Triple Threat: John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy

A story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Maybe that’s why the trilogy is such a satisfying structure for so many epic series or curious corners of cinema history. This year in Triple Threat, Ken Lowe revisits another of cinema’s best trilogies each month, including some unofficial trilogies that have come to define a director, actor, or time in film history. You can follow the series here.

John Carpenter hasn’t been truly active since 2010’s The Ward, and cinema is poorer for it. Some directors who come up through B-movies cast aside their ruder, edgier impulses to ease their way into mainstream success. In decades of grungy gross-out sci-fi fantasy horror, Carpenter never compromised. Even as his budget and his audience grew, he still poured on the gallons of blood, body horror, and sledgehammer social commentary.

By 1982, Carpenter had directed iconic films like Assault on Precinct 13, Halloween and Escape from New York—stuff that’s been remade (poorly), fired the imaginations of other creators in other media, or completely redefined genres. The Thing, Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness are not by any means the only movies from Carpenter that could be argued deal with the end of the world—Escape from New York, Escape from L.A. and even They Live, to name a few, also play in the end times, or at least during the end of the world order. In those latter films, though, the destructive influence is a recognizably human sort of evil, and it’s of an oppressive and authoritarian sort: Even the aliens in They Live basically read as Reagan-era hyper-capitalists.

But, in the movies film writers have come to call John Carpenter’s Apocalypse Trilogy, there are indeed malign outside influences, but that’s not what’s causing everything to break down and doom mankind. It’s our own failings—of trust, of faith, of individual critical thought—that are going to screw us if we ever have to stand up to some unknowable force from beyond the void.

Straddling the ‘80s and ‘90s, Carpenter’s trilogy centers on three classic boogeymen of the apocalypse: Menacing aliens, Cthulhu-like outsider gods, and freaking Satan. All are mysterious, all are in what mystery writers would call a “cozy” situation where the victims/suspects are all confined together, and in all three films the only thing standing in their way are a skittish group of people who seem no more capable of handling it than you or I would be. These are grim, gross, nasty movies without a lot of hope. They’ve never really been Carpenter’s most successful films, but taken together and regarded side by side, they’re some of his most unforgettable.

The Movies

The Thing, one of the most fiercely unique-looking movies Universal ever greenlit, began as an exercise in trying to milk an intellectual property—like so many studio projects. Attempts to remake the novel on which 1951’s The Thing from Another World was based began in the 1970s, and at different points, Tobe Hooper and John Landis were attached to direct the project. But nobody liked their pitches, and the thing was shelved until a little film called Alien tore up the box office and suddenly made sci-fi horror seem a bankable conceit again. Carpenter, fresh off his success from Halloween, was attached.

It’s hard to imagine what the hell kind of film we might have gotten had Carpenter not turned the project around and employed Rob Bottin as his effects supervisor—at various points, Walter Hill and Sam Peckinpah were also being considered. Instead we got one of the absolute ickiest horror movies in memory. Set at an Antarctic research station, the film follows a group of isolated American scientists that include Kurt Russell, Keith David, Wilford Brimley and Donald Moffat as disaster descends upon them. A group of Norwegian researchers chase a dog into the American camp, shooting at it to no avail before their inability to communicate brings about their demise. The Americans shelter the dog and go investigate the burnt-out, destroyed Norwegian camp, and a remote site the Norwegians were investigating.

The Norwegians have dug up a spaceship that appears to be 100,000 years old, and a creature that has been frozen in the ice for just as long. It turns out that this alien lifeform is a predator that absorbs its prey, and then perfectly mimics it. It’s the universe’s most devastatingly effective ambush predator, and if it isn’t stopped, it’ll take over the whole world in a matter of months. That’s a classic paranoiac 1950s Cold War-era premise, of course. But that is not the kind of movie Carpenter is here to direct, because the creature is not left to the imagination at all.

Audiences did not go for The Thing in 1982, at least not enough to make it a success. Critics of the time largely savaged it, and I guess I can see why: It’s a gross, seemingly nihilistic movie on the surface, one in which Russell and the other victims are trying and failing to stop a nightmarish enemy that outwits and outmaneuvers them again and again. You get the unmistakable sense that the creature doesn’t even feel malice in the same way you or I do, but in the way a tiger or an anglerfish does: The Thing’s mimicry is no different to it than stripes or a bioluminescent appendage, and it’s way, way scarier as a result.

I say it was seemingly nihilistic. The straight-laced critics of the time failed to pick up the tragedy of the ending, and Carpenter’s profound awareness of the ending’s tragedy: Two men who should be friends, paranoid and unsure of one another, sitting in the wreckage they’ve created, doomed to die no matter what, because they’ve been undone by distrust and the inability to unite in the face of a force that will absolutely kill them. It’s not like Carpenter is cheering the ending.

