This article was written for the fantastically-named Zombie Hamster website, which specialised - naturally - in horror.
In the late 1800s, Britain started to destroy itself. Not in the streets, but on paper. A slew of novels and short stories began to appear that imagined the end of the empire, which, in the British imagination, was tantamount to the end of creation. War of the Worlds is arguably the most famous, but there was also After London, The Purple Cloud, and The Night Land, in all of which either war, pestilence, famine or aliens reduced the centre of European civilisation to rubble. It was almost as if, at the height of its powers, all the empire's visionaries became fascinated with its inevitable collapse, almost willing the responsibility to be over and done with.
Flash forward to the modern day, and we find America churning out spectacles of armageddon, whether environmental (2012, The Day After Tomorrow), political (Red Dawn, White House Down), or cosmic (Independence Day, Battle Los Angeles). The same self-destructive impulse is evident, an almost gleeful tearing down of cultural monoliths and audience security. Of course, these films, like many of their Hollywood counterparts, hark back to an earlier genre tradition of the 1970s – in this case, the much-maligned “disaster movie”, in which sundry stars chugging their way towards a pension would cope with earthquakes, volcanoes, burning buildings or capsizing passenger liners. The emphasis, though, was on special effects, and the guilty pleasure of seeing Charlton Heston or Fred Astaire drenched by gallons of water in the name of popular entertainment. There was no sense of wider danger to the world, only to the hardy band of survivors in the cast list. By contrast, modern disaster movies will only settle for total apocalypse.
In between these two “imaginations of disaster” is the work of John Carpenter, who neatly bridges the two periods under discussion - his first feature appeared in 1974, his latest in 2010 – and throughout, there is a fascination with the end of the world. It kicks off in Dark Star with a talking nuclear bomb, right at the height of the Cold War. But it's not until Carpenter's second film, Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), that we start to see the peculiar direction his apocalyptic vision will take.
Assault is not a disaster movie as such, more an urban thriller remake of Rio Bravo (1959), but it's built around that ultimate middle-class fear – the collapse of law and order. When a group of criminals are massacred by the police, their fellow gang members lay siege to a local police station in the process of shutting down. Through this simple scenario, Carpenter sets out his stall for most of the movies to come. The setting is a landscape of the worst kind of urban deprivation where anarchy rules; at the centre, a diverse group of people joining forces in a base-under-siege. The thugs who attack them don't have names, dialogue, even a clear leader – they could be an enemy army or the walking dead – scuttling, faceless, among the shadows, stealthily advancing. And the composition of our band of heroes is significant; their leader is a black cop, an extremely unusual protagonist and centre of audience identification even in the era of Blaxploitation, and to survive, he must team up with a ruthless criminal – a white “bad guy” - to repel the forces of darkness.
In the end, the team wins out. But by the time we get to The Fog (1980), something has shifted in Carpenter's perspective. This time, the line between heroes and villains is blurred; as a bunch of maggot-ridden dead sailors descend on the pretty seaside resort of Antonio Bay, the vicar discovers the reason – that they were betrayed and murdered by the town's ancestors – and that the happy, civilised image of the place is a sham, built on foundations of deceit. Carpenter thus makes us pessimistic about what is being fought for; the restoration of order in Assault is now the restoration of a lie, the protection of a society that has killed in order to prosper.
This new pessimism deepens as Carpenter's fantasies of devastation become wilder and more baroque. In Escape From New York (1981), America abandons even its most superficial veneer of respectability and turns its major city into a gigantic prison whose inmates are allowed to run free and create whatever society they choose. But it's in The Thing (1982), which Carpenter himself dubbed the first in his “Apocalypse Trilogy”, where that pessimism reaches its zenith. Once again, a group of disparate protagonists – scientists, doctors, pilots – trapped in one location, an Antarctic base, try to work together to combat an enemy force. But the nature of that enemy – an alien that can take over the form of any creature which which it comes into contact – disables their sense of cohesion as they realise that any one of their colleagues could be contaminated and therefore hostile. The professional roles and discipline that helped secure the police station in Assault now collapse as mutual mistrust and fear sets in. The stakes have also been raised - the scientists realise that they must struggle not just for their own survival, but for that of the entire human race, who would be at the creature's mercy if it reached civilisation. And as if to cement the severity of this doomsday scenario, Carpenter completely inverts the “buddy” dynamic he set up in Assault; now, at the end of the film, the white hero faces his black colleague in the burning, wrecked remains of their world, both facing certain death, and they can't even share a bottle of whisky without the trace of suspicion, because even their own saliva, possibly carrying the cells of the multi-nucleate alien organism, might betray them.
