Spit In My Mouth, Satan! A Tribute to “Prince of Darkness” (1987)
A long-overdue ode to John Carpenter’s kinky teleological-horror classic!
By: Toxicka Shock
ToxickaShock@gmail.com
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Next to John Hughes, I can’t think of another director whose oeuvre in the 1980s truly defined the decade than John Carpenter. Although “Halloween” may have made him a horror auteur immoral, it wasn’t until the eighties rolled around that Carpenter truly hit his stride as a genre director.
While the initial commercial and critical receptions for the movies fluctuated, all eight movies helmed by Carpenter have since gone on to become bona fide cult classics. “The Thing” is considered one of the greatest creature features in cinema history, “They Live” is oft-celebrated as one of the most brilliantly subversive criticisms of yuppie-dom in any medium and we’d be here all day simply listing the myriad ways video game culture has been influenced, impacted and inspired by “Escape From New York” and “Big Trouble In Little China.”
Of Carpenter’s eighties filmography, probably the least heralded today is 1987’s “Prince of Darkness.” And that’s a real shame, because not only is it one of Carpenter’s best “pure” horror movies, it’s really one of the best “pure” horror films of the entire decade. Eschewing the macabre humor of “An American Werewolf in London” or “Evil Dead 2” and avoiding the T&A-laden bloodshed of “Friday the 13th” and its endless array of imitators, “Prince of Darkness” is one of the more cerebrally stimulating genre flicks of the Reagan years, albeit one that isn’t afraid to break out the periodic dismemberment or up-close jugular slicing shot.
Time has been a lot kinder to “Prince of Darkness” than a lot of its supernatural horror contemporaries. The juxtaposition of Old Testament prophesy and almost accurate hard cosmology results in an intriguing blend of religious allegories and quantum physics theory, a film that at least tries to be open-minded with the spiritual and scientific dynamics of both conflicting worldviews. One minute the characters in the film are debating the merits of Schrodinger’s cat and the consequences of anti-matter and in the next they’re sweating bullets over the demonic messages numerically hidden in centuries old codes that spit in the face of carbon dating principles. And this being a John Carpenter movie, you just know he had to toss in some sociopolitical commentary on Reagan’s policies while he was at, this time with a subtler than normal message about homelessness in America - and how the realms of the religious and the scientific have failed to adequately address the pressing cultural issue.
Of course, we need one more variable to ride out the four corners of what makes “Prince of Darkness” such a delightful little genre offering. In a film rife with apocalyptic religious symbolism, sometimes oblique references to astro physics and metaphors about the poor and mentally ill, why not throw in some kinky sexual subtext to really get the witch’s brew bubbling? Yes, “Prince of Darkness” does indeed bring the goods when it comes to tantalizing and titillating undertones, with furtive touches of lesbianism, interracial sex *and* S&M play all being brought up as plot points. If you’re into saliva transfer, hoo boy, are you in luck, considering the fulcrum of the story literally hinges on SATANIC SPIT SWAPPING.
As for the cast, we’re working with a much better ensemble case than you are likely used to for a late 1980s genre movie. The film is ultimately balanced out by two great performances from Carpenter movie staples; representing the church, so to speak, is Donald Pleasance as the priest Father Loomis (that last name ring a bell to anyone?) who unwittingly uncovers Satan’s tomb in the basement of a long-shuttered Los Angeles chapel. And representing science is Victor Wong as Professor Howard Birack, a character more than happy to make all of his grad students help set up demon-measuring equipment on their own free time without it even counting towards extra credit. As par the course, we also have our obvious budding romance between the mustachioed Brian Marsh (played by Jameson Parker) and the Molly Ringwald/Ally Sheedy hybrid Catherine Danforth (played by Lisa Blount of “An Officer and a Gentleman” fame.) And since ALL 1980s horror movies were required by international law to have at least one comic relief character, we’ve got Dennis Dun showing up as Walter, the wisecracking assistant who tries to ward off demons by telling them corny jokes about the expectations of Jewish mothers. Pretty much everybody else in the cast are just various shades of demon fodder, although I do feel the need to point out who is playing the lead homeless, spawn-of-Satan foot soldier - none other than ALICE FREAKING COOPER, who also contributed the awesomely-awful-until-its-unironically-awesome-again title song to the movie’s soundtrack.
Give Carpenter (who also wrote the script) for coming up with one of the most creativeMcGuffins in film history. There are a lot of ways you could symbolically depict Satan onscreen, but leave it to J.C. to eschew the expected horns and hooves for the most abstract version of Lucifer likely portrayed in *any* media format. Brilliantly, in “Prince of Darkness” the ultimate evil of the cosmos is depicted simply as a swirling green vial of good in an old ass container, which later on, demonstrates a visually impressive disregard for obeying the standard laws of gravity and physics and all that other stuff. It’s the kind of imagery that doesn’t seem like it would work in theory, but in execution it’s downright amazing; needless to say, you’ll never look at a lava lamp the same way again after watching this movie.
