I watched John Carpenter’s 1987 film Prince of Darkness this weekend. I’d caught the final third or so of the movie on AMC back in my first year of university, and while I remembered it being low-budget and kind of inexplicable it nevertheless intrigued me enough that I was more than happy to watch it in full when I stumbled across it on Netflix Saturday afternoon. With the day off from work and no obligations to speak of, I plopped down on the couch, put my feet up on the coffee table and hit play.
Roughly an hour
and a half later, the credits were rolling and I was rubbing my chin, processing
what I’d just seen. It wasn’t a mindbender by any means but neither was it
trash. It’s actually a fairly solid film from start to finish, occasionally clumsy
acting and dodgy pacing balanced out by Carpenter’s cinematography and pulsing
synth score, and while it wasn’t nearly as good as The Thing, I could easily see how its cult status has endured over
the last quarter of a century.
But later on
that day, strolling through the Glebe with a drink in my hand and the thawing
ice crunching beneath my feet, I slowly realized that buried within this
admittedly unsettling doomsday flick was the potential for what could have been
one of the greatest horror films ever made.
