Skip Halloween and Watch John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy Instead

Estimated reading time: 10 minutes

For general audiences, John Carpenter’s always gonna be most famous for Halloween. But this spooky season, I want to highlight some other examples of the guy’s greatest works, specifically something that stands shoulder to shoulder with Halloween.

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That’s because that thing is actually three things, and one of them is The Thing. I’m talking about John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy, a series of thematically related and narratively unrelated movies he made starting with 1982’s The Thing, continuing with 1987’s Prince of Darkness, and concluding with 1994’s In the Mouth of Madness. For horror fans, there’s no better way to kiss it all goodbye.

The Thing (1982)

Now look, when we move on to the next two movies in the Apocalypse Trilogy, a little of this is gonna become me convincing you why you should check out those slightly underloved entries in Carpenter’s filmography. But The Thing speaks for itself. And it sounds like this: It’s a pillar of both the sci-fi and horror genres and it stands shoulder to shoulder with Halloween as one of John Carpenter’s absolute best movies. It features career-defining performances from both Kurt Russell and Keith David, two of the coolest fuckin’ guys alive, as they battle back a shape-shifting alien organism that assimilates its host. If you haven’t watched The Thing, it’s on you at this point. But what about The Thing in context as the first movie of the Apocalypse Trilogy?

When you think of the term “apocalypse” in film, you probably think of big, sweeping images of desolation. But Carpenter’s view of the end times is a lot more lonely. The very first shot of The Thing is from space, and then we see the alien’s ship crash sometime in the past, but everything else that happens in this story with world-ending stakes is restricted to Antarctica. It calls into focus an element of Carpenter’s apocalyptic storytelling that we’ll see a lot of throughout the trilogy: restricted perspective, the idea that we only have a very narrow view into the fallout of the events being depicted. Carpenter makes lower-budget movies, so his films don’t jump around to every corner of the globe showing you how the events of his stories are reverberating. It’s an inside-looking-out approach where the characters and the audience are handcuffed to each other, processing information together in real time, dreading the larger ramifications of their predicaments in the same way, partly because they can’t see the whole picture. It’s one of the things that makes each movie in the trilogy so intense – all that we can’t see.

And we don’t need anything else: When the magic ’80s computer tells Wilford Brimley’s Blair that the organism will assimilate the entire global population within three years if it can escape Antarctica, it only takes the look on Blair’s face and the knowledge that no help is coming for Carpenter to imbue all that follows with a wild amount of gravity. Every single choice matters and could determine the fate of the human race, so the chaos, mistrust, and rash decisions that follow and leave Outpost 31 in flames is a pretty bleak take on our collective odds at surviving something like this.

Carpenter takes time early in The Thing to humanize the crew of Outpost 31 with specific interests and personality traits, to color them with life and help them stand in for the whole human race as it and they stare down their demise, whether they know it or not. That essential humanity the alien imitations strip away speaks to another thing that binds the Apocalypse Trilogy together: All three of these apocalypses involve a loss of self. It’s not just an end to the human race at stake, it’s also an end to the idea of humanity in each case.

It’s not just an end to the human race at stake, it’s also an end to the idea of humanity in each of these films.

So The Thing contains the end of the world to some easily readable, corporeal boundaries – human bodies, human society. Our next stop on the Apocalypse Trilogy tour contains the end of the world in an ancient glass jar full of swirling green Satan goo! And that shit’s starting to leak!

Prince of Darkness (1987)

There are signs in the sky, in the earth, and in the little treasure box of a dying priest that something wicked this way comes in Prince of Darkness. That treasure box contains a key to a church in Los Angeles that houses the Catholic Church’s greatest secret: Throughout history, they’ve maintained a sealed vessel that imprisons what’s essentially liquid Satan. The priest who inherits this secret breaks that cycle of silence and enlists a college physics professor and his grad students to use modern science and tech to help keep the evil contained. If there’s one thing we know about John Carpenter movies in which Donald Pleasance is trying to contain evil, it’s that the evil will not be contained. The film’s also got an operatic synth score, some killer surreal imagery, and, again, the antagonist is a glass jar full of swirling green Satan goo.

