In the Mouth of Madness (1994) on Netflix
R19941h 35mFantasyHorrorMystery
Insurance investigator John Trent is hired to find Sutter Cane, a horror novelist who vanished. With Cane's editor Linda Styles, he seeks the New Hampshire town that exists only in Cane's books.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb7.1/1091,688 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes59%
Trailer
Plot summary
John Trent works insurance cases in New York City. After he exposes a fraud, a man with misshapen pupils attacks him with an axe. The book publisher Arcane then hires Trent to find Sutter Cane, a horror novelist whose readers report disorientation, memory loss and paranoia, and whose next novel crowds of fans are waiting for. Arcane's director, Jackson Harglow, says the attacker was Cane's agent; Trent reads Cane's vanishing as a publicity stunt. He notices that the covers of Cane's books, laid side by side, form a map pointing to Hobb's End, New Hampshire, a town that exists only in Cane's stories. With Cane's editor, Linda Styles, he drives north to learn whether the place is real.
Cast
- Gene Mackas Guard #2
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about In the Mouth of Madness (1994)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Michael De Luca wrote the script in the late 1980s and one of the first directors he offered it to was John Carpenter, who initially passed; New Line announced production in 1989 with Tony Randel to direct, Mary Lambert was later attached, and Carpenter finally signed on in December 1992.
- The town scenes in Hobb's End were filmed on Main Street Unionville and the exterior of the Black Church is actually the Cathedral of the Transfiguration, both in Markham, Ontario; the rest was shot in Toronto for its mix of "New York skyscrapers and New England remoteness".
- It took seven weeks for KNB to create all the practical effects for the film, the biggest of which was an "eighteen-foot Wall of Monsters" that was mounted on rollers and operated by a crew of twenty-five people.
- Carpenter said in 2001 that there was under seven million dollars to spend on the picture, and that the monsters had to be outrageous Lovecraftian demons yet slightly cartoonish, since Sam Neill spends most of the movie ridiculing horror only to discover it's all too real.
- The film's main theme was inspired by Metallica's "Enter Sandman": Carpenter had originally wanted to use the song, but was unable to secure the rights and instead composed his own theme with composer Jim Lang and guitarist Dave Davies of The Kinks.
- Hayden Christensen makes his film debut in the movie, briefly seen as a paper boy, alongside Frances Bay as Mrs. Pickman and Wilhelm von Homburg as Simon.
- The film opened at the number four spot with $3,441,807 from 1,510 theaters, fell to number seven in its second week and left the top 10 in week three, ending up with $8,924,549 on a budget ranging from $8 million to $14 million.
