On this episode, we look back at one of John Carpenter’s lesser appreciated works, which was released 35 years ago this week.
Prince of Darkness was a return to Carpenter’s roots, lower budgeted independent filmmaking, free of studio interference and more creative control.
Or so he thought.
Learn more about the fascinating story behind the story on this week’s episode. And, if you’d like to read along with the episode, a full transcript can be found below.
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Thank you again.
Edward
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Transcript:
Hello, and welcome to The 80s Movies Podcast. I am your host, Edward Havens. Thank you for listening today.
Since its prime time horror movie season, and this is a podcast about 1980s movies, and there were literal tons of horror movies released in the 80s, we’re going to spend the next couple weeks talking about… well… horror movies. Next week, it’ll be our second annual “A Brief History of” show, going into the history of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, with our special guest, Jeff Townsend, the Podcast Father.
We’ve already hosted a brief history of the Halloween movies last October, and we talked about John Carpenter a bit in our episode this past spring on Nick Castle’s under appreciated 1982 film The Assassination Game. John Carpenter was such a staple of 1980s horror cinema, and I wanted to touch on one of my favorite movies of his, not just from this decade but in his entire oeuvre, and one that doesn’t get as much love as I think it deserves.
Prince of Darkness.
I’m not just focusing on Prince of Darkness on a whim. When this episode releases on October 21st, 2022, it’ll drop only two days before the 35th anniversary of the film’s release into American theatres. Because I love doing crazy timing stuff like that.
I’m guessing you don’t need me to tell you a whole lot about John Carpenter, so we’ll just do a quick recap of his career after Halloween.
By the summer of 1986, John Carpenter had hit a dry patch in his directing career. After the surprise success of Halloween in 1978, and the success of his ABC-TV movie about Elvis Presley in 1979 starring Kurt Russell, Carpenter was able to jump from low budget movies like the $300k Halloween and the $1.1m The Fog to more ambitious but not always horror projects like the $6m sci-fi/action film Escape from New York and the $15m sci-fi/horror film The Thing. Both films would be minor hits, but not quite as big as its financiers and fans had hoped. Ditto his $10m adaptation of the Stephen King novel Christine, and his $24m sci-fi/romantic drama Starman, even with Jeff Bridges getting nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor, the only time any John Carpenter movie was ever nominated for anything at the Oscars.
In 1986, Carpenter swung for the fences with his $25m fantasy martial arts action comedy, Big Trouble in Little China. Reteaming with his Elvis, Escape from New York and The Thing star Kurt Russell, Big Trouble in Little China had everything a summer blockbuster should have: a likable lead hero, a trusty sidekick, a damsel in distress, lots of martial arts, James Hong, a prime release date in the Fourth of July weekend, and amazing widescreen cinematography by one of the best lensers working at the time, Dean Cundey.
Except it would be, to borrow from baseball parlance once again, a foul out. Despite some good reviews from some major critics, Big Trouble in Little China was a big disappointment, grossing just $11.1m in America.
Carpenter was not just disappointed but disillusioned with Hollywood filmmaking, and he decided he was going to go back to his roots. Independently produced films on a lower budget, free from studio interference, where he would have total creative control. That’s a pretty tall order for a filmmaker who wasn’t exactly known as a hitmaker, but he would quickly find willing patrons in the Alive Films team of Shep Gordon and Andre Blay.
Although Blay was a producing novice, Shep Gordon was very much an industry insider. Gordon not only managed the careers of such stars as Alice Cooper, Kenny Loggins, Raquel Welch, and, in the last years of his life, Groucho Marx, and not only helped to create the concept of celebrity chefs by elevating the likes of Emeril Lagasse and Wolfgang Puck, but also founding the production and distribution company Alive Films, whose films included the groundbreaking 1982 documentary Koyaanisqatsi and Gregory Nava’s Oscar-nominated El Norte in 1983. For a few years in the mid 80s, Alive Films formed a partnership with Chris Blackwell’s Island Pictures to form Island Alive. When that partnership ended in 1985, Gordon decided to focus solely on film production, and saw John Carpenter as a rather safe bet.
Carpenter and Alive Films would sign a four picture deal, and Carpenter would get started on writing the first of those films, Prince of Darkness.