The Thing was Carpenter's calling card to the major studios. After its failure, he changed tack and tried courting popularity with more upbeat fare, in the process turning out three of his least interesting films. I can't help feeling it's significant that when Carpenter tired of big budget production and returned to independent filmmaking, he returned to the theme of Apocalypse with a vengeance.
Prince of Darkness (1987), the second in the “Apocalypse Trilogy”, is both a restatement of Carpenter's identity as a filmmaker and a conscious development of his themes in a new direction. On the one hand, he reprises the base-under-siege format and sets it in urban wasteland. And once again, a church, as in The Fog, becomes both the locus of the action and the source of its mystery. In fact, from this point on, churches become central to Carpenter's mythology. Just as the vicar in the former film found a tome buried in the walls which provided the secret of the ghostly invasion of Antonio Bay, so here a mysterious canister buried for years deep in a church crypt proves to be the container of Satan himself and the explanation for a series of violent natural phenomena. And just as the sailors' diary in The Fog brought to light the moral turpitude of the town's ancestors, so the existence of the canister upends the assumptions of both the religious and scientific community in Prince of Darkness: for the scientists, because it defies their analysis of physical data, and for Donald Pleasance's priest, because he discovers that the church has kept its secret for centuries and deliberately founded its entire religion on a series of untruths so as to prevent the canister's discovery. In other words, the church is a place where we discover the Truth – and the truth is, it was all a pack of lies. Carpenter returns to this theme again in They Live (1988), when the choir singing from a city church turns out to be taped music on a loop, a cover for a guerilla operation transmitting a pirate TV channel that tells its audience the “truth” about who's really running the country. And as for In The Mouth of Madness (1994), well, all hell breaks loose in that church. But we'll get to that in a moment.
The important point is that the “secret truth” revealed this time undermines our sense of reality itself. Suddenly, the twin foundations of our civilisation that both lay claim to the “truth” - science and religion – and wildly differing versions of the truth at that – are utterly confounded and totally lose their bearings. In their confusion, they become unusual allies – a strange new configuration of Assault's “buddy” dynamic of opposites teaming up. And what they're struggling with is a new kind of Apocalypse, one that threatens not only our physical survival, but our mental understanding of the world and our relationship to it.
Ultimately, however, they survive (for a while at least) and the crisis of faith is contained within the framework of the narrative. But from They Live onwards, Carpenter begins to explore this theme in radically new ways, questioning the nature of reality to the point where even the film itself becomes unstable. Carpenter's most overtly political movie, They Live literalises the ultimate truck driver's conspiracy theory of the way the world works – everything's run by an untouchable elite who exploit us, and they exploit us because they're aliens. How do they do it? It's the media, man, the fuckin' media. When Roddy Piper's character dons a pair of sunglasses stolen from the church mentioned above, he suddenly sees the messages and signals hidden in adverts and popular magazines – CONFORM, OBEY, MARRY AND REPRODUCE – and that the guys in expensive suits are skull-faced aliens. Real fuckin' ugly aliens, too. The rise of the discontented masses has never been far away in Carpenter – from the young hoodlums seemingly omnipresent on the streets of Assault, to the homeless vagabonds who become Satan's army in Prince of Darkness (a genius touch). These masses may be faceless but Carpenter – that rare thing in American cinema, a genuinely blue collar director – clearly sympathises with their social plight and revels in their moments of chaos. Here, that sympathy boils over into a call for outright revolution. And indeed, it's telling that the ensuing “social apocalypse” reignites Carpenter's optimism for the first time since “Assault”, and the positive “buddy” dynamic returns, albeit in the most peculiar way: what other American film can boast a six-minute scene where a black guy and a white guy beat the crap out of each other so the white guy can show his black brother how they're both being mutually oppressed?
But in cinematic terms, there is a much more subtle revolution going on. When Piper looks through the glasses, the screen turns to black and white; when he takes them off, we return to “normal” colour. Through the dark lenses, we see a world fantastical, full of alien machines and weird creatures, but which we know to be true; by contrast, when the image returns to normal, filled with the paraphernalia of everyday life, we know what we are looking at is false. Our entire security in what we see, in what our senses tell us, has been destabilised. And crucially, so has our trust in the narrative integrity of the image; now it is a slippery index of reality, a construct built on dubious foundations.
