Speaker 3: they wander slowly around the streets and the alleys around
Speaker 3: the church, sometimes staring up at the sun, sometimes staring
Speaker 3: down at the ground, maybe looking at insects. And one
Speaker 3: of them at one point approaches Donald Pleasant says he's
Speaker 3: entering the building, and she says, it's so wonderful what
Speaker 3: you're doing, father, opening the church again. And then Donald
Speaker 3: Pleasance looks down and sees that she is holding like
Speaker 3: a coffee cup full of maggots.
Speaker 2: The bug wrangler really just did. They had a lot
Speaker 2: to do on this picture. Maggots, beetles, earthworms, you name it, hants.
Speaker 3: Yes. So the students and professors arrive and begin their
Speaker 3: weekend of work. They you know, unload their equipment and
Speaker 3: introduce themselves. So it's not only people from the physics department,
Speaker 3: but also biochemists to microbiologists, theologians, and classicists. To translate
Speaker 3: the book, there are a lot of characters. As we
Speaker 3: said earlier, we can't really spend time talking about all
Speaker 3: of them, but we'll mention a few individuals as we
Speaker 3: go along for certain scenes. One thing that often bugs
Speaker 3: me in storytelling, does happen here doesn't bug me as
Speaker 3: much here as it often does, But it's that situation where, like,
Speaker 3: many specialists are assembled for a project or mission, but
Speaker 3: they are not told what it's about or what they're
Speaker 3: going to be doing until after they get there. So
Speaker 3: like in this situation, it's like, why did they agree
Speaker 3: to do it in the first place. It often feels implausible.
Speaker 3: So we get those kind of scenes where the characters
Speaker 3: arrive here and they're like, what are we going to
Speaker 3: be studying? What are we doing? And they're like, I
Speaker 3: don't know. You know, I'll tell you when I know.
Speaker 3: I could be wrong. But I seem to call a
Speaker 3: particularly egregious example of this in the movie Prometheus, because
Speaker 3: they do this, but they also they don't get the
Speaker 3: briefing until they're like literally light years away from Earth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I guess I'd cut Promethea some slack personally, because
Speaker 2: the experts in that film were recruited to board a
Speaker 2: state of the art exploration space vessel funded by the
Speaker 2: world's pre eminent innovator and visionary. In Prince of Darkness,
Speaker 2: a local physics professor has just invited students to sleep
Speaker 2: in the basement of a condemned church but I mean,
Speaker 2: all in all, you know, I guess you have to
Speaker 2: sort of think of it again from a storytelling choice standpoint,
Speaker 2: and you know, I venture to guess I don't know
Speaker 2: for certain on this, but I've ad ventured to guess
Speaker 2: that this is perhaps a storytelling trope with roots and
Speaker 2: military movies where the characters are going to have more
Speaker 2: limited choice about showing up for that secret mission, with
Speaker 2: that last minute debriefing. Carpenter has always been pretty open
Speaker 2: about his use of like classic Western structure his inspiration
Speaker 2: for his film, so I would not be surprised if
Speaker 2: he and other filmmakers are drawing on stuff like that.
Speaker 3: That's a good insight. That makes a lot of sense.
Speaker 3: This works in a military situation because the characters are
Speaker 3: just supposed to follow orders. They don't have to know
Speaker 3: what they're going to do. You know, they're told when
Speaker 3: they're told. It makes less sense for like movies about
Speaker 3: scientists or something where normally you would like you would
Speaker 3: know what you're going to do before you start doing it.
Speaker 3: But yeah, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Speaker 3: So it's just like the same kind of storytelling structure
Speaker 3: is pourted onto different types of characters. And situations.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then all that aside from just the standpoint
Speaker 2: of giving the audience more about you know, providing some exposition,
Speaker 2: but also some little character moments. A debriefing scene like
Speaker 2: that can be very useful.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Obviously it can work well with characters being like, well, now,
Speaker 2: why are we here? Because I'm a doctor and you're
Speaker 2: a lawyer. What do we possibly have in common? One?
Speaker 2: Why are we in this church basement? That sort of thing.
Speaker 3: Oh, yeah, totally. I mean it's absolutely clear like why
Speaker 3: it happens from a storytelling and efficiency point of view,
Speaker 3: because it's like you can explain it to the audience
Speaker 3: at the same time that the characters find out. You
Speaker 3: can see them react all at once. You can string
Speaker 3: the mystery or the tension along before that moment of
Speaker 3: the reveal what everybody's doing. Yeah, I mean, it's clear
Speaker 3: why it works from the storyteller's point of view. It's
Speaker 3: just one of those where like that clashes with the plausibility.