One of the really great things about “Prince of Darkness” is how it takes its time building up to its inevitable demonic possession gore and guts jubilee. Almost half of the movie is dedicated to the cast - which, in addition to being atypically diverse for its time frame, is also comprised of characters who AREN’T your rank and file assortment of idiots and reprobates just begging to be dispatched in gleefully ghoulish ways - simply trying to figure out what the hell that giant jug of emerald juice is supposed to be. So structurally, it has more in common with a mystery-suspense thriller than your dime a dozen “Friday the 13th” ripoff - think, “The Omen” or “Don’t Look Now,” only with way more references to dead languages and quasars and what have you.
But once the unholy mayhem starts, my goodness, how spectacular it gets. The very first kill of the movie sees a naive college kid get his intestines poked out with a bicycle seat shaped into a makeshift hobo shiv; later on, another researcher has his entire body magically transformed into a six foot tall pile of locusts, complete with crickets and grasshoppers pouring out of his stumps.
The real fun, however, doesn’t begin until Anne Howard swallows a mouthful of Satanic spunk and automatically turns into a ravenous, murderous instrument of the devil. When she isn’t knifing random computer geeks to death, she engages in quite a bit of spit play with the rest of the cast, at one point mounting a female colleague and spraying her face with a colossal stream of unholy saliva - which, by genre convention, must *also* turn her into a horrific demonic hussy by default.
One of the best scenes in the film occurs when Jessie Lawrence Ferguson’s character Calder gets attacked by a harem of demonically possessed women, with Anne Howard ultimately crawling on top of him and infecting him with a deep, sloppy, unholy open mouth kiss. At the time, interracial spit swapping was still a fairly uncommon site at the cineplex, even within the framework of supernaturally-tinged horror movies - lest we forget, not even Stuart Gordon had the chutzpah to give us that teased Ken Foree on Barbara Crampton liplock in “From Beyond.” From there, Calder clutches a crucifix and giggles hysterically while mindlessly ambling around the staircase; rather than suffer eternal damnation via demonic possession, he ends up saving his own soul by means of a very gruesome suicide by throat slicing.
It’s not a terribly original premise for a horror film - indeed, the exact same hook was used more than a decade earlier in David Cronenberg’s “Shivers.” But the kinky subtext in “Prince of Darkness” is beautifully complemented by the film’s deeper allegorical commentary on religion, technology and even the homeless epidemic of the 1980s ... which, almost 40 years later, is still just as relevant now as it was back in ‘87.
It’s surprising to me just how little love this film receives compared to the other flicks in Carpenter’s eighties canon. Next to “Starman,” this is probably his *least* celebrated movie from the decade, which is a shame since “Prince of Darkness” does such a fantastic job of encapsulating the social entropy of the era. The masses may praise “They Live” for its cultural commentary, but in many ways, “Prince of Darkness” is an even sharper social satire - and a more intricate one, at that.
Clearly “Prince of Darkness” is a movie pitting religious fundamentalism against technologically-rooted science. In fact, that’s pretty much the summation of the entire movie - university researchers versus the demonic forces of the Judeo-Christian faith, albeit without the researchers realizing it until the last 30 minutes of the film. You can balk at some of Carpenter’s on-the-nose allusions (primarily, the juxtaposition of the Anti-Christ with anti-matter), but you can at least give “Prince of Darkness” credit for refusing to succumb to an oh-so-typical “religion bad, science good” diatribe.
Secondly, it’s clearly a movie about how the United States has clearly failed in addressing its homelessness problem. That all of the “demonic” homeless people featured in the movie are depicted as having some sort of profound neurological disability isn’t a coincidence; remember, this movie came out at a time when Reagan administration edicts were LITERALLY throwing mentally ill individuals out of hospitals and onto city streets. That both the men of religion and science are both completely oblivious to the hordes of homelessness at the beginning of the film serves as a metaphor for how America’s churches and medical community refused to pick up the slack - damning commentary that’s just as apt now as it was 35 years earlier.
And of course, what critical reading of “Prince of Darkness” would be complete without touching upon the AIDS parable? HIV was running rampant in 1987, and here’s a film that depicts “pure evil” hopping from host to host, primarily through sexually suggestive stimulation of the oral mucus membranes. It’s an easy dot to connect, really, although something tells me that’s probably not the key cultural commentary he was trying to make with the movie.
