Prince of Darkness Ascends Its Throne

I often tell my friends that my opinion of a book, film or album should never be trusted until I’ve either read/seen/listened to it again or waited 48 hours. Entertainment is a largely emotional experience for me, and so I’m liable to have a high opinion of any work that gets my adrenaline pumping in spite of whatever flaws it might possess—at least until the rush wears off. I really, really liked Transformers when I first saw it and, Hell, Star Wars: The Phantom Menace was one of my favourite films for years. So when I say I enjoy something, feel free to treat me like a little kid who has just ingested a pound of sugar. The stomach ache will come, just you wait.

The same applies to the inverse. Some things will leave me feeling sour after I’ve first experienced them, but whether because of the mood I was in at the time or simply due to changing tastes I’m liable to come around to liking or even loving them some months or years in the future. I initially disliked Rebellion’s 2010 Aliens vs. Predator game and it took me three years to realize that my shitty living conditions in third year of university had actually contributed to my feelings of ill will rather than the game itself. It’s actually pretty rad.

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is another such case. Made for a fairly low budget of $3 million and released in 1987, Prince is the second entry of what Carpenter calls his “Apocalypse Trilogy,” preceded by The Thing (which I liveblogged while drunk on New Year’s) and followed by In the Mouth of Madness. It didn’t exactly thrill me on my first full viewing a couple years ago, but after watching again it during my most recent horror binge in October I’ve come around to it in a huge way. Not only is it Carpenter’s best film after The Thing, it really is a little gem that deserves critical re-evaluation.

Anatomy of a Scene: Ringu (1998) vs. The Ring (2002)

I’ve never seen The Ring. You might wonder why I call myself a horror buff even though I haven’t watched maybe the most iconic Western horror film in the last decade—oh, scratch that, The Ring turns 12 this year. Regardless, yes, it’s iconic and no, I haven’t seen it, primarily because I was still a big wuss back in ’02, with the only things resembling horror under my belt then being Alien and Ghostbusters, the latter telling you how big a wimp I was.

Another contributing factor was the overwhelming opinion within the community that any American remake of a Japanese horror film is bound to pale in comparison to the original. I don’t believe this is a statement about horror remakes in general: John Carpenter’s The Thing, David Cronenberg’s The Fly and most recently Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead are all great and all of them remakes, re-adaptations or re-imaginings of some kind. But when someone from the West does try to reinvent a film or television show from a very different culture, I think there is an inherent risk of changing or even being completely oblivious to the context in which it was created. Cracked’s Robert Brockway pointed this out rather succinctly in a pair of articles about the perpetually-in-development American remake of Akira.

What’s funny is that I can’t tell you if the same issues apply to the American take on The Ring, again in large part because I still haven’t watched the whole thing. That being said, I have watched a single scene—undoubtedly its most famous moment—and while I can’t comment on the entirety of Gore Verbinski’s stab at remaking Hideo Nakata’s unsettling Ringu, I can say he screwed up one big part.