Every once in awhile, a certain film comes along that makes you wonder… “Why has it taken me so long to watch this!?”

John Carpenter’s 1994 horror film, In the Mouth of Madness, a tribute to the works of author H.P. Lovecraft, is one of these movies.

The film’s plot is fairly simple at first glance.  Sam Neill (of Jurassic Park fame) stars as John Trent, an insurance investigator that thrives from uncovering cons and revealing the reality of situations.  Trent is hired by a book publisher to track down a missing horror writer, Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), and is convinced it’s all part of an elaborate marketing scheme to generate fervor for his next book.  Accompanied by Cane’s editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen), the two begin to discover that the horrors within the author’s novels may not be fiction after all.

As I mentioned prior, Mouth of Madness has magically flown under my radar for the last 17 years.  Unsurprisingly, being a John Carpenter film, everything still holds up flawlessly years later.  Everything about the movie had me entranced, anxiously anticipated what was around the next corner.  Sam Neill is deliciously over-the-top in his performance, and writing is a great blend of camp and creepy, and the rubber monsters are ripped straight out of a Lovecraft story.

Without spoiling anything, the way the film wraps up is also fantastic and caught me completely by surprise.  There were multiple moments during the last 15 minutes where I felt confident about how the film would end, only to be thrown from another slight twist.  It’s a dangerous move, as any average filmmaker could completely kill his film with such a winding third act, but Carpenter proves that he is a master storyteller with his tight control over the narrative.

If you’re a fan of John Carpenter, H.P. Lovecraft, or The Thing-like monster movies, I highly recommend In the Mouth of Madness.  It’s a fun and fast ride that is completely worth taking, especially if you like your horror with a touch of insanity from the void.