Speaker 2: All right, So we got the team is as symboled, right,
Speaker 2: and now they're being told what's.
Speaker 3: Up, right, So we're going to start making some discoveries.
Speaker 3: First of all, there's the character Lisa I mentioned earlier,
Speaker 3: this is the theology student who studies ancient languages. She
Speaker 3: just like looks at the Brotherhood of Sleep book She's like, Okay,
Speaker 3: I'm gonna start typing out the translation. So she's typing
Speaker 3: on the computer, and we keep cutting back to her
Speaker 3: at different times, like seeing the sentences as she types them.
Speaker 3: They're things like, I Jesus have sent mine angel to
Speaker 3: testify unto you this thing which shall be unleashed, and
Speaker 3: the Prince of Darkness was himself sealed that old life
Speaker 3: called the Devil and Satan, which deceiveth the whole world.
Speaker 3: So kind of biblical type stuff, except it's interesting. This
Speaker 3: text seems to have a quality that none of the
Speaker 3: canonical texts of the Bible have, which is it claims
Speaker 3: to be written by Jesus. You know, in the Bible
Speaker 3: we don't have that. We only hear about Jesus from others.
Speaker 3: That's kind of interesting. So this would be all read text, Yeah,
Speaker 3: I guess. So, so the team all they gather in
Speaker 3: the basement and they're finally shown the cylinder of green goo.
Speaker 3: So it's like swirling around really good in the cylinder.
Speaker 3: They're watching it churn and Donald Pleasant says, I can
Speaker 3: feel it getting stronger. And some of the scientists are
Speaker 3: not amused. They're like, wait a minute, we're here for
Speaker 3: what and they think it's a waste of their time.
Speaker 3: Others are more interested. But as the research begins, we
Speaker 3: get different scenes where like findings emerge. So I'm going
Speaker 3: to list off some of the things they discover. First
Speaker 3: of all, they discovered the ancient book describes a long
Speaker 3: series of differential equations mathematical instruments that had not been
Speaker 3: invented at the time the book was written. So huh,
Speaker 3: how is that possible. They also find that the lid
Speaker 3: on the cylinder is sealed shut with a strange locking
Speaker 3: mechanism so that it can only be opened from the inside,
Speaker 3: and the corrosion on the lid is carbon dated to
Speaker 3: seven million years ago. By the way, just pedantic note.
Speaker 3: Carbon dating is not useful for things that old. You
Speaker 3: would need to use a different radiometric method for that.
Speaker 3: Next thing is inside the cylinder. What is it? What
Speaker 3: is the green goo? Well, they do some tests and
Speaker 3: Brian reports to Barak. He says, quote, a life form
Speaker 3: is growing out of prebiotic fluids. It's not winding down
Speaker 3: into disorder, its self organizing, it's becoming something what This
Speaker 3: is one of those where I'm like, Okay, I don't
Speaker 3: know how what did they detect? What tests did they
Speaker 3: do to determine that?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, yeah, it's it's it's it's technobabble. But yeah,
Speaker 2: the important thing is we know there's something growing inside
Speaker 2: this cylinder that can only be opened from the inside.
Speaker 3: But if they can't, they can't get inside the cylinder.
Speaker 3: How did they test it? Hm, well, okay, there are
Speaker 3: not complaining. I'm just saying like there are.
Speaker 2: Some containment issues going on, as we'll see.
Speaker 3: I think this is a great example of what I
Speaker 3: was saying earlier that I think the science stuff in
Speaker 3: this movie it works. I think it works great if
Speaker 3: you don't pay too close attention, if you just take
Speaker 3: it esthetically and you don't try to like analyze it substantively,
Speaker 3: if you just like let it happen as an aesthetic experience,
Speaker 3: it's beautiful.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Also, trust scientists, show trust them, they're professionals.
Speaker 3: Somewhere in here we get the scene where one dude
Speaker 3: tries to leave the church at night. Oh, this is
Speaker 3: the guy who's going to get stabbed with a bicycle
Speaker 3: by Alice Cooper. And he finds a crucified pidg in
Speaker 3: the alley when he's going out, So that's not a
Speaker 3: good sign. That's never good. And then he like runs
Speaker 3: into Alice Cooper in the alley and and all of
Speaker 3: his and all of his band, you know, they're they're
Speaker 3: hanging out down there, and he gets he gets impaled
Speaker 3: with the bicycle. Uh, And nobody seems to notice this.
