John Carpenter

They Live

In the Mouth of Madness

If you were to ask me who my favorite director is, I’d probably be unable to name just one. If you were to ask me who my favorite horror director is, I’d definitely be unable to name just one—but I’d probably land on a trifecta of horror minds that I’ll always love and respect: Wes Craven, David Cronenberg, and tonight’s subject, John Carpenter. Composer, writer, director, actor, and strictly cult-movie maker John Carpenter is the creator two of my favorite horror films of all time: Halloween and The Thing. And while Carpenter’s film’s play with rather simple set ups, there is always a deeper message to be received amid the horrors he unleashes. This isn’t Carpenter’s first appearance on Double Feature Thursday (nor will it be his last), and his film’s have influenced so many other filmmakers featured on this blog, but I felt that this legend deserved a night of his very own. They Live was a bold, brash film that ultimately told a very real story in a very bonkers way. (Rowdy) Roddy Piper, the star of this film, was a professional wrestler and an actor until his untimely death in 2015. I know him best from his cameo in one of my favorite episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia [“The Gang Wrestles For the Troops”], but most fans know him from his multi-decade wrestling career in the WWE, and his inspired performance John Carpenter’s 1988 cult classic They Live. They Live follows a nameless, background-less drifter (who, on imdb is listed as John Nada) as he arrives in Los Angeles, looking for a job. Nada struggles to get hired at apparent white-collar jobs, but eventually lands a job at a construction site, where he meets Frank, who invites him to live at a homeless camp run by a man named Gilbert. On the communal television, a random signal keeps cutting into the show they’re watching, and suddenly a man is pleading the audience to listen to his warning: scientists have discovered that a mysterious, subliminal message is being broadcast daily to hold the human race captive in an unaware, dreamlike state while they take over. John Nada doesn’t believe any of this until an army of police show up shortly after to completely demolish the homeless camp, and anyone who might be spreading false reports of human enslavement. The homeless camp, along with a neighboring church where the scientists were conducting their research and hatching a plan to stop the probable alien invaders, is destroyed. All that is left is a box of sunglasses that appear to be ordinary until John puts them on and sees an entirely different world in front of him—the real world. Where there were once billboards for cigarettes, are signs that say OBEY. The grocery stores have marquees that say CONSUME. The whole world appears grey and hostile, and worst of all, John sees half of the people walking down the street are not even human. Intermingling with normal humans, operating in positions of authority and power, are cold, grey, skeletal creatures dressed in nice suits and fur coats and gold watches and none of the regular humans can even see them for how they really are. When John takes off the sunglasses, everything is back to what he once considered normal, but now he is understandably unsettled. What’s a little less understandable is how John Nada’s next move is instantly finding some guns, and shooting every single alien he sees and saying the infamous line “I came here to chew bubble gum and kick ass. And I’m all out of bubble gum.” I’m obviously "Team “Kill the Aliens”, but I had to laugh at our protagonist’s lack of fear or foresight in his response to discovering that the world has been casually taken over by aliens. It was just as absurd and amazing from that point on, and John Carpenter made use of all of my favorite tropes of his: a killer score, running down dark alleys, and cops getting the shit kicked out of them. Any chance that Carpenter can take to kill and/or beat a cop, he’s gonna take, and I love that about him. But it’s not all just rapid-fire violence and loud declarations about bubble gum, They Live, like many of Carpenter’s films, has obvious but incredibly salient critiques of the ingrained social injustice of humanity in general, but particularly within America. From the obliteration of the tent city, to the indifference and cruelty of the wealthy and the ones in power, to the immense amounts of violence and destruction that descends upon marginalized groups, They Live was nothing if not timeless, and current. Frank (Keith David), John’s only real acquaintance before the madness begins, puts it simply but accurately when he says, “Life’s all about the golden rule: he who has the gold makes the rules”, thus painting an eternal truth about (particularly Western) society, and implementing a quote that I’ve only heard in one other iconic film: Aladdin. Essentially, John Carpenter is bravely but succinctly summing up everything that sucked about the world in 1988, and in 2022. Under the Reagan regime, the economy was in crisis and as the gap between the rich and the poor grew larger, increased commercialism and consumerism was a convenient distraction from the systemic depletion of basic human rights. The system that was and is in place—our governments, the corporations who make the things we consume and need to live, the general social order—is in place for a reason, and it’s not for the benefit or growth of humanity. If it weren’t so sickening, it’d actually be