Cue the third in the “Apocalypse Trilogy”, In The Mouth of Madness. For what is madness but the destabilisation of our wits and senses to the point where different constructs of reality merge and interact? Only, in this, his most thematically ambitious film, Carpenter raises the stakes even further. What if the reality we are trying to get back to while consumed with madness has itself gone mad? As one character puts it, if everyone in the world believes something and you are the only one left who believes the opposite, even if it is, to you at least, demonstrably true, are you not by definition insane? We can see an allegory of religion galloping over the horizon towards us at this point, so let's go back to church, in this case, a modern-built Greek Orthodox church (and a quite brilliantly chosen location, gleamingly new, but also strangely antique and sinister). In this church, a successful novelist, Sutter Cane, sits writing horror stories, stories that have a habit of coming true. He invents a town called Hobb's End and the church becomes part of it, he depicts monsters and they turn up everywhere. In short, he is creating a new reality. This reality in turn takes its energy from an old, forgotten one – the time of the Old Ones, gods from a dark dimension (like the one in Prince of Darkness) waiting to return to “our world” (reality being so troublesome a concept here that inverted commas become essential), the secret of their existence once again hidden in the walls of the church.
Meanwhile, in “our” reality, a wily, worldwise insurance investigator (Sam Neill) is hunting down Sutter Cane to expose his disappearance as an outrageous publicity stunt. But at Hobbs End, the investigator is forced to recognise the...er...truth of Cane's powers, the writer-necromancer happily making clear that pesky religious allegory. Yes, folks, it's the power of the Word, the Word is the Lord and all that. The writing of a new version of Truth which causes manic fervour in its readers, changes not just their belief system, but their mental disposition, and therefore generates a whole new society, utterly barbaric in this case but also wholly real and self-justified because the word that is its Law is also the very substance of the world's existence. In short, the ultimate triumph of Artifice, of Art dictating Life, Sutter Cane literally writing himself out of existence to create the hole through which his Masters can make their way into “our” universe (those commas again).
The problem for Carpenter is how to represent this apocalypse cinematically, and to do so, he breaks the fourth wall in style. Slowly, Sam Neill's character realises that he's just that, a “character”, the protagonist of the fiction that Cane is writing, the fiction that is becoming a reality Neill wants to deny even though his own existence is dependent on it. And so, at the end of the film, what does he do? He wanders into a cinema where In The Mouth Of Madness is showing and joins us, the audience, as a spectator. Now our reality is his, and his is Cane's, and...The End. Literally. For both the movie and the world. In fact, Carpenter anticipated this trick in They Live; when the signal distorting viewers' perceptions is disrupted by Piper, we hear a TV announcer berating the films of “George Romero and John Carpenter” for being too violent. It's a nice little in-joke, but it points up the idea of the wall between film and audience being permeable; in Mouth of Madness, that wall is smashed down.
Surely that is the ultimate apocalypse – the narrative and the form by which it is brought to the screen collapsing together into a single chaos? Surely Carpenter couldn't take his strategy any further, especially in years, which by common consent, saw a decline in his work? But maybe he had just one more trick up his sleeve. Nearly a decade later, after the debacle of Escape From LA (1996) and Vampire$ (1998), he made what seemed like an apologetic throwback to his early glory days – Ghosts of Mars (2001). An ostensible remake of Assault, it features a small posse of law enforcers forced to defend a remote outpost from the “masses”, this time, working men (miners), but who just happen to be possessed by long-buried extraterrestrial ghosts. And once again, the protagonist (a gutsy, gun-toting female replacing the black officer as unusual new action hero) is forced to team up with a mean-ass bad guy (Ice Cube, neatly inverting the white-black “buddy” dynamic of the first film). With its rock soundtrack, dodgy supporting performances and endless sexist banter from Jason Statham, it felt to most critics like a lazy, underpowered shoot-'em-up from a once great cult director.
In fact, it's Carpenter's last winning ace, and his most underrated film. Its genius lies in the way it takes the collapse of narrative from In The Mouth of Madness and threads it through the entire DNA of the movie. So what appears to be a hokey, straightforward story on the surface, on examination, completely falls apart, to the point where we realise that everything we are seeing could be a lie. Take the main character played by Natasha Henstridge (defying her image as “That blonde who got hired to show herself off in Species” and giving a superb, committed performance). She is our narrator of events, but we seen realise the version she is feeding to the tribunal assessing her conduct, is peppered with little untruths, because we see her acting subtly differently in the visual flashbacks. She fails to mention she's addicted to drugs and that she was quite conscious when Ice Cube handcuffs her to the bed in the final act. But then, which version should we as viewers trust? Why should we assume the visual information is correct and the spoken report a falsehood?