Speaker 3: This just like happens off to the side while nobody's looking.
Speaker 3: And then finally we get a scene where Lisa reveals
Speaker 3: the translation of the book and sort of summarizes its
Speaker 3: main teachings.
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, we got we got a real doozy come
Speaker 2: in here.
Speaker 3: Are you ready? Obviously we've had lots of spoilers so far,
Speaker 3: but like, if you know, if you don't want to
Speaker 3: have everything spoiled, you could stop now and watch the
Speaker 3: movie yourself. But here we go. This is like the
Speaker 3: big reveal, she says. And this is a quote with
Speaker 3: some abridgments. The container was buried somewhere in the Middle
Speaker 3: East eons ago by the father of Satan, a god
Speaker 3: who once walked the earth before man, but was somehow
Speaker 3: banished to the dark side. Apparently the father buried his
Speaker 3: son inside the container. Now later on here Christ comes
Speaker 3: to warn us he was of extraterrestrial ancestry, but a
Speaker 3: human like race. Finally, they determine Christ as crazy, but
Speaker 3: he's gaining power converting a lot of people to his beliefs,
Speaker 3: so they kill him, but his disciples keep the secret
Speaker 3: and hide it from civilization until man could develop a
Speaker 3: science sophisticated enough to prove what Christ was saying. And
Speaker 3: then Donald Pleasance goes on to surmise from that that
Speaker 3: the Church kept this a secret for the last two millennia,
Speaker 3: thinking it better to characterize evil as an abstract spiritual
Speaker 3: force rather than as a volume of liquid buried in
Speaker 3: a jar. But I, oh my god, I love this reveal.
Speaker 3: So the idea is that all of Christian history is
Speaker 3: sort of a facade to cover up the reality, which
Speaker 3: is that Jesus was an alien who came to warn
Speaker 3: us that the father of the Devil buried his son
Speaker 3: the devil, which is a jar of liquid in the
Speaker 3: desert somewhere, and it's been hiding there and we have
Speaker 3: to watch out for it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's essentially Christianity, if not organized, religion as
Speaker 2: a whole is just a placeholder. It's a band aid
Speaker 2: until science can reach the point where we can actually
Speaker 2: tackle the problem. And you know, now that I say
Speaker 2: it out loud, there are a lot of interesting ways
Speaker 2: to take that apart and look at it. So yeah,
Speaker 2: I like the way it hits in this picture though.
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, yeah, oh another funny like report on findings scene.
Speaker 3: This is one of those like how did they figure
Speaker 3: that out? Moments Brian discovers that the green gou is
Speaker 3: one conscious and two capable of telekinesis a little fuzzy
Speaker 3: on how they detected that with the machines, but they
Speaker 3: put it together. So at some point we start getting
Speaker 3: the leaky cylinder, and this is where everything really goes haywire.
Speaker 3: The volume of green goo starts leaking out of the
Speaker 3: container and it drips upwards so against gravity and forms
Speaker 3: a pool on the ceiling of the room. And then
Speaker 3: Susan Cabot, one of the researchers, notices this. She's like
Speaker 3: down in the room with it. She sees the pool
Speaker 3: on the ceiling and then it sprays into her mouth,
Speaker 3: turning her into a servant. Of Satan, and this starts
Speaker 3: a chain reaction where from here Susan goes on to
Speaker 3: start killing and converting other people in the church. Sometimes
Speaker 3: she'll snap their necks. Sometimes she will infect them and
Speaker 3: turn them into new thralls of the Satan fluid, often
Speaker 3: by like vomiting a jet of fluid out of her
Speaker 3: mouth into somebody else's mouth and face orifices.
Speaker 2: And even if she does kill you, you'll still come
Speaker 2: back and be a servant. Later we see that with
Speaker 2: next Snap dude.
Speaker 3: Yes, And then another type of threat begins, which is
Speaker 3: the same thing we saw earlier that people who try
Speaker 3: to leave the church get attacked by the Alice Cooper crew.
Speaker 3: So a lot of the middle of the movie is
Speaker 3: like scary scenes like this, people getting attacked by the
Speaker 3: Satan thralls or by the Alice Cooper crew outside in
Speaker 3: any particular scary scenes you want to talk about, rob.
