Prince Of Darkness: Indistinguishable From Magic

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” - Arthur C. Clarke

There’s an element to cosmic horror that I think sometimes gets overlooked, beyond the whole tendency to reduce it to tentacles and madness, and that’s its technological piece. Sure, you’ve got the stories of cultists making sacrifices to ancient gods, but as often as not those ancient gods are mixed up with equally ancient extraterrestrial races, concerned with foul experiments on humanity. And this is one of those combinations I really dig. It’s not an amalgamation of horror and science fiction, strictly speaking. Alien comes to mind there, but that’s really a horror story told through the lens of science fiction. And it’s not one of those stories where what first appears to be horror turns out to be something like alien abduction - those are disappointing, as often as not. No, this is more like a case where the ancient and incomprehensible is rendered in terms of technology instead of magic, or as a commingling of the two, and the results feel foreign to our experience. And I think part of making a good horror movie (or at least a scary horror movie) is denying the audience the comfort of expectations.

Prince Of Darkness is one of the few films to plumb this very specific intersection, and in many ways it defies easy description. Unfortunately, it hasn’t aged all that well on a few fronts, but it still has its moments, and I think those moments are worth considering.

It opens with an old man lying in bed, breathing his last. He clutches a small box, and then he’s gone. A priest, called to his bedside, finds the box. Inside is a key to a reinforced door in an abandoned church in a run-down part of Los Angeles. Elsewhere, Dr. Howard Birack is teaching a graduate class on quantum physics, explaining how our understanding of things like time and space and causality break down entirely at sufficiently large or small scales. That beyond a certain point, the universe is chaotic and unknowable. Birack gets a call from the priest (who never gets a name), inviting him out to this abandoned church.

It turns out that the old man who died was the last member of a monastic order called the Brotherhood of Sleep, an order so secret that its work was concealed from even the highest levels of the Vatican. The brothers of this order have, for centuries, guarded something stored in the catacombs below this church. A tall cylinder made of metal and glass, filled with a turbulent green fluid. Carbon dating puts it at seven million years old.

Written in the old man’s journal: “The sleeper awakens.”

So Dr. Birack brings his students and a lot of equipment to the church. They’re joined by the priest, a biologist and his students, and an expert in ancient religious texts, whose job it will be to translate a book found next to the cylinder - a book written in a mishmash of Greek, Latin, and Coptic, passages erased and overwritten, over the course of centuries. They’re going to try and find out exactly what this thing is.

In style and subject matter, this film is pretty much a homage to the works of Nigel Kneale, who trafficked in similar territory in his own work. Some of it isn’t even subtle - one of Dr. Birack’s students is a transfer from “Kneale University” and the screenplay is credited to the pseudonym “Martin Quatermass.” I’ve seen some of Kneale’s work, and a lot of it is somewhat dated, but it’s still interesting in how it merges the scientific and the supernatural in really compelling ways. I don’t like the idea of remakes, but I would purely love to see Ben Wheatley tackle a remake of Kneale’s The Stone Tape. And that’s one of the best things this film has going for it - it’s an approach to the idea of supernatural evil that you don’t see very often. You’ve got a 2000-year-old religious text that contains differential equations and describes Jesus of Nazareth as a member of an extraterrestrial race tasked with imprisoning the occupant of this cylinder, with the idea that evil is a material thing, describable in terms of biology and physics. Strange dreams of future events, beamed directly into people’s brains as a stream of tachyons. In the news, the light from a supernova that occurred millions of years ago is just now reaching Earth. The sun and moon are both visible in the sky. Insects are going crazy, and people are starting to congregate around this abandoned church. As Lovecraft would put it, the stars are right.

So when it does work, it’s creepy and atmospheric, creating a feeling almost from the get-go that something very bad is coming, that events millennia in the making are gaining momentum. It doesn’t lean into many of the usual cliches about things like demonic possession and creates a pretty interesting visual vocabulary for itself in the process. It doesn’t always make a lot of sense if you look at it too closely, and not everything is explained, but I think that this actually helps it - we’re dealing with something beyond our comprehension, so of course it isn’t all going to make sense.

But there are parts that don’t work all that well, a lot of it (though not all) being a function of time. None of the characters are especially developed as people, and there’s a lot of them so after a bit they come off as kind of interchangeable. The dialogue is clumsy throughout, and the performances range from good and understated to wooden. Some of them are barely performances, not through any fault of the actors, but just because there are so many people that most of them barely get any time to develop at all, so there’s not much sense of who they actually are. It’s sort of hard to care about what happens to them as a result.

And in the moment to moment interaction, it really shows its age in terms of how it handles gender. Attitudes toward women in this film aren’t great, more chauvinistic than misogynistic, but it’s just obnoxious enough to be noticeable. In this building full of scientists and experts, the women are pretty much discussed entirely in terms of how available they are, and it’s off-putting enough to be a distraction, and the clunky dialogue doesn’t help. For a film that’s supposed to be about science trying to understand the supernatural (or the supernatural as phenomena that can be scientifically explained), it…doesn’t spend much time on the science, and the jargon doesn’t really hold up. I mean, it’ s not Star Trek levels of technobabble, but it feels at several points like an afterthought - all of these experts gather at this church and then sort of…go into different rooms and have conversations, so we don’t really get a clear picture of how science explains this thing. It sort of comes up in passing here and there, but it feels like understanding the artifact and the implications of its existence should come first, and then things should start to go south, and it doesn’t really work that way. It’s sort of scattered in what story it’s telling.

And that’s the other big problem - the pacing. It starts off strong, creating this atmosphere of looming dread, and it ends pretty well as everything goes to shit, but the middle sags quite a bit. One thing Kneale’s stories do well is create a sense of discovery, where you’re finding out along with the characters what it is they’re dealing with, and here we’re sort of shut out of that part of the story, and it suffers as a result. It’s not a very dynamic film at all, and that weakens the third act and threatens to bring the second act to a screeching halt. I suspect some judicious editing would tighten things up a bit, and I don’t think it’s just a matter of modern sensibilities preferring faster-paced films. I like a good slow burn, but this film’s missing the sort of things that would make for a good slow burn - establishing the people, gradual reveals of what they’re dealing with, mounting dread as everything builds toward a climax. Here we have an assortment of scenes put together that don’t really gel after the very promising first act.

But at the same time, when it works (and there are definitely moments when it does), it works really well. The effects work still mostly holds up, and even when it doesn’t it’s not egregious. It’s easy to overlook the technical shortcomings because it’s often in service of vivid, creepy setpieces. The cinematography is functional - solid without being flashy (with the exception of some inventively unnerving dream sequences), everything scored with ominous, pulsing synthesizer, and it ends on a strong, nicely inconclusive note, which redeems it to a degree.

So I think what we’re left with is something ambitious, trying to do something beyond the obvious, something that starts strong and ends, well, pretty strong, but really bogs down in the middle and doesn’t have performances that can carry it past the pacing problems. Which is too bad, because the idea of evil as a function of particle physics and ancient creatures from beyond the stars alike - that place where science and magic blur and become indistinguishable - is strange, fertile territory for exploration. And it’s been too long since anyone journeyed there.

IMDB entry
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