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Popular Culture Review
menace and malevolence. The citizens are repelled by the aftermath of an alien
invasion, but the horrors brought by government are just as evil. The end comes
when Dr. Chaffee, vho has learned to block their efforts to read his mind,
detonates a bomb hidden in his briefcase, killing himself and all but one of the
children, one who did not seem to be like the others. We are left wondering what
choices and directions the child will make, whether good or evil will persevere.
In the Mouth o f Madness (1995) brings the audience close to the thin line
separating reality from fantasy. Nightmares and paranoia are set off among those
who have read Sutter Crane’s novel, In the Mouth o f Madness. The story begins
as John Trent (Sam Neill) is shown in an insane asylum, relaying to a psychiatrist
the path that led him there. In the process of investigating the author’s
disappearance, Trent had discovered that, in Crane’s novel, a strange form of evil
takes over the world. Readers of the book are losing their grip on reality; they are
losing their minds. Creatures from a dark, parallel, Lovecraftian world emerge,
attempting to reclaim life through living beings. Readers are being replaced by
evil monsters. Crane’s publisher represents corporate greed and a general decline
in morality. Trent, too, seems to lose his sanity. Evil has triumphed and has
taken over the world. Trent is shown as the last hope of humanity, but he has lost
any desire to try to save mankind: “The human race will just be a bedtime story
for children” (In the Mouth o f Madness 1995).
Vampires (1998) begin with Jack Crow (James Woods) leading a team of
vampire slayers who attach the vampires to a cable and drag them into the
sunlight to their destruction. Valek, the vampire master, strikes back and murders
the team, with the exception of Crow, his primary assistant Montoya (Daniel
Baldwin), and a prostitute named Katrina (Sheryl Lee). Upo n being bitten by
Valek, Katrina forms a mental link with him, and Crow attempts to exploit this in
his quest to defeat and vanquish the vampire master, who (Crow learns from a
Vatican official), is the original vampire, created when the church bungled an
attempt at exorcism in the Middle Ages. If Valek can obtain the black cross used
in that ceremony and complete the exorcism, he and other vampires will become
immune to the destructive power of sunlight. Katrina is able to telepathically
determine the whereabouts of Valek as he searches for the cross, and she leads
Crow to its location, but she also bites Montoya, turning him into a vampire too.
Crow is captured by Valek, who has seized the cross and is about to re-create the
exorcism. A Catholic Cardinal has agreed to perform the ritual in exchange for
Valek’s granting him immortality as a vampire. In a final showdown, Crow
destroys Valek, but he sets free his vampire friends, Katrina and Montoya. Evil
will live on. Carpenter’s disdain for authority, especially for the Catholic Church
(which is shown here as responsible for the creation of vampires) is a central
theme in Vampires. An everlasting form of pure evil has ironically been created
by an institution symbolic of its opposite.