Speaker 2: Ooh, any particular scenes. Oh, I mean, there's a lot
Speaker 2: going on here with characters just sort of like you
Speaker 2: wandering off, maybe you know, going outside even which is
Speaker 2: extra dangerous, and or taking little naps in which we
Speaker 2: get the you know, the reveal about the dreams, which
Speaker 2: we'll get into here, but I'm trying to remember if
Speaker 2: there's I pretty much any scene in which a character
Speaker 2: spits a stream of green liquid out of their mouth
Speaker 2: into another character a character's mouth, I'm generally on board for. Also,
Speaker 2: any of the sequences with the cylinder are all great,
Speaker 2: so you know everything's going according to plant. Oh wait,
Speaker 2: one scene does come to mind. This is not really
Speaker 2: a scary, but there's a scene where Peter Jason's character
Speaker 2: is moving through like the snack room, the breakroom, the
Speaker 2: kitchen or whatever. And I just both times I watched it,
Speaker 2: I was very captivated by all the things he was
Speaker 2: grabbing because I think he had a coffee cup, who's
Speaker 2: smoking a cigarette, also grabbed two apples and an entire
Speaker 2: package of oreos, and I was like, this man is
Speaker 2: going to get down for what is his discipline. Guess
Speaker 2: he's the microbiologist, a chemist chemist. I think, yeah, this
Speaker 2: guy's about to do some serious chemistry.
Speaker 3: Chemistry with all the package of donut several apples that
Speaker 3: he's doing tricks with, He's like popping them up in
Speaker 3: the air and kind of juggling apples while he's smoking
Speaker 3: and doing kazoo songs. With his mouth.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so, yeah, I had noted that both times I watched.
Speaker 2: I remember that over any actual scares that were happening
Speaker 2: during this portion of the picture.
Speaker 3: Oh, there's another great technobabble scene in here where Barak
Speaker 3: and the priest are talking and the thing, and Barack
Speaker 3: starts to hypothesize that. Okay, maybe if there is a
Speaker 3: universal mind, like a god, controlling every single thing in
Speaker 3: the universe, the movement of every single sub atomic particle.
Speaker 3: He says, well, every particle has an anti particle. It's
Speaker 3: mirror image, it's negative side. Maybe this universal mind resides
Speaker 3: in the mirror image instead of in our universe as
Speaker 3: we wanted to believe. Maybe he's anti god, bringing darkness
Speaker 3: instead of light. Once again, I don't know how well
Speaker 3: that works if you engage too closely with the idea
Speaker 3: of an anti particle. But as pure aesthetics, it's great.
Speaker 3: I love this.
Speaker 2: And so that's ultimately the threat here, the threat of
Speaker 2: the coming of the anti god.
Speaker 3: Yes, so you mentioned the idea of the dream, and
Speaker 3: this is one of my favorite things in the whole movie.
Speaker 3: So what the characters start to discover is that every
Speaker 3: time someone goes to sleep in this church. They have
Speaker 3: the same dream, not just the same dream they had
Speaker 3: last time. All of the different people have the same dream.
Speaker 3: They start comparing notes and realizing they're all dreaming the
Speaker 3: same thing. It's an image of the church seen from
Speaker 3: outside from out front, with a figure in shadow emerging
Speaker 3: from the front doors of the chapel into the daylight,
Speaker 3: and what sounds like a looping recorded message that begins,
Speaker 3: this is not a dream, not a dream. We are
Speaker 3: using your brain's electrical system as a receiver. And ooh,
Speaker 3: I think of everything in the movie, this was the
Speaker 3: thing the first time I saw it that got me
Speaker 3: the hardest. I love this dream.
Speaker 2: Yeah, this is pretty great. I'm a sucker for any
Speaker 2: kind of like at this point, you know, vintage creepy
Speaker 2: technological transmission, like you know, be at the video drone
Speaker 2: transmission in the original video Drone film, or be at
Speaker 2: the Ring video. I'm on board for all of that,
Speaker 2: and I put this up there with any of those examples.
Speaker 3: Oh it's so good. So we get different snippets of
Speaker 3: the recorded message because characters are often woken up in
Speaker 3: the middle of the dream and they only remember part
Speaker 3: of the message. But like the beginning is what it says,
Speaker 3: this is not a dream. Not a dream, We're using
Speaker 3: your brain's electrical system. And then it says we are
Speaker 3: unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving
Speaker 3: this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the
Speaker 3: year one nine nine nine. And then like suddenly, you know,
Speaker 3: the character will snap awake. And so it turns out
Speaker 3: what we learn is that the Brotherhood of Sleep has recorded,
Speaker 3: you know, testimony that anyone in close proximity to the
Speaker 3: church has always had this dream, always has the same dream.
