John Carpenter’s Apoc­a­lypse Tril­o­gy and the end of faith

At the end of John Carpenter’s 1982 sci-fi hor­ror The Thing, two men sit across from each oth­er, wait­ing. R.J. MacReady (Kurt Rus­sell), and Childs (Kei­th David) are the sole sur­vivors of an attack on their arc­tic research sta­tion, com­mit­ted by an alien par­a­site that can imi­tate oth­er organ­isms. In these final moments, each man seems to won­der if the oth­er is being imi­tat­ed by the epony­mous Thing. ​“Why don’t we just…wait here for a lit­tle while?” MacReady says to Childs. ​“See what happens.”

There’s a temp­ta­tion to read The Thing, and its end­ing in par­tic­u­lar, as a tes­ta­ment to para­noia – that this arc­tic attack by an alien force is the cold­est of all Cold Wars – but in the end, the film feels root­ed in the idea of faith. That, maybe in spite of them­selves, both MacReady and Childs are hold­ing out hope that they can keep faith in the oth­er man. That one won’t trans­form and devour the oth­er. The Thing is the first film in Carpenter’s Apoc­a­lypse Tril­o­gy, fol­lowed by Prince of Dark­ness (1987), and In the Mouth of Mad­ness (1994). While the apoc­a­lyp­tic DNA that the three films share might point towards the end of the world, the ele­ment that real­ly binds them togeth­er is their shared pre­oc­cu­pa­tion with the end of faith: in mankind, in God, in the self.

In The Thing, the body itself becomes untrust­wor­thy, as the shapeshift­ing crea­ture under­mines the cer­tain­ty that your fel­low man is who you think they are. One of the first humans that the Thing tries to assim­i­late is George Ben­nings (Peter Mal­oney), but it is caught by his col­leagues in the midst of trans­for­ma­tion, fin­gers long and mal­formed, screech­ing its only way of speak­ing. MacReady insists that the crea­ture isn’t Ben­nings, and, after immo­lat­ing the Ben­nings-Thing, says that ful­ly assim­i­lat­ed, it would have ​“looked and sound­ed and act­ed just like Ben­nings.” Faith in each oth­er, and faith in the body itself, is rocked to its very core.

While The Thing is the most vis­cer­al film in the Apoc­a­lypse Tril­o­gy, its two spir­i­tu­al suc­ces­sors approach the idea of the end of faith in more abstract ways. For Prince of Dark­ness, faith is test­ed not by an absence of God, but instead the real­i­ty of His oppo­site num­ber; a rev­e­la­tion that changes the char­ac­ters in the film, both body and soul. The lines between our world and anoth­er, dark­er, more ancient one begin to blur, and the foun­da­tions of belief itself begin to shake.

1987’s Prince of Dark­ness feels like John Carpenter’s pseu­do-pre­cur­sor to Mar­tin Scorsese’s own film about God and his absence: Silence. The name­less Priest (Car­pen­ter main­stay ​‘Don­ald Pleas­ance) ref­er­ences a ​“stub­born belief in com­mon sense,” that runs through to the core of the film, and the oth­er parts of the tril­o­gy. Each of these films are about belief, and what hap­pens when char­ac­ters run up to the lim­its of what that belief can offer; what hap­pens once they step off the edge of the map. The cos­mic evil of an ​“Anti-God” in Prince of Dark­ness is, accord­ing to Pleasance’s Priest, some­thing that the church has known about but cho­sen to keep secret, argu­ing that the church chose to char­ac­terise pure evil in a way that keeps ​“man at the cen­tre of things.”

The dis­cov­ery of this evil turns these assump­tions – the cen­tral­i­ty of man, the pow­er of faith – on their head. It prompts a legit­i­mate cri­sis of faith in the Priest, as he asks the void ​“Where are you, Christ? Where are you?” This is linked to the lim­its of faith itself, in how God or Christ, or even Satan can be under­stood – Prince of Dark­ness presents a spir­i­tu­al evil that exists beyond the con­fines of spir­i­tu­al­i­ty as it is nor­mal­ly inter­pret­ed. Carpenter’s char­ac­ters are forced to con­front the fact that the world doesn’t func­tion the way that they thought it did, and that the place of man is not as cen­tral as we once hoped. If the cos­mic cen­tral­i­ty of man is shift­ed, then the idea of what man can have faith in must be ques­tioned – the answer may sim­ply be silence.

Prince of Dark­ness – like The Thing – ends on a moment of uncer­tain­ty, cut­ting to black just before we find out if the world as we know it has end­ed. These two end­ings feel like a kind of cin­e­mat­ic Rorschach test: the choice belongs to the view­er, a test of their own faith. But In the Mouth of Mad­ness, which sees Car­pen­ter at his most Love­craft­ian, doesn’t even offer the pos­si­bil­i­ty of light. Here the apoc­a­lypse begins inward and slow­ly expands out to the rest of the world, as fans of the author Sut­ter Cane (Jür­gen Prochnow, an iter­a­tion of H.P. Love­craft) are seem­ing­ly dri­ven to mad­ness by his words, and John Trent (Sam Neill) – the inves­ti­ga­tor on his trail – begins to lose him­self the deep­er he finds him­self drawn into Cane’s dark world.

As the sto­ry unfolds, Cane is revealed to be a con­duit for an ancient evil that pre­dates man – an evil that’s also hint­ed at in Prince of Dark­ness – some­thing that brings through to our world through his words. These words change the world around them, forc­ing peo­ple to con­tort into new forms.Just before a farmer takes his own life with a shot­gun, he says ​“I have to. He wrote me this way.”

Lin­da Styles (Julie Car­men), Cane’s edi­tor, accom­pa­nies John on his trip, and when she has the truth of Cane’s pow­er revealed to her, returns to John and con­tin­u­al­ly repeats the sen­tence ​“I’m los­ing me”, a fate that’s set to befall count­less oth­ers before a twist­ed, meta con­clu­sion. All three of the films have this sense of ​“los­ing me” – that some­thing inte­gral about the char­ac­ters is being lost, be it bod­i­ly auton­o­my or faith in God. In In the Mouth of Mad­ness, that thing being lost is the self, the soul.

The con­clu­sion of Carpenter’s tril­o­gy feels at once bleak­er and more bom­bas­tic than the two films that came before it. Rather than cut­ting to black before the moment of rev­e­la­tion, In the Mouth of Mad­ness push­es right up to it, show­ing a world being changed by some­thing strange and ancient. It is the per­fect con­clu­sion for Carpenter’s med­i­ta­tions on the end of the world and the end of faith, because here, both of those things final­ly run out. The final, mor­bid punch­line of Mad­ness reveals how frag­ile the con­cept of the self is in Carpenter’s tril­o­gy, and that to lose faith in one’s self is the first pulling on a thread, which will keep unrav­el­ing until the end of all things.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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