Furthermore, the visual narrative we are witness to is itself only a “re-enactment” of various reports. Throughout the film, different characters take on the job of telling the story – Jason Statham sees the death of Pam Grier, Ice Cube's accomplices see the contamination of the miners. The visuals merely correspond to their version of events. And the reason these characters have to fill the holes in the narrative is because our chief narrator, Henstridge, misses so much. At seemingly every crucial point of the narrative, either she is not at the location where the action is taking place or she's been knocked out and is unconscious, meaning there are also large ellipses of time where she and us are really not sure what's been happening. Carpenter cheekily points up the unlikeliness of her missing every dramatic beat of the story. In one scene, Statham, who has been consistently hitting on Henstridge (wearisomely) throughout the movie, suddenly hits the jackpot, when he draws her into an enclosed room and she blithely decides to go along with him. Just then, they hear a gunshot. Henstridge quickly opens the door to find her junior officer has killed her prisoner, which, like Henstridge's sudden lust for Statham, seems unmotivated and violently out-of-character. You can almost hear Carpenter chuckling at our credulity, our desperate attempts to make sense of events, when really the whole point is there is no sense.
Even the form of the film helps to augment the sense of an unstable perspective. On several occasions, Carpenter makes use of dissolves instead of straight cuts in the editing. One moment – the team creeping out of a doorway – is measured out across three dissolves, giving it a blurred quality, a lack of definition unusual in an action movie. It's as if time is malleable and the events within it dreamlike – the fevered imaginings of the drug addict's mind...?
The last scene might be seen as an indulgent rock 'n' roll kiss-off with Henstridge and Ice Cube packing big guns and going to off to kick some ass. But I think it is the key to the whole film. Henstridge wakes in a hospital bed, looking troubled. We saw her stretchered into the room at the beginning of the movie – has she only just woken, the intervening events just a bad dream? We hear screaming outside – the Apocalypse is coming. Ice Cube enters and says “The tide is up”, his euphemism for shit hitting the fan, throws Henstridge a gun and they stroll off together to “do what we do best”. And just as the picture fades to black, Ice Cube turns to camera and gives a little smile. This is a game, folks. Oh, and haven't we been played! “Do what we do best”? Have they been in cahoots for longer than we thought? Perhaps they were always partners, her drug addiction signalling a possible mutual interest? Perhaps the entire story about Martian ghosts is a pack of lies and the screaming from outside is thanks to Ice Cube's hoodlums creating merry hell?
The point is, we just don't know. Absolutely any reading of this apparently straightforward film is viable. Ghosts of Mars is itself a ghost, an insubstantial record of events, whose true story may or may not lie hidden within the fabric of the narrative, like an ancient book buried within the walls of a church. This is Carpenter's final and most devastating apocalypse, one where nothing is reliable, no fact can be taken for granted, and film itself, despite its apparent material realism, dissolves into nothingness, a gaping black hole of uncertainty where truth is entirely absent.
Since Ghosts, Carpenter has produced little. Cigarette Burns (2005) had Udo Kier disembowelling himself by means of a cinema projector – a pithy personal and cinephile apocalypse – while The Ward (2010) seemed like a postscript to an entertaining career, though it did at least return Carpenter to the theme of insanity and a fractured perception of the world. But his warnings of impending doom seem to have dried up. Perhaps because they were ignored. Like the TV prophets in They Live or the last sane man alive in In The Mouth of Madness, he was trying to wake people up, to look through the veil of reality embroidered by the Reagan regime or the modern media, and perceive a wider truth, and perhaps encourage them to fight for it together, like “buddies”. But just as the human turncoats in They Live deliberately turned “a blind eye” to the aliens' exploitation so they too could enjoy the profits from it, so the audience seems to have bought into, or agreed to accept, the consumerist-capitalist culture so graphically satirised in that movie. A culture whose most ostentatious symbol of excess is Hollywood itself, the film factory, churning out images of stars to emulate, fashion to wear, lifestyles to aspire to. And which, in its disaster movies, perversely revels in the destruction of those lifestyles, just like the British did all those years ago. And look what happened to the British.