Speaker 3: And Brian suggests a the what if someone is trying
Speaker 3: to communicate with them, This could be a message beamed
Speaker 3: into their brains from the future by the emission of tachions,
Speaker 3: which are hypothetical particles we've never detected directly, but they're
Speaker 3: proposed to exist that sort of fit with existing models
Speaker 3: of physics, hypothetical particles that always move faster than the
Speaker 3: speed of light and thus possibly backwards in time. And
Speaker 3: so the idea is this is a warning scent from
Speaker 3: the future to our brains as receiver antennas in the past,
Speaker 3: and it's an invitation to change the course of history
Speaker 3: to avert some kind of catastrophic future event.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, I love pretty much all the descriptions of
Speaker 2: this in the film that I think it's later where
Speaker 2: someone talks about how it's like it's like each time
Speaker 2: it's more intense in your mind, as if it's growing
Speaker 2: and pushing other things out of your sleeping mind to
Speaker 2: make room for itself.
Speaker 3: Yes, yes, I love that. And so while this is
Speaker 3: going on, the characters are like learning about the dream
Speaker 3: and comparing notes about that. We also get Susan running
Speaker 3: around recruiting minions. So she infects Lisa, who's the one
Speaker 3: doing the translation of the book of the Brotherhood of Sleep.
Speaker 3: She vomits satanic juice into her mouth, and then she
Speaker 3: also recruits Calder, the microbiologist, and so we get that
Speaker 3: really creepy scene that I love where Lisa is after
Speaker 3: she's infected. She's sitting at the computer typing, not looking
Speaker 3: at the screen, and like one of the professors tries
Speaker 3: to pop into the door and be like, hey, Lisa,
Speaker 3: what's going on, But she's just typing over and over.
Speaker 3: I Live, I Live, I Live. And then later you
Speaker 3: see her type on the screen you will not be
Speaker 3: saved by the Holy Ghost you will not be saved
Speaker 3: by the god Plutonium. In fact, you will not be saved.
Speaker 2: It is interesting that the the Devil the son of
Speaker 2: the anti god here as it's communicating with people, its
Speaker 2: main communications increasingly are kind of taunting. They're kind of like,
Speaker 2: you got no chance. It's not like you need to
Speaker 2: fall in line or I can do great things for humanity.
Speaker 2: It's like just just saying, hey, I'm bringing doom and
Speaker 2: there's nothing you can do about it.
Speaker 3: Yeah. One of the guys who went outside earlier and
Speaker 3: got killed, he starts calling everybody to the window and
Speaker 3: he's like standing there in zombie form in the parking
Speaker 3: lot below, and they're like, hey, what's going on, and
Speaker 3: he just yells at them like pray for death.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and then collapses into beatles. Great, great scene.
Speaker 3: So the remaining researchers are increasingly overtly threatened by the
Speaker 3: servants of Satan, and they start finding themselves like they
Speaker 3: first they discovered they're barricaded inside the church. The Alice
Speaker 3: Cooper band has piled up trash and furniture on the
Speaker 3: doors outside. Calder, who has been possessed by the Devil,
Speaker 3: he like stabs himself with a steak of wood in
Speaker 3: the throat in front of everyone in a horrifying scene.
Speaker 3: Susan and Lisa end up bringing the cylinder of goop
Speaker 3: up from the basement and they take it to a
Speaker 3: sleeping Kelly where it pools on the ceiling and then
Speaker 3: it drains down from the ceiling into Kelly's mouth and eyes.
Speaker 2: So oops.
Speaker 3: I think Kelly might be the chosen one. And we
Speaker 3: later learned about like she had a mark on her
Speaker 3: arm that was growing. She didn't know what it was,
Speaker 3: but it takes the form of I think they say
Speaker 3: they call it the magician staff. It's like a symbol
Speaker 3: that is not good news.
Speaker 2: I think that Carpenter said they got the symbol from
Speaker 2: a Blue Oyster CULTU. I mean, and you know it
Speaker 2: likely has I'm sure it has a history pre dating
Speaker 2: Blue Oyster Cult. But there you have it.
Speaker 3: So in the final act, we get less reveals about
Speaker 3: the mythos. You know, it's starting to all kind of
Speaker 3: come together, but instead it turns into more action and
Speaker 3: desperate horror. So the final act involves various demon sieges.
