Carpenter's dance around the apocalypse
I was watching John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness and In the Mouth of Madness, which are horror films indeed, but not in the usual sense.
I wouldn't say that these films are particularly clever, although their fans seem to agree on that, they are disguised though, Prince of Darkness is inverted and In the Mouth of Madness buries the plain, but consequential truth under fanciful and inconsequential rubbish.
Why is it that, when you want to make a film about the nature of God or the Bible, you have to use zombies and buckets full of blood?
I once saw a Russian psychic, a girl who claimed that she could perceive the ailments of people, she was shown six people and she said that she had perceived the ailments of four of them. The remaining 50:50 chance she didn't want to take and after being forced to, got it wrong, after which it was pseudostatistically stated that 4 out of 6 isn't as unlikely (1 in 6!/(4!2!)=15) as you think (1 in 6!/2!=360).
Such is the role of science when it comes to the supernatural. And to its comfort the Catholic Church has taken refuge, giving man his sins to guard against and otherwise making him the world's master until such time as his planning will have created an environment as toxic as prophecised thousands of years ago.
Why invert it all? Why not just show John receiving his visions from our eyes? I will not admit that such a film couldn't be made for dramatic reasons.
In In the Mouth of Madness Carpenter plays with the alternative idea that the Revelation has become true by virtue of steering our imagination, that is to say that we eventually invented television, because we heard for centuries that the beast's deeds would be broadcast by the second beast. And likewise we invented airplanes and bombs, so that fire could fall from the sky. Actually, we went on from there and invented nuclear fission, so that we might look upon angels with faces as radiant as the sun, who are clothed in clouds and whose legs look like fiery columns.
If one can believe such a thing without losing one's mind.
It really isn't particularly clever. It's just that we live in times in which an independent thinker has to feign allegiance to Satan, if he wants his message to be heard, because the image of the devil has become the instrument to open men's souls, thanks to a populace that has lost sight of the virtue of the divine and bows to coercion and hence doesn't understand the nature of admonition anymore, which is to awaken one's sense of responsibility.
But I don't believe that this state has any more days left, the ground is changing and with it are we.
I wouldn't say that these films are particularly clever, although their fans seem to agree on that, they are disguised though, Prince of Darkness is inverted and In the Mouth of Madness buries the plain, but consequential truth under fanciful and inconsequential rubbish.
Why is it that, when you want to make a film about the nature of God or the Bible, you have to use zombies and buckets full of blood?
I once saw a Russian psychic, a girl who claimed that she could perceive the ailments of people, she was shown six people and she said that she had perceived the ailments of four of them. The remaining 50:50 chance she didn't want to take and after being forced to, got it wrong, after which it was pseudostatistically stated that 4 out of 6 isn't as unlikely (1 in 6!/(4!2!)=15) as you think (1 in 6!/2!=360).
Such is the role of science when it comes to the supernatural. And to its comfort the Catholic Church has taken refuge, giving man his sins to guard against and otherwise making him the world's master until such time as his planning will have created an environment as toxic as prophecised thousands of years ago.
Why invert it all? Why not just show John receiving his visions from our eyes? I will not admit that such a film couldn't be made for dramatic reasons.
In In the Mouth of Madness Carpenter plays with the alternative idea that the Revelation has become true by virtue of steering our imagination, that is to say that we eventually invented television, because we heard for centuries that the beast's deeds would be broadcast by the second beast. And likewise we invented airplanes and bombs, so that fire could fall from the sky. Actually, we went on from there and invented nuclear fission, so that we might look upon angels with faces as radiant as the sun, who are clothed in clouds and whose legs look like fiery columns.
If one can believe such a thing without losing one's mind.
It really isn't particularly clever. It's just that we live in times in which an independent thinker has to feign allegiance to Satan, if he wants his message to be heard, because the image of the devil has become the instrument to open men's souls, thanks to a populace that has lost sight of the virtue of the divine and bows to coercion and hence doesn't understand the nature of admonition anymore, which is to awaken one's sense of responsibility.
But I don't believe that this state has any more days left, the ground is changing and with it are we.
Labels: 19, filmkritik, geschichte, gesellschaftskritik, metaphysik, rezension, wahrnehmungen, zeitgeschichte, ἰδέα, φιλοσοφία
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