For me, though, “Prince of Darkness” can best be read as something of a metaphor for sexual repression. Let’s face it, clergymen and university researcher dorks aren’t the kinds of people who get laid with any regularity, and how does Satan manifest himself in this movie? That’s right, by turning level-headed, studious squares into unrepentant sex maniacs. The swirling green elixir of demonic temptation is clearly a stand-in for semen, with one gulp of the unholy, gravity-defying gunk transforming people into promiscuous libertines. That sort of sums up the 1980s cultural zeitgeist - keep your loins in check or else.
And there’s even a healthy bit of queer subtext going on, too. We’ve already touched upon the sapphic spit swapping between our comely female co-stars, but what about the fate of the practical joker archetype played by Dun? He spends the climax of the film avoiding a horrifically deformed, sex-crazed zombie woman, by hiding out where? In the shadowy confines of a closet. It’s a plot device that’s so blunt, it almost becomes comical - that is, until you realize it came out in the 1980s, and that a society high on Reaganomics and Moral Majority rhetoric simply couldn’t deduce the obvious undertones for themselves.
While the initial commercial and critical receptions for the movies fluctuated, all eight movies helmed by Carpenter have since gone on to become bona fide cult classics. “The Thing” is considered one of the greatest creature features in cinema history, “They Live” is oft-celebrated as one of the most brilliantly subversive criticisms of yuppie-dom in any medium and we’d be here all day simply listing the myriad ways video game culture has been influenced, impacted and inspired by “Escape From New York” and “Big Trouble In Little China.”
Time has been a lot kinder to “Prince of Darkness” than a lot of its supernatural horror contemporaries. The juxtaposition of Old Testament prophesy and almost accurate hard cosmology results in an intriguing blend of religious allegories and quantum physics theory, a film that at least tries to be open-minded with the spiritual and scientific dynamics of both conflicting worldviews. One minute the characters in the film are debating the merits of Schrodinger’s cat and the consequences of anti-matter and in the next they’re sweating bullets over the demonic messages numerically hidden in centuries old codes that spit in the face of carbon dating principles. And this being a John Carpenter movie, you just know he had to toss in some sociopolitical commentary on Reagan’s policies while he was at, this time with a subtler than normal message about homelessness in America - and how the realms of the religious and the scientific have failed to adequately address the pressing cultural issue.
Of course, we need one more variable to ride out the four corners of what makes “Prince of Darkness” such a delightful little genre offering. In a film rife with apocalyptic religious symbolism, sometimes oblique references to astro physics and metaphors about the poor and mentally ill, why not throw in some kinky sexual subtext to really get the witch’s brew bubbling? Yes, “Prince of Darkness” does indeed bring the goods when it comes to tantalizing and titillating undertones, with furtive touches of lesbianism, interracial sex *and* S&M play all being brought up as plot points. If you’re into saliva transfer, hoo boy, are you in luck, considering the fulcrum of the story literally hinges on SATANIC SPIT SWAPPING.
 |
| Oh, the eighties - when the line between hyper-masculinity and hyper-homoerotic was practically non-existent. |
As for the cast, we’re working with a much better ensemble case than you are likely used to for a late 1980s genre movie. The film is ultimately balanced out by two great performances from Carpenter movie staples; representing the church, so to speak, is Donald Pleasance as the priest Father Loomis (that last name ring a bell to anyone?) who unwittingly uncovers Satan’s tomb in the basement of a long-shuttered Los Angeles chapel. And representing science is Victor Wong as Professor Howard Birack, a character more than happy to make all of his grad students help set up demon-measuring equipment on their own free time without it even counting towards extra credit. As par the course, we also have our obvious budding romance between the mustachioed Brian Marsh (played by Jameson Parker) and the Molly Ringwald/Ally Sheedy hybrid Catherine Danforth (played by Lisa Blount of “An Officer and a Gentleman” fame.) And since ALL 1980s horror movies were required by international law to have at least one comic relief character, we’ve got Dennis Dun showing up as Walter, the wisecracking assistant who tries to ward off demons by telling them corny jokes about the expectations of Jewish mothers. Pretty much everybody else in the cast are just various shades of demon fodder, although I do feel the need to point out who is playing the lead homeless, spawn-of-Satan foot soldier - none other than ALICE FREAKING COOPER, who also contributed the awesomely-awful-until-its-unironically-awesome-again title song to the movie’s soundtrack.
Give Carpenter (who also wrote the script) for coming up with one of the most creativeMcGuffins in film history. There are a lot of ways you could symbolically depict Satan onscreen, but leave it to J.C. to eschew the expected horns and hooves for the most abstract version of Lucifer likely portrayed in *any* media format. Brilliantly, in “Prince of Darkness” the ultimate evil of the cosmos is depicted simply as a swirling green vial of good in an old ass container, which later on, demonstrates a visually impressive disregard for obeying the standard laws of gravity and physics and all that other stuff. It’s the kind of imagery that doesn’t seem like it would work in theory, but in execution it’s downright amazing; needless to say, you’ll never look at a lava lamp the same way again after watching this movie.
