Film Review: Prince of Darkness – 7/10

‘Maybe he’s anti-god, bringing darkness instead of light…’

John Carpenter is arguably the most successful horror director of all time. While conversation around his career is undoubtedly dominated by The Thing and the Halloween franchise, some of his lesser known work is just as affecting. The Fog is nastily effective, In the Mouth of Madness is a measured, grown up horror film and here we have Prince of Darkness – a movie that lashes out at the brainless slasher fare dominating cinemas at the end of the ’80s by trying to include theoretical physics and atom theory into the mix. A sentence we are unlikely to read again in relation to any horror film…

When an ancient, unknowable evil is awakened in the cellar of an abandoned church, a priest (Donald Pleasence) and a quantum physicist (Victor Wong) must close the gap between their beliefs in order to save humanity.

The great thing about Prince of Darkness is that while it does have scientific pretensions, it’s still basically an invasion movie. Some mysterious green gas floating in a canister causes everyone outside an inner city church to become mindless killing machines (bizarrely led by a silent Alice Cooper). Inside the church, there are echoes of The Thing as nobody knows who has been ‘infected’ and who hasn’t. Carpenter utilises some wonderful physical effects, along with a before-its-time recording method for the film within a film to produce something that has moments of greatness without ever actually threatening to be great.

The script is competent but unspectacular, likewise the acting (aside from Victor Wong who does a lot of the heavy lifting – Pleasence meanwhile is basically Dr Loomis but in a dog collar), and even the score, usually an area in which Carpenter excels, is pretty forgettable. What saves Prince of Darkness is its ambition. The sheer scale of ideas at play here mark Carpenter’s forgotten film out as something that deserves to be remembered with as much clarity as some of his other celebrated work.

An oddity, but one that deserves an afterlife.