Speaker 3: You mentioned there are elements of the Siege movie to this,
Speaker 3: as there certainly are, like the remaining humans get sort
Speaker 3: of herded into different rooms of the church or defensive positions,
Speaker 3: Like there's one part where the character waltered and it's done.
Speaker 3: He gets stuck in a closet where he can like
Speaker 3: look through a sort of a confessional screen out at
Speaker 3: Kelly as she's being transformed into the host of Satan,
Speaker 3: and he's like freaked out and his friends are trying
Speaker 3: to like dig him out through a wall. We also
Speaker 3: get resurrected versions of the dead scientists. Calder especially is
Speaker 3: awesome in this form. He's the one who can't stop
Speaker 3: laughing and he's very creepy. And eventually Kelly gets turned
Speaker 3: into this absolutely horrifying anti god vessel who is like
Speaker 3: she's awake and she's got these wide wild eyes, like
Speaker 3: she's thrilled to be in physical form again and just
Speaker 3: like testing her limits. Except she's in Kelly's body, Kelly's
Speaker 3: original body, but with mangled, burned, bloody flesh. Is disgusting
Speaker 3: to look at.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've always kind of thought about that. This is
Speaker 2: one of the things that I've always noticed about this
Speaker 2: particular character is that she does the effects here are great,
Speaker 2: and she looks disgusting, and I feel like it does
Speaker 2: feel like an intentional choice, Like they didn't try to
Speaker 2: make her like horror cool or horror sexy, you know,
Speaker 2: like she's supposed to be just this gross, zombified slab
Speaker 2: of rotting meat. Like the possession is just decaying or
Speaker 2: flash or something. So it's an interesting look, and especially
Speaker 2: with the hair remaining pristine, like the blonde hair has
Speaker 2: been untouched by the corruption, but the flash is all decayed.
Speaker 2: And yeah, the big eyes steering out of.
Speaker 3: It, it's tremendously revolting.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Now, there are actually some more conversations that go on
Speaker 3: with the remaining human characters. There's one thing where they
Speaker 3: talk about how they believe. For some reason, I think
Speaker 3: there was something about this in the Brotherhood of Sleep
Speaker 3: book that the goal of Satan here is to bring
Speaker 3: back his father from the dark side. Somehow his father,
Speaker 3: the anti god, was banished to the sort of inverse universe,
Speaker 3: and Satan wants to bring his father back. There's an
Speaker 3: interesting thing where at multiple times we notice Donald Pleasance
Speaker 3: reverts to prayers and the Bible, like he's reading from
Speaker 3: the Bible or saying Christian prayers. Like he does this
Speaker 3: at a short funeral they hold for Calder, and he's
Speaker 3: also praying and like reading from some kind of book
Speaker 3: when he's in danger. And I thought this was interesting
Speaker 3: in that he's doing this even though he seems to
Speaker 3: have been convinced earlier that the official doctrine in mythology
Speaker 3: of the Church is purely a fiction to cover up
Speaker 3: the truth about Christ as an alien. But it's like
Speaker 3: he can't give it up. He still needs it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean when during a stressful situation, you know,
Speaker 2: what are you going to do? You're gonna fall back
Speaker 2: on your faith in previous models of your faith and
Speaker 2: so forth.
Speaker 3: It's like he's fully convinced that the metaphysics of his
Speaker 3: religion are are untrue, but he still needs the act
Speaker 3: of his religion. He still needs to be able to pray.
Speaker 3: So there are again there's the Siege movie aspects. They're
Speaker 3: like fighting off demon attacks on the rooms. There's one
Speaker 3: part that's funny where the scientists are defending a room
Speaker 3: against a zombie attack and Professor Barak uses a shaken
Speaker 3: up soda can as a weapon.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he's a master of physics, man, you can't mess
Speaker 2: with him.
Speaker 3: I love that. And they're all like they're dodging streams
Speaker 3: of satan juice vomit while the Satan hosting Kelly oh Man.
Speaker 3: There's a creepy scene where she starts looking into mirrors,
Speaker 3: like she finds a little makeup compact and looks into
Speaker 3: the mirror in it and says, father, it's so creepy,
Speaker 3: and I like that the mirror she's looking into appears
Speaker 3: to be showing static like an old TV.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, I love the use of mirrors here. Obviously,
Speaker 2: you know, it's very Alice in Wonderland. Very bores as well,
Speaker 2: the idea that the mirror is a gateway to the
Speaker 2: unseen world, to the realm where this ancient being is imprisoned.
