Review of Prince of Darkness (1987) by M G — 09 Apr 2012

I have never seen a more suspenseful ending to a horror film. This intellectual horror film written by Martin Quartermass attempts to resuscitate the concept of evil by grounding it in modern knowledge of quantum mechanics. If you can get past the cheesy and gratuitous gore, the idea driving the film is elegant.

This is a very different type of horror film. This is a more conceptual horror film that gets you involved intellectually and delivers some images that are as aesthetically interesting as they are scary. The priest and the interdisciplinary team of university scientists converge on an answer to a question of cosmic scale and impact for the entire human race. The thin veneer of sciences provides just enough plausibility for you to suspend disbelief in -- and even revitalize -- an idea of evil that has grown stale over decades of filmmaking. In this film evil is not an exotic substance that invades us from a categorically distinct realm we call "supernatural" but rather an extension of what is known about the physical world in which we live. It's simply something science and mathematics has not yet caught up with and can get there with a little interdisciplinary coordination and creative problem solving. So you'll hear concepts on the fringes of modern physics tossed around in this film like tachyons (i.e., particles that move faster than speed of light) and anti-matter.

Carpenter takes PRINCE OF DARKNESS to another level midway through the slow-burning film with the intriduction of a dream that is shared among the team but which all agree does not appear to come from their subconscious. The cinematography of this dream is superb and the mystery of its meaning provides some forward-moving momentum that will sustain the plot until a 30-minute series of climactic events that provides some of the best suspense ever seen in a horror film (making this perhaps one of the few good films in the action horror genre). And the ending does not disappoint!

Along with Salems Lot (1979), A Haunting in Connecticut (docudrama, 2002), The Shining (1980), Mothman Prophecies (2000), Race with the Devil (1974), and Melancholia (2011), this is one of my favorite horror films.