Why a film about evil green goo is one of John Carpenter’s best

Pure evil exists in phys­i­cal form. It’s trapped in a con­tain­er under a church in the City of Angels. It’s re-emerg­ing tonight, 2000 years after the only force fit to fight has gone. It’s green goo. That’s 1987’s Prince of Dark­ness, equal parts absurd and insid­i­ous, a high-con­cept hor­ror of the­ol­o­gy and the­o­ret­i­cal physics.

The sec­ond instal­ment in John Carpenter’s Apoc­a­lypse tril­o­gy (with The Thing and In the Mouth of Mad­ness), Prince of Dark­ness was released and for­got­ten between cult favourites Big Trou­ble in Lit­tle Chi­na and They Live. While They Live has under­gone a crit­i­cal reap­praisal and pop­u­lar resur­gence, not least in the face of this cur­rent US elec­tion cycle, the unfor­tu­nate posi­tion­ing of Prince of Dark­ness means it remains an over­looked gem in Carpenter’s filmography.

Rebelling against the com­mer­cial fail­ures and trou­bled pro­duc­tions of his stu­dio films, Car­pen­ter dove back into the kind of inde­pen­dent film­mak­ing that fos­tered his ear­li­er land­marks, par­ing back to one locale, cre­at­ing oppres­sive atmos­phere with synth and shot, even recruit­ing Don­ald Pleas­ance from the midst of the Hal­loween sequels.

The film finds a group of the­o­ret­i­cal physi­cists exam­in­ing the afore­men­tioned green goo as Pleasance’s name­less priest attempts to com­pre­hend its broad­er the­o­log­i­cal impli­ca­tions. He’s right­ful­ly ter­ri­fied from very ear­ly on, and it’s not long before the scale of what is hap­pen­ing here begins to hit the stu­dents. How­ev­er, in a sig­nif­i­cant piece of sub­ver­sion, sci­ence does not fail in the pres­ence of high­er, super­nat­ur­al pow­ers. In fact it serves the film that their the­o­ry proves true. Satan is goo, the Anti-God does exist in a par­al­lel dimen­sion. Good luck repeat­ing this test in sci­en­tif­ic conditions.

For a taut, indie, low-bud­get genre film Car­pen­ter skimps on noth­ing. Bugs, the pos­sessed home­less, Alice Coop­er – and these are just the accou­trements. The cen­tral con­ceit pro­pos­es that the dev­il is lit­er­al­ly in the detail, that evil lives in sub­atom­ic par­ti­cles. Tachyons trans­mit warn­ings of an apoc­a­lypse to avert – through dreams, like Carl Jung’s col­lec­tive uncon­scious with poor sig­nal recep­tion. Reli­gion and sci­ence col­lide and explain each other’s mys­ter­ies, while their rep­re­sen­ta­tives admirably team up with lit­tle ques­tion­ing or bick­er­ing to stop that goo from call­ing forth the anti-god through a mirror.

It sounds too ridicu­lous to work, and the result is cer­tain­ly heady and uneven. But Carpenter’s bravu­ra is dis­cernible in every frame as he runs this high-con­cept (pseudo-)philosophy through B‑movie machi­na­tions, couch­ing every dif­fer­en­tial equa­tion with a dis­mem­bered limb, every sci­en­tif­ic read­ing with a shock-rock­er impal­ing. Prince of Dark­ness derives its poten­cy from its inher­ent dis­com­fort and dis­cord, where even the ele­ments that don’t work how they should take on a dif­fer­ent power.

One thing that requires no jux­ta­po­si­tion for its pow­er is the imagery. From low-key creepy (water drip­ping upwards, hun­dreds of cru­ci­fix­es sur­round­ing bot­tled Satan – more sub­tle than it sounds) to axe-to-the-head gris­ly (the worm cup, the bug man, the axe to the head), Car­pen­ter unre­pen­tant­ly goes tac­tile and vis­cer­al in a man­ner only rivalled by The Thing. One image, of a char­ac­ter inside the mir­ror, is Jean Cocteau by way of HP Love­craft – uncan­ny, dev­as­tat­ing and tru­ly haunting.

Beyond all the icon­ic imagery in his films, beyond the ice cream vans and coat hang­ers, the blood tests and eye patch­es, what res­onates most in a Car­pen­ter is the atmos­phere. And nev­er again in one his films would this be so oppres­sive, the fight so futile, the world so lost. What, are you going to out­run this?

For all its sub­lime, crush­ing hor­ror, Prince of Dark­ness remains a pro­found­ly human film. It’s as obsessed with the intri­cate foibles of human nature as it is the intri­cate per­fec­tion of sci­ence. In the begin­ning Vic­tor Wong’s pro­fes­sor argues the sig­nif­i­cance of the lack of order in life. We fool­ish­ly attempt to push order onto noth­ing. Sans irony, the first thing the team attempts with bot­tled Satan is exact­ly that, quan­ti­fy­ing it in terms we have cre­at­ed. The first per­son to fall vic­tim to this evil does so because she’s unsci­en­tif­i­cal­ly not tak­ing care.

More per­son­al­ly, the hes­i­tance that comes with learn­ing every­thing you thought you knew was false – while sort of under­stand­able – ensures every­one is caught on the back foot when Alice Coop­er and co come a‑calling. Less for­giv­able: the char­ac­ters’ ten­den­cy to focus less on the task at hand and more on get­ting lucky with each oth­er. These weak­ness­es dri­ve the plot/​impending doom, but the film remains non-judge­men­tal about them.

It’s a mess of ele­ments, yes, though it ulti­mate­ly works as a sin­gu­lar, hol­low­ing whole. When you’re done with Hal­loween, you check your back seat. When you’re done with Prince of Dark­ness, you check your­self, like the abyss has been star­ing straight back. The late film crit­ic Roger Ebert derid­ed it: ​“We’re threat­ened with Armaged­don, we expect more than peo­ple hit­ting each oth­er.” But the film gets some­thing Ebert didn’t – that evil is so impos­si­bly large the best we’ve got is scrab­bling in the dirt. We’re the apes from 2001: human and fucked. Now that’s darkness.