The Oral History Of In the Mouth of Madness

John Carpenter’s In The Mouth of Madness may well be the greatest pure cosmic horror film of all time.

As a difficult genre to pin down by definition, cosmic horror (sometimes called weird fiction) often features the emergence of vast, powerful, sometimes reality-altering forces into our world, usually provoking an apocalyptic-grade threat. Much of cosmic horror is traced to the early 20th century writers H.P. Lovecraft and Robert W. Chambers and their influence on authors like Stephen King, Clive Barker, Thomas Ligotti, or Laird Barron is crystal clear. But on the big screen, you could say cosmic horror’s biggest influences began with John Carpenter’s The Thing.

In the 1982 sci-fi horror movie, a group of American scientists in a remote Antarctica research station stumble upon an alien of untold powers that can take over a biological body with little more than a molecule of its own. The apocalyptic threat this poses is clear, and the fact that it landed in the mostly unpopulated regions of Antarctica is a blessing — until it’s not. In its depiction of inhuman entities that threaten to escape its isolated locale and destroy all of global civilization, The Thing would set the stage for future apocalyptic cosmic terrors in the likes of Prince of Darkness, Event Horizon, The Void, Annihilation, and Underwater.

“It's really hard to get a Lovecraftian feel without relying on ‘the unspeakable and unknowable horror.’”

While The Thing is clearly his most influential work in this vein, it’s 1995’s In The Mouth of Madness that most completely renders the elements of cosmic horror on the silver screen. The rampage of cosmic terrors that come to reclaim our world, driving protagonist John Trent (played by a brilliant, anxiety-ridden Sam Neill) to the brink while warping reality into an apocalyptic hellscape, is straight out of Lovecraft (whose At The Mountains of Madness clearly inspired the title of Carpenter’s Madness). Even better, the film’s finale sees Trent realize Sutter Cane’s power has fully subsumed Trent’s own life and every event we’ve seen, making Madness the boldest exemplar of the genre’s reality-bending tendencies in film history. It’s a masterpiece — but one that doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It was far ahead of its time when the film premiered three decades ago, and it’s still at the forefront of cosmic horror film history.

To celebrate the film’s 30th anniversary, Inverse spoke to producer Sandy King Carpenter and members of the cast and crew to tell the story of In the Mouth of Madness. (Sam Neill and Director John Carpenter declined to participate.)

The Beginnings of Madness

Madness was written in the late 1980s by New Line Cinema exec Michael De Luca, who first approached Carpenter to direct it in 1988. He turned it down at the time, but was approached again in November 1992 while preparing to direct his segments of the anthology Body Bags, officially signing on in December ‘92.

Sandy King Carpenter: We wound up doing three back-to-back projects, Body Bags, Village of the Damned, and In the Mouth of Madness, and the In the Mouth of Madness script needed a lot of work, so John worked on it with De Luca. I think that's what then finally made it into more of something that interested him, and brought it into the realm of the Old Ones, and Cthulhu, and that kind of thing… It was a matter of trying to get the Lovecraftian side of it working without it winding up in oblivion. It's really hard to get a Lovecraftian feel without relying on “the unspeakable and unknowable horror.” [Laughs] Where do you go from there?

Julie Carmen: Michael DeLuca, he wrote this amazing script, but he happened to be head of production at New Line at the time, and the script quite honestly went over people's heads in 1994.

Carpenter: [It has to be] believable and immersible, so you [need to buy] the mysterious guy, Sutter Cane, Trent's descent into madness, and the glimpses of monsters … that's tough. It's one thing for H.P. Lovecraft to write it on a page and let your imagination go there. It's another thing when you have it on the movie screen.

Casting and Rehearsing Madness

Sam Neill was Carpenter’s only choice for John Trent, the pair first having worked together in 1992’s Memoirs of an Invisible Man. New Line head Bob Shaye and De Luca had doubts, but Carpenter leveraged Neill’s starring role in the upcoming Jurassic Park to assuage their concerns and lock down Neill in the role. Jürgen Prochnow secured the role of author Sutter Cane, and Julie Carmen was picked to play Cane’s editor, Linda Styles.