Speaker 2: And it's also kind of interesting to think about this
Speaker 2: in terms of, Okay, you're the son of the anti god,
Speaker 2: waking up during the mid nineteen eighties, and you have
Speaker 2: not been privy to any of human history really at
Speaker 2: this point? Is that correct?
Speaker 3: So it was buried before like eons ago?
Speaker 2: They say, yeah, so you've never seen a mirror, not
Speaker 2: like this, I mean, the best.
Speaker 3: You could ever seen a human?
Speaker 2: I guess, never seen a human, yea, never never seen
Speaker 2: a mirror, I guess the best you could hope for
Speaker 2: would have been reflection in water, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2: So very very exciting here for ancient evil entities of
Speaker 2: venturing into our reality. And you don't even know how
Speaker 2: big mirrors get culturally become important.
Speaker 3: That's right. So the first attempt to contact the anti
Speaker 3: god through the mirror fails, but then Kelly goes to
Speaker 3: another room, goes to another room, the bigger mirror, and
Speaker 3: this is the room where Donald Pleasance is like hiding
Speaker 3: behind a piece of furniture. So she goes up to
Speaker 3: the mirror and then it starts saying like father, and
Speaker 3: the mirror fills with light and like, oh we are
Speaker 3: tuned in now, baby, It's something is happening. She starts
Speaker 3: reaching in through the mirror and we see her hand
Speaker 3: emerging on the other side, and it's an underwater shot,
Speaker 3: like a hand reaching under the surface of a liquid.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, some great effects here with the surface of
Speaker 2: the mirror that I believe they said he use mercury
Speaker 2: here to create this effect. So a bit dangerous but
Speaker 2: worth it. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So Donald Pleasance tries to intervene, like he chops off
Speaker 3: the demon Kelly's arm with an axe, but then she
Speaker 3: immediately grows a new one. Then he chops off her head,
Speaker 3: but she picks it up and puts it back on.
Speaker 3: It seems like there's nothing stopping her. But finally, just
Speaker 3: as she is about to pull her father, the anti god,
Speaker 3: through through the mirror from the other side, Catherine intervenes.
Speaker 3: So Kelly is like reaching in grasping a shadowy hand
Speaker 3: on the other side, Catherine sees what's happening. In a
Speaker 3: moment of clarity, she realizes what's about to take place,
Speaker 3: and she runs and tackles the satan possessed. Kelly tackles
Speaker 3: her into the mirror, so Catherine also disappears into the mirror,
Speaker 3: and then Donald pleasant smashes the mirror with his axe.
Speaker 2: Yeah, incredible sequence.
Speaker 3: So this causes sort of it cuts the connection to
Speaker 3: the demonic power. The zombies all collapse. They fall down dead.
Speaker 3: Alice Cooper's crew are no longer possessed. They sort of
Speaker 3: go off mission and then just wander off on their
Speaker 3: own business. Kelly and Catherine have vanished, Brian Walter, Barack,
Speaker 3: and Donald Pleasance have survived, and the next morning we
Speaker 3: see characters sort of being taken to the hospital or
Speaker 3: trying to figure out what this all means, and Donald
Speaker 3: Pleasant says, we stopped it. The future conjured up by
Speaker 3: that vile serpent. It will not happen now, and Barack says,
Speaker 3: we're safe. He's waiting on the other side. She died
Speaker 3: for us, and so you think it's all over. But
Speaker 3: then somebody starts having the dream again. We go back
Speaker 3: to the dream, and it turns out it's Brian having
Speaker 3: the dream, and the recorded message plays and the dark
Speaker 3: figure begins to come out of the church, and this
Speaker 3: time we see a part of the message we've never
Speaker 3: made it to before. We get later and later, and
Speaker 3: it's revealed that the dark figure coming out of the
Speaker 3: doors of the church is Catherine, and Brian suddenly wakes up.
Speaker 3: He wakes from a horrible nightmare. He like imagines that
Speaker 3: she's lying there, bloodied and mangled in the same way
Speaker 3: that Kelly was as the host of Satan. But he
Speaker 3: wakes up and he's alone in his room, in his bed,
Speaker 3: and then the pulsing music starts again. Something is wrong
Speaker 3: with the world still, and he looks in the mirror
Speaker 3: on his wall and slowly he reaches out to touch it,
Speaker 3: and then cut to credits.
Speaker 2: A yeah, right, as the music is building too, like
Speaker 2: it's it's so perfect ending.
