Reseñas de la crítica

You have to care more about horror paperbacks than I do to see this all as a canny prophesy instead of an idle game. But In the Mouth of Madness does have a very intriguing idea on its side: that a well constructed work of fiction can override your reality, even when you know it's fake. And thus the best moments of the film come when it scares you (sometimes exquisitely) while making as little sense as possible.

A brilliant storyteller himself, Carpenter directs Madness for all its worth, delighting the narrative's twists and turns and embellishing them with cheerfully self-referential filmmaking. In hindsight Madness looks like the director's last great feature, a summation of the narrative games he played in Halloween, Prince of Darkness, and other classics of the 1970s and '80s.

What hellborn fuckery is this? An underrated uptick in Carpenter's troubled late period, certainly. Though his more ludicrous visions still laid ahead (Ice Cube shooting space ghosts; Kurt Russell shooting hoops), In the Mouth of Madness earns the privilege of reveling in insanity.

It may be that In the Mouth of Madness is more jokey than scary, perhaps a sign that Carpenter's heart isn't really in the material; it's a lighter entertainment than The Thing, for instance. But the opening credits montage of a best-seller being churned out by massive printing presses projects a wariness of industry and conformity—just like the overture in Carpenter's 1983 adaptation of the King-penned Christine—and thus hints at something more chilling than mere slimy monsters.

In the Mouth of Madness (1994) is the most perfect (and overt) expression of the director's career-long conversation with the weird tales of H. P. Lovecraft. (As in Prince of Darkness, which Carpenter wrote under a pseudonym, the film gains a great deal from a sense of conviction—you get the feeling Carpenter actually _believes_ in ancient evil active in the modern world.)

It isn't John Carpenter's best horror movie to date, but it may well be his scariest. What makes it nightmarish isn't so much its premise--a man set loose inside the mind and writings of a crazed hack novelist--as the many elliptical details that the premise occasions: things that go bump in the head, fleeting suggestions of horrors that brush the edge of our attention and perceptions, like the peripheral events in bad dreams.