Prince of Darkness isn’t so dissimilar from The Thing in its construction: It focuses on a small group of people trapped somewhere who are going up against a force they can’t fully comprehend, and that force begins to corrupt and turn them against one another. But where it’s easy enough to wrap your head around The Thing’s idea of the apocalypse – aliens take over the human race, no more humans – the nature of Prince of Darkness’ apocalypse is much murkier, which is sort of the point. Prince of Darkness is full of debate about the nature of anti-matter, centered around the conceit that if there’s a God that moves particles around in our universe, there must be an anti-God that does the same for anti-matter and maybe that anti-God lives in a mirror universe. And maybe that mirror universe is a literal mirror universe. So what happens at the end of the day if the students are unsuccessful? How exactly will the world end?

That’s one of the stronger elements of Prince of Darkness, and it comes in the form of a shared dream everyone starts to have in the church, one which the priests who’ve protected the church have already experienced. Except it’s not actually a dream; it’s a neural transmission from 13 years in the future, imploring whoever is seeing it to do whatever it takes to prevent the images that they’re seeing. In that way, Prince of Darkness represents its apocalypse from both the beginning and the end. The fact that the transmission reaches the characters at all – piped right into their subconsciouses from over a decade in the future – forces the audience to imagine what laws of nature are even still in effect, how far humanity has fallen, and how bad it must be out there if it’s anything like what’s currently happening inside the church.

It goes back to that idea of restricted perspective – Carpenter only gives us a view of this apocalypse from inside the church, with the only exception being a premonition from a future in which the heroes have already lost. It invites us to extrapolate the movie’s events out to a global scale, one in which classical reality has completely shattered and VHS-quality postcards from the future are the last weapon the uncorrupted have in their arsenal. That message from the future may be from the very last person who hasn’t been possessed.

Prince of Darkness is a much weirder and esoteric chapter of the Apocalypse Trilogy than The Thing… but the final movie in the Apocalypse Trilogy rewrites the whole book and then lights it on fire.

Oh, by the way… do you read Sutter Cane?

In the Mouth of Madness (1994)

The final movie of John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy is without a doubt the weirdest and gosh, I love it for that. In the Mouth of Madness stars Sam Neill as John Trent, an insurance investigator who’s hired to track down missing horror author Sutter Cane – a character basically standing in for Stephen King – just weeks before his latest novel is due to hit shelves. Cane’s books are known to drive his readers crazy… more so lately. Trent’s investigation leads him to Hobbs End, New Hampshire, a town that shouldn’t exist… because it’s a fictional location from Cane’s novels. How does a real man drive to a fictional town? So begins In the Mouth of Madness’ myriad questions about the nature of sanity and reality.

All three of the Apocalypse Trilogy movies have a strong cosmic horror streak – that is, the horror of the imperceivable, the unknowable, the surreal, old gods emerging from the yawning abyss, that sort of thing. In the Mouth of Madness really leads with that and Carpenter uses every trick in the horror filmmaking playbook to drive Trent to insanity after he arrives in Hobbs End: repeated imagery, time slips, time loops, old ladies who wouldn’t hurt a fly that… Oh Jesus, what is she!? With a comparatively ripping pace, In the Mouth of Madness is the most bombastic of the Apocalypse Trilogy, and promises that the end of the world will not come with a bang, or a whimper, but with Sam Neill laughing maniacally in a movie theater in what may be one of the best cinematic examples of “if you can’t beat em, join em.”

In that way, In the Mouth of Madness is a perfect end to John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy. John Trent is established early on as the kind of guy who only believes what he can see and feel, and certainly not as someone who would like the horror crap Sutter Cane pumps out. But his hard opinions and ideas about the world aren’t going to be enough to save him from Sutter Cane’s impossible influence – as Julie Carmen’s Styles says: “Sane and insane could easily switch places if were the insane to become the majority.” That’s the end of the world that Carpenter tracks through In the Mouth of Madness: the end of not just a planet, or a universe, but of the fabric of reality itself. Cane’s ability to rewrite reality is presented as a chicken-or-the-egg proposition; we never find out just how he’s able to wield this amount of control, but there’s something wonderfully nihilistic to knowing Trent never had a chance to turn things around, to intercede in this complete collapse of society. He just wasn’t written that way.

The Apocalypse Trilogy is a bit of a misnomer: The name calls to mind grandiose visions of Earth’s final days, but John Carpenter’s films are rarely interested in playing out death and destruction on a scale that grand. He’s more interested in the loss of what we know, what we’re confident in, what we can agree on, and what we believe about ourselves. He’s a big softy.