John Carpenter's highly underrated 1987 film The Fog still to come.
One of Carpenter's most unjustly overlooked efforts is Prince of Darkness, although it's not hard to see why, releasing as it did between two Carpenter cult classics in 1986's They Live. Horror has never been low on films concerning Satan, as The Devil is genuinely seen as the ultimate source of evil, at least by those who subscribe to the Christian faiths that dominate the American populace. However, Prince of Darkness accomplished the feat of interpreting Satan in a new, creative way, allowing for surprising and unexpected dramatic results.
While Prince of Darkness sports a decent-sized fanbase today, at the time of its release, Carpenter's film came and went without much fanfare, earning middling reviews and failing to make much of a dent at the box office. It's a fate sadly shared by many of the director's films, although at least they often end up getting their due later. Here's what inspired Carpenter to create Prince of Darkness.
Prince of Darkness: What Inspired John Carpenter's Weirdest Film
In Prince of Darkness, a priest (Halloween's Donald Pleasance) invites quantum physics professor Howard Birack (Big Trouble in Little China's Victor Wong) and a group of graduate students to an an old church after the discovery of something puzzling. In the church's basement rests a large cylinder filled with a mysterious green substance, which turns out to be the essence of Satan himself, who seeks to possess and use the students in an attempt to bring his father the "anti-God" to Earth. It's a crazy premise, and unlike anything else John Carpenter did before or since.
According to Carpenter himself, Prince of Darkness was partially inspired by the 1980 Italian horror film Inferno, directed by Halloween 3: Season of the Witch.