hilarious how the far-right, white supremacist Neo-nazis have appropriated this film and have tried to skew its anti-Reagan, anti-establishment view as support for their argument that Jews control the media and that conservatives are under attack because the whole film expresses the exact opposite of this sentiment. For these individuals to interpret this anti-government, anti-conservatism narrative as anything different is not only backwards, it’s dangerous. This article expresses this phenomenon better than I could, plus I don’t want to focus on the attempted-tarnishing of a movie so purely anti-authoritarian. I love how Carpenter’s films don’t just hold a mirror up to society or the elite just to mock them or commiserate with the audience—he just kind of exaggerates the reality that we’re all uncomfortably familiar with and, if anything, offers a sense of hope through various forms of ass-kicking. Whether it’s Laurie Strode taking down Michael Myers or Kurt Russell taking down an oppressive government, Carpenter always has a creative solution for every scary problem. In this day and age, I’ll take some hope anywhere I can get it. And in They Live, it’s Roddy Piper and Keith David, and their determination to kick alien ass, and each other’s ass, in a fight scene where John tries to convince Frank of the truth, by way of fighting with him for 10 minutes straight. They Live is heavily influential and astonishingly good despite every bit of goofiness. The music was, of course, energetic and mysterious, via John Carpenter’s legendary compositions, and the choice to make the protagonist an unnamed and undistinguished person only makes its story seem more believable and universal. They Live, in all of its quotable, over-the-top gusto, had a lot more hope to give than John Carpenter’s 1995 film: In the Mouth of Madness. The film introduces us to John Trent, former insurance investigator and current mental patient being admitted into a madhouse. It’s not until a doctor comes to visit Trent that we learn how he wound up in a straight jacket, as he takes us on a flashback journey into the titular mouth of madness. As an insurance investigator, Trent was a staunch skeptic and therefore, an excellent detector of bullshit. When he’s tasked with tracking down famed horror writer Sutter Cane, who’s gone missing right as his next book is set to be published, Trent is faced with a mystery that even he struggles to solve. Trent, along with Cane’s editor Linda Styles, go off in search of Cane as the streets begin to run wild with crazed horror novel fans—each getting crazier and more rabid as they wait for Cane’s next masterpiece. It seems that anyone who reads Cane’s novels, which looked to be modeled after Stephen King in both literary style and book cover aesthetic, goes insane with rage. The fear that lies between each page of his novels is of no interest to the very cynical Trent, who only begins to believe in the madness when he arrives in Hobb’s End—a once-thought-to-be-fictional town where Cane awaits him. Linda and Trent are immediately perplexed by the uncanny resemblance this town has to Cane’s description—every building, every fence, every townsperson seems to be an exact match to the author's writing. This would be disturbing enough, but when the creatures begin to appear and the locals begin to turn less friendly, In the Mouth of Madness really kicks into the horror movie that it sold itself as. Conceptually, In the Mouth of Madness is a terrifyingly fun idea to play with. Its execution didn’t end up being the most frightening, but the very thought of your own reality becoming less and less real while the monsters you once thought were fictional begin to take over is a scary headspace to be in. It wouldn’t be a John Carpenter film without a booming score, the questioning of authority, creepy little kids, and an overall sense that reality is not what we think it is—and that was all very much present. In the Mouth of Madness and They Live are both perfect examples of Carpenter’s distrust of mankind, and in different ways, they both underscore his point that what we consider to be true and right can be taken away overnight. As Linda says to Trent: “reality is just what we tell each other it is”, and this rings true for both of tonight’s films. Whatever sense of normalcy we all expect, whatever niceties and standards we all uphold, they were all made up and can all be disproven and dismantled if enough people are convinced. As out-there as that may sound, the numbing isolation and subsequent decline of humanity throughout the pandemic has only proven this to be true. Facts can be called “fake news”. Demanding action after children are murdered in school can be turned into a “political issue” and is therefore un-discussable. With each passing day I realize how phony many people are, how ambivalent people in power are, and how we never needed a pair of sunglasses to see the world for how cruel it really is—just turn on the tv or open twitter and it’ll be laser-beamed into your awareness. That’s why I’ll always appreciate the work of John Carpenter, no matter how “meh” the execution of his films may be, his concepts are both out-of-this-world and completely close to home. He dares to reveal the horrors of humankind without making it laborious or depressing—instead he finds horrifying but fun ways to depict the truth. I don’t have the stomach to watch the news anymore, but I’ll watch a freaky John Carpenter film any day of the week.