Part of John Carpenter’s “Apolcalypse Trilogy”, together with The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness, this masterpiece didn’t go the usual route of using jump scares to instill horror and dread to its audience. How they did storytelling before won’t meet today’s standards, I’m not saying that in a bad way, most modern horror films rely mostly on their special effects, jump scares, and sudden high pitched sounds just to get thay scare factor, but it’s like a sandwich without a filling, bland.

Poking around in a church cellar, a priest (Donald Pleasence) finds an otherworldly vial filled with slime. Frightened, he brings his discovery to a circle of top scholars and scientists, who eventually learn that the strange liquid is the essence of Satan. The slime then begins to seep out, turning some of the academics into zombified killers. As the possessed battle the survivors, student Kelly (Susan Blanchard) is infected by a large quantity of the liquid and becomes Satan personified.

Tone

Ominous. Eerie. Unsettling. Words that best describe the emotion, and feel of the film. It kept me engaged, waiting to see what will happen next, and it kept me glued to the screen. The acting was okay, could be better, but it was enough to make the film an instant horror classic.

Iconic Dream Sequence

One of the best scenes in the film was the dream sequence, with the dialogue:
“This is not a dream… not a dream. We are using your brain’s electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious state of awareness, but this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation.”
This was a warning from the year 1999 for the, presumably, the scientists to prevent the rise of an Anti-God, the Prince of Darkness. But all of this is left to the viewer’s interpretation, if it really was a warning, or just a normal nightmare. But this has been one of the most effective scenes of horror in John Carpenter’s career

Conclusion

Even after watching it, my mind still wonders what would happen if she were to pull the thing out of the mirror. The flickering of the mirror on the other side, when she went through it to stop it from going out, it was an awesome idea; it portrayed a candle, the single piece of light amidst the darkness enveloping her, flickering out, and leaving her to drown in the abyss.

Honestly speaking, not everyone will like the film as much as I did. It’s a classic 80s-90s horror, don’t expect an “Insidious” kind of treatment.