Our Haloween celebration of the work of John Carpenter continues for a third week with a look at John in the 90s. Arguably his rockiest period, a decade that saw a significant decline, John Carpenter in the 90s produced one movie that wasn't a fucking debacle and we think that it's In The Mouth of Madness.

In The Mouth of Madness finds John Trent (Sam Neill), a private investigator hired by a publishing company to find Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), the best-selling author in the world, a writer of particularly terrifying horror fiction whose novels drive its readers insane. Cane vanished in New Hampshire while writing his latest novel and the publishing company would very much like him and his manuscript found. What Trent finds, however, is weirder (some might say more confusing) than anyone could have imagined, hidden out in a forboding church in a pastoral New Hampshire town that doesn't exist. This fiasco leads John Trent to wonder, am I even a real person or am I a character in Sutter Cane's book? Is Sutter Cane even real, for that matter?

Carpenter crafts a pastiche here of HP Lovecraft and Stephen King half way through a decade that wasn't terribly great for horror movies.

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Our October marathon of John Carpenter continues as we find John returning to the world of independent film and total creative control. Perhaps John smoked a little too much weed and flew too close to the sun with this one. For all it's theoretical physics and spiritual nonsense it's still a fun little movie.

Prince of Darkness finds a Catholic priest discovering a hidden order of priests protecting a run-down church in Los Angeles that hides a terrible secret in its basement. For the last 400 years it has housed a strange, churning tank in its basement which contains the fluid essence of the devil. But now as conditions shift and the stars align, the tank is coming to life, manifesting in our world in order to pull an even older force of evil into ours from the abyss. A team of graduate students in the field of theoretical physics is gathered to study this phenomenon and ultimately stop it.

It doesn't make a lot of sense and it has a real mean sense of humor about it at time but we can't help but love Prince of Darkness. It's John Carpenter back where he belongs and fully producing movies that feel characteristically John Carpenter.

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This week Halle Kiefer of the fantastic horror podcast, Ruined, joins us for a three-peat as we kick off our Halloween 2026 series, a month-log exploration of the films of John Carpenter. We're starting strong with John's critically maligned The Thing, a movie that reviewed so badly that he lost an entire contract with Universal. Thankfully, in the fullness of time viewers have come back around and reassessed it, and recognize it as one of the greatest horror movies of the 80s and one of the greatest of all time.

The Thing finds an American scientific research station in Antarctica facing an unseen alien threat that absorbs its host and hides in plain sight. A Norwegian station nearby thawed a UFO out of the ice and woke up the frozen pilot after 100,000 years and now it has its eyes set on planet Earth. If it leaves the isolation of Antarctica, the entire planet is doomed. These men will drive themselves insane with paranoia as they narrow down who among them is The Thing and what will it cost them to stop it in its tracks?

The Thing is a frozen, paranoid nightmare of extraordinary imagination, with gross-out special effects from a very enthusiastic Rob Bottin.

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