Prince of Darkness would tell the story of a group of quantum physics students and scientists who are invited by a Catholic priest to investigate an ancient canister of swirling green goo in the basement of an abandoned church in Los Angeles. Now, even if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you can probably guess what happens when you hear “a group of quantum physics students investigate an ancient canister of swirling green goo in the basement of an abandoned church in Los Angeles.” It’s not good. In a nutshell, you have a standoff between an ever dwindling number of very smart people trying to figure out what this thing is, an ever growing number of people who have become possessed by the thing inside the cylinder, and an even larger group of enthralled schizophrenic homeless people who have surrounded the church.
Can you guess what’s in the goo? Is it possibly in the name of the movie?
With his producers, Carpenter created a $3m budget for the film, which the producers would recoup as part of a negative pickup deal with Universal Pictures.
Sidebar: a negative pickup, in case you’re unaware, is a contract, between a usually independent producer or production company and a distributor, wherein the distributor agrees to purchase the movie from the producers at a given date and for a fixed sum. The studio essentially owns the negative to the film for a specified amount of time, and can exploit the film as they see fit. One positive benefit to a negative pickup is that it usually covers the cost of production, so producers don’t have to wait years to recoup their investment, if ever. One negative benefit to a negative pickup is that the film goes over budget, it’s the filmmakers who are on the hook.
I mention this for a specific reason, which will get to soon.
Carpenter came up with the idea for Prince of Darkness while doing research on atomic theories and theoretical physics, because he was looking for a fresh spin on what many consider to be the ultimate evil. Combining the character of the Prince of Darkness with notions of matter and anti-matter excited the director, and he would finish his draft of the script rather quickly.
While his production team scouted locations throughout Los Angeles, Carpenter concentrated on casting the roles.
As the priest who puts the story into motion, Carpenter would turn to Donald Pleasence, the British actor whose appearances in Carpenter’s Halloween and Escape from New York would fuel a late-career resurgence. He would also turn to Victor Wong and Dennis Dun, who both starred in Big Trouble in Little China, and Dirk Blocker, who had appeared in Starman. New to the Carpenter universe were Jameson Parker, who at the time was one of the stars of the hit CBS show Simon and Simon, Lisa Blount, best known at the time for her Golden Globe-nominated performance as Lynette in An Officer and a Gentleman, and singer Alice Cooper.
Production on the film would begin in mid-May 1987. For the exteriors of the church, Carpenter would shoot at an actual but at the time abandoned church in downtown Los Angeles, which is now, ironically, a theatre arts center, while the interiors of the church were shot in the cavernous ballroom of the once popular but at the time abandoned Pacific Coast Men’s Club in downtown Long Beach. Other scenes would be shot at the San Fernando Mission and at the Valencia Independent Studios near Magic Mountain. Shooting would last five weeks, ending on June 25th.
If you’re a fan of Alice Cooper, and saw him perform live in the 70s and 80s, you may be aware of an impaling device he used during his concert. Carpenter loved this bit, and invited Alice Cooper, through Cooper’s manager Shep Gordon, to come visit the set one day.
Cooper, who had ambitions of becoming an actor, came to visit the set very early in the production, and would talk to the director between takes. What Cooper didn’t know is that Carpenter was hoping Cooper would not only accept a small role in the film, as the leader of the homeless schizophrenics, but would also allow Carpenter to use Cooper’s impaling device for a scene in the movie, and possibly maybe even write a song for the film. Yes, Cooper would love to play the leader of the homeless schizophrenics. Yes, Cooper would allow Carpenter to use the impaling device for one of the scenes in the movie. And, yes, he would love to write a song for the movie. That song’s title? Prince of Darkness. Which, not ironically, can be heard in the scene where the impaling device is used.
Now, if you know anything about John Carpenter and his movies, he not only directs and regularly writes, but he creates an electronic musical score for almost every single one of them. Prince of Darkness would be no different, and like several of his films before, he would team with Alan Howarth, a composer and sound designer who had been teaming with Carpenter since 1981. But, for some reason, Carpenter did not take a screenplay credit for his script, instead crediting it to one Martin Quartermass, nods to the British sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale and his most famous character creation, Bernard Quartermass. If one is familiar with the works of Nigel Kneale, one would see a number of story elements that were similar to those founds in several of the author’s work.