Carmen: We had two weeks to rehearse, and Sam Neill hadn't arrived yet from New Zealand, so it was just Jürgen Prochnow and John and me, and we got to watch the movie, His Girl Friday, because John had in his template that Rosalind Russell kind of enters in the office the same way that I walk through the office and go down the stairs with that very long monologue about Sutter Kane. But basically, John got to share with us some of his theories about the world.

We shot this before the end of the millennium, so the 1990s were just ending, and he had this very astute theory that, at the end of a millennium, people get a little bit nuts. John felt that in the beginning of a new millennium and a new century, there's sometimes very authoritarian and fundamentalist, and concrete, narrow thinking that tries to establish really hard and fast rules, and fundamentalist theories. He felt that a lot of that was happening, and I think that the movie was informed by his thoughts.

“He had this very astute theory that, at the end of a millennium, people get a little bit nuts.”

Carpenter: What was funny was Jurassic Park came out the week that [Sam Neill] arrived up in Toronto and he had no idea it was this phenomenon. I had security ready to pick him up and have him processed out... So security had to come out and we had a car waiting for him outside, never entering the terminal, and he had no idea that Jurassic Park had just taken the box office by storm and that he was now a big deal. And he couldn't figure out why I was out there, and why he was being ushered through all the security… He's that kind of guy. We'd just settle in for work.

Carmen: [For me] there was really no casting process. What happened was, many years ago I did a movie of the week called She's in the Army Now. It was originally called Powder Puff Platoon, and four of us went through basic training. It was shot before Private Benjamin. It was Melanie Griffith, Jamie Lee Curtis, Kathleen Quinlan, and me… Sandy was our script supervisor, and from that, I think she poached Jamie Lee Curtis for Halloween and me for In The Mouth of Madness. Years later, I had just given birth to my second child, and I wasn’t able to stand up straight. My doctor said, “you can’t stand up for six weeks,” and the phone rang and they said, “Sandy King Carpenter wants you to come over to their house and meet John.” … [John and I] talked for a while, then he said, “I’ve got an offer,” so really there was no competition.

The Locations of Madness

Shot in Toronto, Madness was Carpenter’s first film shot outside the U.S. since The Thing. At the time, New Line hadn’t produced a unionized picture, but the move allowed the film to be shot with a union crew.

Carpenter: New Line had never done a union movie, and we're very pro-union. And the way to circumvent that was to convince them they could save money in Canada. What they didn't understand was all of Canada was unionized. So they had such brilliant ideas as “shoot at Love Canal,” and as I told him, I'd had cancer three times, and the one thing that wasn't hard to give up was toxic waste. Finally, John had to say in this big meeting, "Seriously, we're not going to Love Canal." I mean they had really ridiculous ideas where you just sat there and went, "No, no, we're not going to do those things."

The way around it was to suggest Canada, like, "Here's a great money-saving thing to do," and in that way we really wound up able to take our keys up there and make deals with the Canadians, and also the towns we shot in looked like where they were supposed to be in this mythical town. So it wound up serving the film, and it wound up serving our needs for how we could shoot it.

Shooting Madness

The film’s budget was initially reported to be $15 million, but New Line kept whittling it down. In various commentaries and interviews Carpenter has pinned the final budget at anywhere from $7-10 million, a significant reduction. Notably, the film’s original ending had to be completely reimagined.

Carpenter: [There was] fighting with the studio, but that’s every movie. They had some weird people. They don’t trust anybody and at the same time I don’t trust them, so it becomes like Spy vs. Spy. [The budget] kept changing as we got closer to shooting. It would be one amount, and then they would cut $2 million out of it. You're just going, ‘why?’ But it is what it is, that's what happens, so we’d roll with it. We just figured it out, and you figure out your shooting days, and you know going in that whatever you anticipate, something in there is going to go to s**t, and so you have to be prepared to punt on something.

Greg Nicotero: I just remember being in pre-production and we would have all the meetings at this little house in Sherman Oaks that they had on Willis Avenue, and looking at all the storyboards for the finale, the original finale where the whole town gets sucked into the book at the end. And it was a big, big deal. And for us, the designs were coming up with not only the creature, but some of the other looks. And I remember we got to that ending and it was like, "We don't have enough money to do that." ILM had storyboarded the whole thing, and it was all this really, really elaborate big action sequence. And I remember being at the meeting where they went, "Yeah, we're going to rewrite the ending because we don't have the money to do that." And I was like, "Oh."

