Prince of Darkness

Prince of Darkness, directed by John Carpenter. Universal, 1987. Colour, 101 minutes.  With Donald Pleasance, Jameson Parker, Victor Wong, Lisa Blount, Dennis Dun, Susan Blanchard, Anne Howard, Ann Yen. 

Carpenter has an impressive and growing reputation, but his Prince of Darkness is rarely mentioned by aficionados and critics, perhaps because the story was too controversial and the film was not a commercial success. 

Nonetheless, I believe Prince of Darkness is an outstanding horror film which comes to grips with an issue often overlooked or glossed over in other films: the nature and frailty of faith. 

The story begins with the death of a priest, the last of the Brotherhood of Sleep. This priest has been guarding a secret relic which the Catholic Church has been hiding for centuries. The relic looks like a glass tub in a rusted metal frame, full of swirling green liquid. 

Donald Pleasance plays a priest who uncovers the relic and enlists the help of physics Professor Birack and his students to study the relic, hidden in the cellar of an old church. 

These scientists discover some unpleasant secrets: the relic is seven million years old and contains the son of the Devil. Contrary to received knowledge, the Devil is in fact the supreme consciousness which controls the entire universe, with God being relegated to a kind of anti-Devil, much as subatomic particles have anti-particles. 

A somewhat silly plot sees some of the scientists being taken over by the green liquid, transformed into zombies who guard another victim impregnated with the physical form of the Prince of Darkness. There is the inevitable confrontation between the zombies and the remaining scientists trapped in the church by a band of tramps who are led by Alice Cooper playing an odd cameo role. 

Superficially, this story is silly. But it carries within it far more thought than any other horror movie I have ever seen. 

Carpenter, who is said to have adopted the nom de plume Martin Quatermass to write the script, poses some interesting questions. 

Suppose the Christian conception of the universe, God and the Devil is just a childish fairytale. Suppose that mankind was confronted by an ultimately evil or destructive power in the universe, and could not use theology to overcome or defeat this power. 

Instead of the juvenile demon fantasies in which an ultimate power of good eventually triumphs, we would find ourselves alone, without a God to protect us from ultimate evil. This concept ought to be more terrifying than even the most hair-raising fable about the conflict between God and the Devil. 

Perhaps the most chilling sequence of the movie shows a mesmerised, possessed student transcribe on a computer some words to the effect: "God will not save mankind, nor will the god Plutonium; in fact you will not be saved at all." 

Perhaps the only sign of hope in the film is the suggestion that people in the future are using tachyon beams to send a message back into the past to be apprehended as dreams by the scientists. Although the content of the message is never quite revealed, it is clear it is a warning. The corollary is that mankind survives into some kind of future from which it is able to warn its ancestors. In other words, mankind does not succumb to the evil power without a struggle, and its chief weapon is science, not theology. 

Jameson Parker as Brian, the hero of the piece, is refreshingly different from the usual Hollywood stereotypes, as is Victor Wong as Birack.

The film has its faults. The settings lack atmosphere, the plot descends into clichés and some of the actors are less than convincing. Perhaps this is the result of a low budget. Nevertheless, using the tools of the tachyon message and some atmospheric lighting, Carpenter might have been able to lend the whole film a far more brooding, dream-like quality. 

I understand that the film was re-edited for TV to exclude all mention of the Brotherhood of Sleep, and to suggest that the entire story is merely a nightmare suffered by Brian. 

It figures that the Americans would kowtow to the Church to remove the most controversial proposition - that religion is all a bunch of lies invented by the clergy, which was hiding the more terrifying truth from all of mankind. 

It is this proposition which probably contributed to the film's obscurity, with the generally low production effort also reducing the overall presence of the movie. 

Despite these flaws, Prince of Darkness is in a category with a very few other films. I have seen it a dozen times since I was first introduced to it by a friend who had an interest in Carpenter. I suspect I will see it a dozen more times over the coming years. I highly recommend it.

© 2003 Peter Strempel.  All rights reserved.