Kneale, who had an unpleasant experience working with Carpenter writing the screenplay for 1982’s Carpenter-produced Halloween III: Season of the Witch, was not pleased with this homage from someone who genuinely admired the writer. He didn’t want his fans to think he had anything to do with the film.
Because Carpenter is one of most efficient filmmakers around, he would have his 101 minute final cut of the film ready in time for Universal Pictures to release it into theatres on October 23rd, 1987, less than six months after the start of production. The film would open in 1,239 theatres nationwide. The critics, for the most part, hated it. Vincent Canby of the Times would trash it, as would Roger Ebert. Ebert hated it so much, he would not only dump on it in his review for the Chicago Sun-Times, he’d do it again on Siskel and Ebert. Siskel, at least, would have some fun at the film’s expense during his criticism of the film on the show. But if there’s one thing you can count on, is a fairly decent turnout for the opening weekend of a new horror film released in the weeks leading up to Halloween, and Prince of Darkness would take second place at the box office on its opening weekend, with $4.66m worth of tickets sold.
But if there’s another thing you can count on, its that a horror film will lose its audience pretty quickly after Halloween night, and that’s exactly what happened with Prince of Darkness in week two.
Actually, it would happen on that second Saturday night, because when Halloween falls on a Saturday, you can bet the theatre will be dead, no pun intended, because all the cool kids are out partying and getting into mischievous mayhem. They’re not at the movies. The film would lose 43% of its opening week audience, dropping down to fifth place on the box office charts, with only $2.66m in tickets sold. By week three, it would fall all the way to 14th place, and lose more than 20% of its theatres. And after seven weeks, it was almost completely out of theatres save some dollar houses in need of a B or C-title. It’s final box office gross was $14.1m, which would make the film a bit profitable just from theatrical, a rare instance even in 1987, but for some, it was yet another disappointing performance from Carpenter.
Like many a film after July 1986, I watched Prince of Darkness the night before we opened the film at the Aptos Twin. And despite the fact that many of my friends were horror fans, and fans of John Carpenter specifically, I ended up watching the film by myself. In a large, empty theatre that could seat more than 500 people. Late at night.
Bad idea.
I’m not the biggest horror fan. I’d admitted that on this show many a time.
I don’t mind being scared. I mind being grossed out for the sake being grossed out. I hate excessive violence, and jump scares punctuated by sudden, loud, screeching violins.
Prince of Darkness scared the living heck of me, to put it mildly. It was more psychological, philosophical, and metaphysical than most horror films. It creeps you out all the right ways, and for all the right reasons. And it has a great ambiguous ending that allows the individual viewer to decide for themselves what happened.
After the completion of Carpenter’s second film with Alive Films, 1988’s They Live!, and there will be an episode in the neat future about that film, Carpenter was already livid about his arrangements with Alive Films. The director had to pay for about $120k of cost overruns from Prince of Darkness out of his own pocket, and had already spent nearly half a million dollars of his own money developing what was supposed to be the third movie in their agreement, Victory Out of Time, a different take on time travel that Carpenter had written with this then-girlfriend, now-wife and regular producer Sandy King. Carpenter would sue Alive Films, Shep Gordon and Andre Blay in May 1990, claiming breach of contract, and requesting $3.6m in damages. Three weeks later, Gordon and Blay countersued Carpenter, claiming they withheld funding for the third movie in their agreement because they believed the director could not deliver a completed film on time, which would have breached their negative pickup contract with Universal. However, I could not find any details on if either lawsuit went forward, or if all parties settled. Suffice it to say that neither Victory Out of Time or the fourth film from the agreement, At Midnight, from a screenplay written by Carpenter and his long-time collaborator Tommy Lee Wallace, would ever get made.
In October 2022, if you wanted to watch Prince of Darkness, it can be streamed on The Criterion Channel and Peacock Premium, or can be rented or purchased from a number of online video services including Amazon, AppleTV, Redbox and YouTube.
Thank you for joining us. We’ll talk again next week, when Episode 89, A Brief History of the Nightmare on Elm Street series, is released.
Remember to visit this episode’s page on our website, The80sMoviePodcast.com, for extra materials about the movies we covered this episode.
The 80s Movies Podcast has been researched, written, narrated and edited by Edward Havens for Idiosyncratic Entertainment.
Thank you again.
Good night.