In the genre of movie moments that is Sam Neill Looking at Something, there is a clear standout. The New Zealand actor, who has died at the age of 78, and Steven Spielberg created one of the most indelible cinematic images of all time in Jurassic Park when Neill, as paleontologist Dr. Alan Grant, sees living dinosaurs for the first time.
Before showing the audience the dinos, Spielberg shows Neill, mouth agape, eyes transfixed but uncomprehending, sweeping his hat off his head, slowly standing up and then — Neill’s coup de grace — snatching his sunglasses off with trembling, claw-like fingers. Seconds later, in the perfect audience communion Spielberg is famous for, Neill’s amazement becomes our own. The actor effectively authors how the audience feels about the movie. It’s the ultimate example of Spielberg Face.
It says a lot, then, that this shot is run a close second by one filmed a year later for John Carpenter’s deranged 1994 horror movie In the Mouth of Madness. In fact, the film has a couple of great examples of Sam Neill Looking at Something. In the first (but not the best) Neill stares directly into the camera, through a tear between one dimension and another — or between reality and fiction, or perhaps between one fiction and another — while a voice narrates the unspeakable horrors he beholds.
Carpenter eventually shows us these horrors, but (unlike Spielberg’s dinos) they can’t quite match the ones we think we see reflected in Neill’s eyes. No matter. Unlike Dr. Grant, Neill’s character in Mouth of Madness — John Trent, an insurance investigator — hasn’t willingly surrendered to the spectacle that’s been arranged for him. He fights it all the way. But in this shot, in Neill’s face, we watch his skepticism, his shield of human arrogance, start to crack in real time.
Trent has been sent by a publishing house to investigate the disappearance of its cash cow, a Stephen King-style horror author named Sutter Cane. Cane’s readers are being sent into a troubling state of hysteria by his books, but they’re selling like hot cakes, and the publisher wants either his next manuscript or a compensatory payout. Trent thinks the whole thing is a marketing ruse, but takes the gig; he believes he has located Hobb’s End, the fictional New England town from Cane’s books, and reckons he will find Cane there. He goes, accompanied by Cane’s editor Linda Styles (Julie Carmen). Naturally, Hobb’s End isn’t quite what — or, exactly, where — he thinks it is.
The audience already knows where this is going, because the film starts with a flash-forward showing us Trent being admitted to an insane asylum, bug-eyed and raving, amid dark reports of an epidemic of violence. He tells a visiting examiner what happened on his trip to Hobb’s End. But the Trent we meet within his story is cool, smarmy, and cynical, resisting all the horror tropes the movie throws at him: axe murderers, angry mobs, creepy kids, black churches, tentacled things. Neill expertly treads the difficult path of an audience point-of-view character who’s quite unlikable, and whose denial of what’s right in front of him is essential to the story.
In the Mouth of Madness was written in the late 1980s and brought to Carpenter by Michael De Luca, a studio story editor and horror screenwriter and producer. (By the time the movie came out, he was a powerful executive at New Line, where he oversaw the likes of Boogie Nights and Seven; now he’s co-chair and CEO of Warner Bros. Pictures.) It’s obviously influenced by Stephen King, and especially by H.P. Lovecraft’s obsession with the boundary between sanity and madness. The way horror is experienced by the characters is very subjective.
That makes Carpenter, one of the horror genre’s great literalists with a gift for suspense and physicality, an odd choice to direct. But it works — Carpenter’s blunt style and Neill’s almost dismissive performance are in perfect harmony. The crisp editing, as it jumps between different realities in the cursed Hobb’s End, builds up an almost Lynchian sense of dissonance in the place, even as it uses much more conventional (and sometimes mildly goofy) horror imagery. The deeper Trent goes in his exploration of Hobb’s End, the blurrier the line between reality and Cane’s fiction gets; eventually, a kind of feedback loop is opened and the fiction of the film itself gets sucked into this vortex.
In the Mouth of Madness is one of the horror genre’s great meta commentaries, but in a much more straight-faced and less self-referential way than Wes Craven’s Scream, which came a few years later. To a great degree, its power rests on its final scene — the second-best Sam Neill Looking at Something moment of all time, and one of the great movie mic drops. In this moment, the now-mad Trent sees something that finally makes him understand the apocalyptic loop he and the rest of humanity is caught in — and he bursts out laughing. Out of nowhere, Neill summons one of the most memorable laughs in the movies: unhinged, despairing, but also genuinely, heartily, infectiously amused. It is a joke, after all, and a good one, if bitter. We have no choice but to laugh with him.
In the Mouth of Madness is free to stream on Tubi