Madness was Carpenter’s fourth collaboration with Gary B. Kibbe as Director of Photography, following Prince of Darkness, They Live, and his Body Bags segments. After Madness, they worked together for Carpenter’s next four features, concluding with 2001’s Ghosts of Mars.

Carpenter: For the most part it was pretty straight ahead, shooting, and we were lucky that we had our cinematographer Gary Kibbe, and then he was able to bring up one of his guys when we weren't able to find the right gaffer fit that could move fast and do what we had to do.

Nicotero: John's a very loyal guy and he likes to use the same crew. He had Gary Kibbe and a lot of the same people, Robin Bush. And so, it was very much like Frank Darabont and very much like George Romero: You got your troop and you're the conductor, and I think that's the way John was, is still.

Carmen: John is a master of long master [shot]s [referring to continuous filming of a scene in its entirety in a way that captures all the necessary information for the scene, including characters, props, movement, and so on]. There's two long masters that have set the bar for me… the first one was walking out of the office, and then down the stairs, and then up to the elevator and into the elevator… it was very relational between John Trent and me, Sam Neill. I'm a dancer. I started as a dancer… so the idea of, you walk out of the office, down the stairs, take off your glasses, and go and beat him to the elevator,, and block the elevator door while you're saying all this dialogue, that's what I've lived for. I love that stuff, so that was really fun.

“You got your troop and you're the conductor, and I think that's the way John was, is still.”

The second long master, we were driving into Hobbs End and we'd just come through driving the Covered Bridge… we drive through Hobbs End, and the camera was mounted at my window at the rearview mirror, and I was just taking in everything in Hobbs End as being exactly what I read in the galleys of the book. I had a newborn baby who was probably two to three months, and my brother's wife's mother's best friend had a green card and could fly to Toronto and hold the baby, so that day was the only day out of four months, the baby was on the set.

So I was supposed to be looking, during this long master with a lot of stunts along the way and people doing things that the camera was supposed to drive by, and all of a sudden my eyes go in recognition gasp, seeing my baby there and then back into focus, and I couldn't help it, I hardly even knew it was happening. Well, it ruined that long master, it just destroyed it, because the camera’s close up on the eyes, and split second, I look at something else and then back, and it literally ruined the master so I was never allowed to bring the baby to the set again.

Cosmic Art and VFX

Carpenter worked with ILM, who he’d worked with on Memoirs, on some of the film’s visual effects. For the film’s makeup and practical effects, Carpenter turned to the KNB EFX Group team, including Robert Kurtzman, Greg Nicotero, and Howard Berger, who regularly returned to work on a number of Carpenter’s subsequent projects.

Nicotero [On Sutter Kane’s books]: The first thing that we really got into was the designs of all the book covers because we had an artist that worked at our studio named Shannon Shea… [I think he] did two or three of the covers.

Carpenter: The art department figured out [what text would show onscreen], and then they went to John with what we needed and parts of things were written in the script and there was, in the paperback books, whatever page the actor opened to, were the lines from the book. And then there was the same thing in the big book, so wherever you were, those things were factored in and manufactured in the books… That art department rocked. And you combine them with Greg Nicotero's monsters, the 18-foot wall of monsters that came down and chased Trent. Those are great.

“We'd like to call it the Thanksgiving Day Parade Float of monsters.”

Nicotero: We'd like to call it the Thanksgiving Day Parade Float of monsters, but then we had four different creature performers that were in front of the monster itself that were walking forward, forward… The idea was we wanted it to look like a tidal wave of things were just sort of spilling over top of each other as it was advancing. We love the idea that as it's moving forward, there's gnashing teeth and there's tentacles, so after we had our initial sketch, we had to go in and break down each piece…

Coming off the front was a welded cradle where the performer could lay on his stomach, and the head of the monster that was in the front was operated with cables, but the performer would lay into it. He was puppeteering the arms and legs of it. So you had this sort of lead monster as if that creature was sort of pulling all the other stuff with it. And aside from that particular creature, then there were three other monsters. There was one that looked like a crab, so it was a creature that had a shell on its back, and the guy would push a button and it would make the arms move up and down [with pistons], so he had arm extensions and he would walk forward and you had two other arms that were moving.