One of the really great things about “Prince of Darkness” is how it takes its time building up to its inevitable demonic possession gore and guts jubilee. Almost half of the movie is dedicated to the cast - which, in addition to being atypically diverse for its time frame, is also comprised of characters who AREN’T your rank and file assortment of idiots and reprobates just begging to be dispatched in gleefully ghoulish ways - simply trying to figure out what the hell that giant jug of emerald juice is supposed to be. So structurally, it has more in common with a mystery-suspense thriller than your dime a dozen “Friday the 13th” ripoff - think, “The Omen” or “Don’t Look Now,” only with way more references to dead languages and quasars and what have you.
The real fun, however, doesn’t begin until Anne Howard swallows a mouthful of Satanic spunk and automatically turns into a ravenous, murderous instrument of the devil. When she isn’t knifing random computer geeks to death, she engages in quite a bit of spit play with the rest of the cast, at one point mounting a female colleague and spraying her face with a colossal stream of unholy saliva - which, by genre convention, must *also* turn her into a horrific demonic hussy by default.
One of the best scenes in the film occurs when Jessie Lawrence Ferguson’s character Calder gets attacked by a harem of demonically possessed women, with Anne Howard ultimately crawling on top of him and infecting him with a deep, sloppy, unholy open mouth kiss. At the time, interracial spit swapping was still a fairly uncommon site at the cineplex, even within the framework of supernaturally-tinged horror movies - lest we forget, not even Stuart Gordon had the chutzpah to give us that teased Ken Foree on Barbara Crampton liplock in “From Beyond.” From there, Calder clutches a crucifix and giggles hysterically while mindlessly ambling around the staircase; rather than suffer eternal damnation via demonic possession, he ends up saving his own soul by means of a very gruesome suicide by throat slicing.
It’s not a terribly original premise for a horror film - indeed, the exact same hook was used more than a decade earlier in David Cronenberg’s “Shivers.” But the kinky subtext in “Prince of Darkness” is beautifully complemented by the film’s deeper allegorical commentary on religion, technology and even the homeless epidemic of the 1980s ... which, almost 40 years later, is still just as relevant now as it was back in ‘87.
 |
| Nope. Nothing CREEPY About this Shit At all. |
Clearly “Prince of Darkness” is a movie pitting religious fundamentalism against technologically-rooted science. In fact, that’s pretty much the summation of the entire movie - university researchers versus the demonic forces of the Judeo-Christian faith, albeit without the researchers realizing it until the last 30 minutes of the film. You can balk at some of Carpenter’s on-the-nose allusions (primarily, the juxtaposition of the Anti-Christ with anti-matter), but you can at least give “Prince of Darkness” credit for refusing to succumb to an oh-so-typical “religion bad, science good” diatribe.
Secondly, it’s clearly a movie about how the United States has clearly failed in addressing its homelessness problem. That all of the “demonic” homeless people featured in the movie are depicted as having some sort of profound neurological disability isn’t a coincidence; remember, this movie came out at a time when Reagan administration edicts were LITERALLY throwing mentally ill individuals out of hospitals and onto city streets. That both the men of religion and science are both completely oblivious to the hordes of homelessness at the beginning of the film serves as a metaphor for how America’s churches and medical community refused to pick up the slack - damning commentary that’s just as apt now as it was 35 years earlier.
And of course, what critical reading of “Prince of Darkness” would be complete without touching upon the AIDS parable? HIV was running rampant in 1987, and here’s a film that depicts “pure evil” hopping from host to host, primarily through sexually suggestive stimulation of the oral mucus membranes. It’s an easy dot to connect, really, although something tells me that’s probably not the key cultural commentary he was trying to make with the movie.
For me, though, “Prince of Darkness” can best be read as something of a metaphor for sexual repression. Let’s face it, clergymen and university researcher dorks aren’t the kinds of people who get laid with any regularity, and how does Satan manifest himself in this movie? That’s right, by turning level-headed, studious squares into unrepentant sex maniacs. The swirling green elixir of demonic temptation is clearly a stand-in for semen, with one gulp of the unholy, gravity-defying gunk transforming people into promiscuous libertines. That sort of sums up the 1980s cultural zeitgeist - keep your loins in check or else.
And there’s even a healthy bit of queer subtext going on, too. We’ve already touched upon the sapphic spit swapping between our comely female co-stars, but what about the fate of the practical joker archetype played by Dun? He spends the climax of the film avoiding a horrifically deformed, sex-crazed zombie woman, by hiding out where? In the shadowy confines of a closet. It’s a plot device that’s so blunt, it almost becomes comical - that is, until you realize it came out in the 1980s, and that a society high on Reaganomics and Moral Majority rhetoric simply couldn’t deduce the obvious undertones for themselves.
XOXO, TOXICKA
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