Whatever the normies felt about it at the time, though, The Thing made an indelible mark on film history. Every film fan of a certain disposition has sought this thing out, perhaps in a double feature alongside The Evil Dead—if anything, it is a movie made for the YouTube age, where a single unhinged clip of it, like the one above, has got to convince people to seek out the entire work. It also must be said that it has benefited from the latter-day appreciation of Brimley’s career, rating as it has among his many utterly bonkers appearances.

Two things were going on for Carpenter going into 1987’s Prince of Darkness. He was studying quantum physics, and he had scored a deal with Alive Pictures, to get $3 million dollar per movie to produce three features—truly a treasure trove for a guy like Carpenter. Prince of Darkness follows a group of physicist students as, holed up in an abandoned church in New York, they assist a Catholic priest (Donald Pleasence, Carpenter’s mightiest genre soldier) who is a member of a secretive order that has been guarding a tube filled with some vile substance for the past 2,000 years. The formerly inert substance has become active, and Pleasence is certain that it may herald the end of his faith and the world.

The scientists, who are all horny youngsters, go to work analyzing the substance and translating the archaic tomes left behind to explain what the hell the stuff is as Pleasence and the students’ professor (Victor Wong himself!) debate the irreconcilability of Wong’s science to Pleasence’s religion. Pleasence believes the substance to be nothing less than the son of Satan himself, approaching some convergence that will allow it to draw its father back from beyond the darkness. The situation turns murderous as the malign substance starts leaking out and driving people to violence in an effort to breach the barrier and let the Prince of Darkness back in.

You can see how the movie was made on the cheap, with its limited sets and situations. It’s no The Thing—no movie is The Thing except for The Thing—but it’s easy to see why Carpenter calls this part of a trilogy of the same movies. It’s an unknowable malign influence breaching its way into our world, and the only people standing in its way aren’t up to the task of defeating it. 

Somewhat ironically, the $3 million film’s $14 million box office take means it’s really the only financial success story of the bunch.

Carpenter passed on In the Mouth of Madness at first, but later signed on after Michael de Luca’s script got shopped around unsuccessfully for years. On a modest $8 million budget, he was able to produce a story that, more so than a lot of other works that namecheck Lovecraft, is actually Lovecraftian in its conceits and execution.

Locked away in a rubber room where he’s adorned every surface and his own body in crosses, Sam Neill is visited by a psych, and relates to him his story of madness. As the insurance sector’s mightiest claims investigator (this was written in the ‘80s, wasn’t it?), Neill is assigned his creepiest case yet: Hunting down a reclusive writer, Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), who, according to the literal dialogue, is bigger than Stephen King and the Bible. Folks are making a run on bookstores because his final manuscript is late and the books are on backorder.

With Cane’s agent (Julie Carmen) in tow, Neill drives out into the rural Northeast—the film was shot on locations that are clear homages to the smalltown Northeastern dread of King and Lovecraft both. Once there, reality seems to unravel and become more and more suffused with the weirdness of Cane’s novels, until Neill can’t even be entirely certain he’s not an invention of the author. The movie ends by breaking the fourth wall, after the entire world has already succumbed to the madness of Cane’s vision.

The story is part of the growing awareness of H.P. Lovecraft’s works in the late part of the 20th century, works which were a clear influence on this and other ‘90s films. It feels like this, combined with the Nintendo GameCube’s Eternal Darkness just a handful of years later, signaled Lovecraft’s dominance of popular culture. (David Warner’s appearance here and in Cast a Deadly Spell means that, among his other claims to fame, he’s been in not one but two 1990s Lovecraft-inspired movies!)

Best Entry

No surprises here: As great as these are to watch in release order, there’s a clear winner here from a pacing, scripting and legacy standpoint. The Thing is simply the longest-lasting and most indelible work among these three.

Unofficial Trilogy Notes

Speaking at a screening of his trilogy, Carpenter said his early exposure to the Bible (particularly Revelations) and the concept of the atomic bomb during his boyhood left an impression on him and got him thinking about the end of things. The movies, he said, aren’t just about the end of a character, but “the order of things, the world, life on this world.”

“I found out we had the capacity to destroy ourselves: We did, human beings,” Carpenter said of a thought that upset him and stayed with him through the decades.

Marathon Potential

This trio is a great one for a rowdy night with friends. My personal recommendation is to go in reverse release order, since the movies’ general quality improves in this order. The Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness is a good old-timey place to start, the paranoid and a bit more slowly paced Prince of Darkness is an easy middle film to have on while everybody gets into the snacks and drinks, and topping it all off with the spectacle of The Thing will make sure you finish strong.

Join us next month as we hoist the French flag for Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Three Colors Trilogy.

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Kenneth Lowe is projected to infect the entire world population 27,000 hours from first contact. You can follow him on Twitter @IllusiveKen until it collapses, on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social, and read more at his blog.