Then you had the second one, which was much more aquatic-looking. We went for a lot of sort of Shadow Over Innsmouth vibe, so it had this elongated kind of fish-looking face with these two long arms that had tentacles that came off the ends of the arms, and those tentacles were operated by puppeteers as well, so the performer would move around inside it, and then the tentacles had a little bit of a life of their own… Then the last was “Meatball Dog,” which was John's favorite monster, and the sketch was really outrageous. With John, you'd go to John and you'd sit down and you'd put all the sketches in front of him, and he loved that. He still loves it.

Carpenter: We still have the center monster, Meatball, the Cyclops, he still exists. He's the only one that made it. The rest got donated to the Boy Scouts of America's Halloween Special something-or-other.

The Opening Theme of Madness

Carpenter wanted a different sound for the film’s score, and was inspired by Metallica… who they couldn’t get. He worked with co-composer Jim Lang on the score, bringing in The Kinks guitarist Dave Davies to collaborate on the opening theme.

Carpenter: In those days, Gold Mountain wouldn't let [Metallica] license for movies, so we couldn't really get them. So instead John and Dave Davies came up with the opening.

Dave Davies: I moved to LA around about then, and then we were going to work on a number of things… it came up, and [John] said he wanted something, “Let's have a go.” … The thing is it was quite quick, and I think he'd done some preliminary stuff with Jim Lane. I know he's worked with him before, but I never met him, so he had some basic things. I think he more or less composed a score for this particular soundtrack, so it was kind of quite a rushed thing and I thought, “oh my goodness, I don't even know what to do.”

“You didn't want to go into it with spooky music.”

I was worrying a bit because there was some time restrictions on the piece. But sometimes, I found it a lot working with the Kinks [Davies was The Kinks’ lead guitarist] and doing live shows anyway, that sometimes the best way is a quick way. To [just] do the f**king thing. So we talked about the story basically, and what he liked that, maybe, thought I could add to it. And I said, ‘Let's plug in and go and see we get,’ and so it was a lot of fun, get out heavy stuff… and it was fun to work with him.

Carpenter: Yeah, I think it set up a rhythm that… you didn't want to go into it with spooky music. You wanted the world to change gradually as Trent got exposed to it, he doesn't know he is walking into that. He thinks it's just an insurance investigation, that it's just fraud. So you want it to not give any foreboding, foreshadowing.

The Legacy of Madness

Madness premiered to mixed critic reviews but has since received notable reappraisal from critics, fans, and other filmmakers.

Carmen: [At the time] the reviews were like, ‘Huh? What do they mean? That's weird.’ The reviewers, they were used to more formula, and this broke the mold.

Carpenter: Well, it was really interesting. What they never told us at the time was it was popular in Europe and they kept that information from us, probably not to have to pay us our backends. It's always the case, you wind up finding out you've made some classic years later. It's like, “Okay, that's nice,” and it's nice that it's appreciated for what it is now. You make art for the sake of communicating to other people. So the fact that there's more people seeing it, and more people loving it is wonderful.

Davies: I mean, all his stuff is great, but I think this piece of work is one of his best, subject matter[-wise], and [it] was kind of going into a new realm of, really a new style of, John Carpenter. It's spooky and creepy and it's relevant today.

“I don't think John was intended to be a horror director.”

Carpenter: Well, I think that horror goes through different cycles, and it's nice to see more thoughtful horror going on. It's nice to see the Jordan Peeles of the world doing cool stuff, and it's nice to see the embrace of Prince of Darkness and Mouth of Madness and some of those that are more thoughtful, and make you look outside yourself a little bit. We'll never be splatterpunk. That’s just nuts.

Nicotero: I don't think John was intended to be a horror director. He just wanted to be a director… everybody pigeonholes you into, “oh, well, you make a movie that's successful, then all of a sudden that's what you do.” That's all you know how to do. John is a consummate filmmaker, and is inspired by Howard Hawks and John Ford and those types of filmmakers, and that's what makes his movies different. That's what makes his movies resonate.

Carmen: John Carpenter and Sandy King Carpenter, I have the utmost respect for them as people, as filmmakers. They changed the landscape of horror films.

Carpenter: Horror is an allegorical medium that you can say a lot about the world through, and if you can f**k up people a little bit while you're doing it, it's great.

A special thanks to Greg Nicotero for generous use of his archives and providing us with never-before-digitized images.