John Carpenter’s highly underrated 1987 film Prince of Darkness is easily his weirdest to date, and here’s what inspired that strangeness. When it comes to horror, Carpenter is definitely a filmmaker worthy of the genre’s hall of fame, if such a body existed. Even if Carpenter’s contribution to the horror genre began and ended with 1978 masterpiece Halloween, he could still claim to have made an enormous impact. But it didn’t end there, with terrific films like The Thing, In the Mouth of Madness, and The Fog still to come.
One of Carpenter’s most unjustly overlooked efforts is Prince of Darkness, although it’s not hard to see why, releasing as it did between two Carpenter cult classics in 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China and 1988’s They Live. Horror has never been low on films concerning Satan, as The Devil is genuinely seen as the ultimate source of evil, at least by those who subscribe to the Christian faiths that dominate the American populace. However, Prince of Darkness accomplished the feat of interpreting Satan in a new, creative way, allowing for surprising and unexpected dramatic results.
While Prince of Darkness sports a decent-sized fanbase today, at the time of its release, Carpenter’s film came and went without much fanfare, earning middling reviews and failing to make much of a dent at the box office. It’s a fate sadly shared by many of the director’s films, although at least they often end up getting their due later. Here’s what inspired Carpenter to create Prince of Darkness.
Prince of Darkness: What Inspired John Carpenter’s Weirdest Film
In Prince of Darkness, a priest (Halloween’s Donald Pleasance) invites quantum physics professor Howard Birack (Big Trouble in Little China’s Victor Wong) and a group of graduate students to an an old church after the discovery of something puzzling. In the church’s basement rests a large cylinder filled with a mysterious green substance, which turns out to be the essence of Satan himself, who seeks to possess and use the students in an attempt to bring his father the “anti-God” to Earth. It’s a crazy premise, and unlike anything else John Carpenter did before or since.
According to Carpenter himself, Prince of Darkness was partially inspired by the 1980 Italian horror film Inferno, directed by Dario Argento. Like many of Argento’s more surreal films, Inferno wasn’t too concerned with logical plot progression or narrative cohesion, instead operating on a sort of nightmare logic. Carpenter found that form freeing, and embraced the opportunity to direct something more of that nature, in which he wouldn’t have to constrain his creativity to fit a conventional narrative. As for Prince of Darkness’ subject matter, Carpenter had become fascinated at the time by theoretical physics and atomic theory, and became intrigued by the idea of combining those scientific notions with the concept of some type of ultimate evil, in the vein of Satan. Stylistically, Carpenter’s script for Prince of Darkness was inspired by the works of noted British screenwriter Nigel Kneale, who had earlier contributed to the script for Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.
More: Black Christmas Inspired John Carpenter’s Original Halloween
