Copyright Screen Rant
Instead of firing up Halloween 1978 again this spooky season, why not check out John Carpenter's terrifying and "underrated" Prince of Darkness instead? John Carpenter's movies have been terrifying audiences for close to 50 years, thanks to classics like The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness. Of course, Carpenter's Halloween will always be his lasting legacy. The original film was a tiny budget chiller shot in about 20 days by a young cast and crew, and it went on to revolutionize the genre. Despite having been relentlessly ripped off and sequelized, the original Halloween is still a near-perfect terror engine. Obviously, it gets a lot of screentime around October every year as fans revisit it for, well, Halloween. It's good to mix things up once in a while though, so maybe this year it's worth digging into Carpenter's filmography a little deeper. For Halloween 2025, why not try his cosmic horror cult classic, Prince of Darkness? Instead Of Watching Halloween This Year, Watch John Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness Prince of Darkness was Carpenter's return to horror, where he made a deal to produce a series of low-budget films in which he retained creative control. This was in response to the terrible experience he had dealing with Fox on Big Trouble in Little China, and he wanted final cut on his next project. With Prince of Darkness, Carpenter combined his fandom of British sci-fi legend Nigel Kneale (particularly his Quatermass series) with his own burgeoning interest in quantum mechanics. The result is a story where a priest and a team of scientists investigates a swirling canister of green liquid which might contain the Devil himself. More than Halloween or even The Thing, Prince of Darkness sees Carpenter capture a sense of pure dread. Right from the opening credits (which run a mere 10 minutes), there's already a suffocating sense of impending doom, and Carpenter slowly builds the tension until things explode in the third act. Prince of Darkness was a modest hit back in 1987 (grossing $14 million on a $3 million budget, via Box Office Mojo), though reviews were pretty divided. It's best remembered now for its future dream sequence, where the main character all share the same dream of a creepy, dark shape emerging from the front of a church. John Carpenter Has Called Prince Of Darkness His Most Underrated Horror Movie Prince of Darkness slipped somewhat into obscurity following 1987, and it felt for many years that only Carpenter diehards really recognized it. That's changed in the last decade or so, where a cult following has built around it, and it's become recognized as one of Carpenter's purest horror outings. Sure, the science impenetrable and it has some dead air, but when the film works, it's a masterclass in horror. The filmmaker himself agrees with the assessment that the film is undersung. In a 1996 chat with Anne Billson (via Multiglom), the director summed it up neatly with "Prince of Darkness is the most underrated of my films." According to Carpenter, Prince of Darkness is the middle chapter in his so-called Apocalypse Trilogy, sandwiched between The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness. While Halloween, The Thing, They Live and more hog all the attention, Prince of Darkness is often forgotten. After all, Carpenter had something of a miracle run during the 1970s and 1980s, where pretty much everything he made was a banger. Even "lesser" outings like his Stephen King adaptation Christine are solid movies. It makes sense that a couple of his films would slip through the cracks, but Prince of Darkness is very worthy of rediscovery. It looks great for its tight budget, features one of Carpenter's best scores and he stages some bravura setpieces. It was also an early outing in the cosmic horror/Lovecraftian genre, of which Event Horizon, Annihilation and The Endless also belong. If it were an A24-style horror effort released today, it probably would have gotten more recognition, but as is the case with much of Carpenter's filmography, it arrived a decade too early. Prince Of Darkness Has Some Of John Carpenter's Most Terrifying Sequences Carpenter's CV is an embarrassment of riches when it comes to haunting scenes. Halloween has the opening POV sequence, The Thing has the defibrator moment, while In the Mouth of Madness has the reality shattering corridor of monsters. Prince of Darkness has several sequences to rival them all. As mentioned above, the future dream is literally the most nightmarish. This might be one of the best visual representations of a bad dream, with the grainy, VHS footage making viewers feel intensely uneasy even though nothing especially scary is actually happening. There's also the "bug man" moment, where a missing team member reappears and shouts "Hello" to the scientists while standing outside the church. Since his skin is moldy, and he's covered in bugs, it's clear something is very wrong. This is confirmed when he utters "Pray for death," before disintegrating into bugs. There's also the concept of the "mirror universe" that comes into play in the finale, where the "Devil" reaches into a mirror to bring its father, the Anti-God, into our world. Ultimately, what makes Prince of Darkness so unsettling is how Carpenter gives it a somewhat surrealistic feel. He grounds it with all the science and religious talk before hitting viewers with gruesome, Italian horror-style imagery. Is Prince of Darkness a horror masterpiece like Halloween? No. Is it a genuinely nightmarish and underrated horror outing from the 1980s that you should check out for this spooky season? Absolutely. Source: Box Office Mojo, Multiglom