Speaker 3: Love the ending powerful, so good. So yeah, I love
Speaker 3: Prince of Darkness. I think it is such a powerfully moody,
Speaker 3: ominous horror film, just a tremendous menace, and it establishes
Speaker 3: a tone almost like no other film I can think of.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and again, so ambitious too, not only in terms of,
Speaker 2: you know, these themes of quantum mechanics and theology, but
Speaker 2: also just you know, the other choices that Carpenter made
Speaker 2: in attempting to make a film that stood out from
Speaker 2: what he perceived as some of the sameness that was
Speaker 2: present in the horror genre at the time. And honestly,
Speaker 2: as there's almost always some like swell of sameness in
Speaker 2: the horror genre at any given point, So kudos to
Speaker 2: anybody who tries to break through that, to push through that,
Speaker 2: almost as if like pushing through that mirror, right and
Speaker 2: reaching something on the other side.
Speaker 3: Here's something I wonder about. I wonder what you think.
Speaker 3: This movie has strong themes of science and technology. Most
Speaker 3: of the major characters are scientists. They're doing scientific tests
Speaker 3: for most of the film, and yet I am not
Speaker 3: at all tempted to think of this as a science
Speaker 3: fiction movie. It is definitely horror. Why does why does
Speaker 3: my brain subconsciously just classify it that way without a
Speaker 3: second thought.
Speaker 2: Hmmm, Yeah, that's a good question, Like is it Is
Speaker 2: it ultimately any less science fiction than the thing? And
Speaker 2: yet you know, I'm far far more likely to classify
Speaker 2: the thing, John Carpenter, Is the thing as sci fi horror? Yeah?
Speaker 2: I don't know. I don't know exactly what it is.
Speaker 2: Maybe the degree to which like direct technology is employed.
Speaker 2: Like nobody like builds a technology technology based trap. Nobody
Speaker 2: uses a ray gun or a symbol some sort of
Speaker 2: electroshock device. I don't know.
Speaker 3: You know, there are movies where there are mysterious or
Speaker 3: unexplainable phenomena that are first thought of to be supernatural,
Speaker 3: but then it is discovered that they are like physical
Speaker 3: in nature, they have a scientific explanation. And then there
Speaker 3: are movies where there are mysterious phenomena that are first
Speaker 3: thought of to be physical, but they're discovered to have
Speaker 3: a supernatural explanation. In this movie, I can't quite tell
Speaker 3: what they have discovered, Like we sort of get an explanation,
Speaker 3: but I don't know how to classify it is the
Speaker 3: ultimate explanation supernatural or physical? Does that make sense?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I mean I guess some of it kind of
Speaker 2: comes down to the idea that everything kind of collapses
Speaker 2: into into what like missing shadow smoking shadows.
Speaker 3: You know that it is you can't tell the difference
Speaker 3: between between the sufficiently powerful and understandable alien presence and
Speaker 3: like a ghost or a spirit from beyond.
Speaker 2: Yeah, Like, this is a film where science has failed
Speaker 2: us to a certain extent, and so has religion, and
Speaker 2: these are the consequences of those failures.
Speaker 3: It's beyond science or religion, and you can't even understand
Speaker 3: whether what you're dealing with is natural or supernatural.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 3: Yeah, that does seem more like horror, I guess.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah. I think it is far easier to say
Speaker 2: Friends of Darkness, solid horror film with science elements to it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: All right, Well, there you have it. Happy Halloween. Just
Speaker 2: reminded that stuff to Blow your Mind is primarily a
Speaker 2: science and culture podcast with core episodes on Tuesdays and Thursdays,
Speaker 2: but on Fridays we set aside most serious concerns to
Speaker 2: just talk about a weird film on Weird House. Cinema.
Speaker 2: You can find a full list of all the movies
Speaker 2: we've covered over the years at letterbox dot com. That's
Speaker 2: L E T T E R B O x D
Speaker 2: dot com. Our user name there is weird House, and
Speaker 2: that's where you'll find the list. Hey, go to our
Speaker 2: tea public store if you like. We have a couple
Speaker 2: of Halloween shirts up as well as they rub the
Speaker 2: fur shirt if you want to get in on that.
Speaker 2: You know, those are just for fun. But if you
Speaker 2: you know, if you want to stick her a shirt, yeah,
Speaker 2: check it out. It's well, I guess it's a way
Speaker 2: to sort of spread the word about the show.
Speaker 3: Huge Things always to our excellent audio producer Jjposway. If
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