Matthew Moulton (@Onideus)

Today, let's review John Carpenter's "In The Mouth Of Madness". Okay, so... this is discount Matrix mixed with Lovecraft. The "enemy" is basically a hell mouth that's causing reality distortion effects. It possesses a writer and through him he's able to create fictional beings in reality that can interact with reality and cause reality to lose itself to fiction if they read his work. Reading it alone doesn't work though, it had to slowly digest or erode your perception of reality, to make you question reality and the more you do, the more reality becomes fictional and that's bad because fictional beings in this movie are... 1. Immortal 2. Have No Autonomy 3. Are Subjected To Uncanny Hellstates Can fiction feel? Well, apparently this monster can make fiction feel real... which is weird, cause it's like the monster hole influenced the writer who then wrote a living story that sprouted to life and its characters... fuck around for no reason. Look, clearly, whatever is in that hole can't just "get out" or it would have a long time ago. Instead it needed a writer and the writer could write characters to get in the way of its goal, because... apparently it didn't have absolute control over the writer which was reflected in his characters, who essentially created delay. Even if they couldn't stop it, there were clearly layers of impedance. Maybe the writer had doubts. Since this monster can't just enter reality at will, it can only enter by manipulating perception, it stands to reason that no "real" monsters even exist at all. People are just deluding themselves into it otherwise it would just pop right in and start eating things all on its own. As a perceptual poison, it's apparently deflected by doubt. Apathy causes atrophy... we know because it does this whole gimmick where the story/movie is what you're watching and it's supposed to make you think you could have been infected by this monster by watching the film. That you could lose control of your mind and become some kind of a monster because an "old one" got out! But apparently ancient monsters aren't all that creative because the pacing was painful, like an excited child constantly screaming, "LOOK! LOOK!" ...and then you look and it's just... not that interesting. I would expect an "old one" to at least have the capacity to point something out that no one has ever noticed before and couldn't notice because of the way human perception tends to look at things. But no, it has no sense of creativity at all, other than looking gross. That's about all the creativity this movie musters... looking gross. Sam Neill's talent was wasted on this film's lackluster writing. I mean, come on, the whole premise is supposed to be FICTION COMING TO LIFE and instead of being like the Matrix and playing with that idea in some really incredible ways... it just has a lot of jump scares and gross shit. Uncanny concept with gross filler. Let's make it BETTER! What if this magic hell hole could absorb fears and make them into physical manifestations that act as an extension of the absence. So it's like every scary monster you can ever imagine... they all came from this hole, from the people who fell into it. It ate their fears and crapped out living nightmares! What's inside the hole is too complex to get into our reality. Our reality blocks nonsense naturally, but living nonsense still exists, even if it can't get into our reality directly, it can scratch open the surface of fears and poison them with evil reasoning. Why are you afraid of things? Because they could hurt you, right? You could lose things. Your autonomy, your pursuit of pleasure, creation, your sense of reality... you fear losing. You manifest monsters in your mind that can make you lose the most in the worst possible ways. This perceptual poison searches for the greatest possible pathways to perceptual petrifaction. As you fall through living nonsense you become your own worst nightmare because after finding the worst form of fear within you, it makes you realize that fear is just a reflection of yourself and in turn you become exactly what you fear the most... and then it spits you back out into actuality. But you're no longer entirely real, having been digested through the mouth of hell, you become... look, if they wanted to make a prequel to Cabin In The Woods... this would be the best backstory! So there's like random hell holes that split open and swallow people into them and then they're shit back into reality as living nightmares. And because of their nature, they're a form of partial nonsense, which means they can't be killed conventionally only through contrivance that has to relate conceptually to the nature of the fear/monster. Like if a nightmare requires specific conditions to exist then it can only attack under those specific conditions or else they can't act. They're scary as all hell, but every one of them is a conditional creature that is "all or nothing".