In the Mouth of Madness

Going back to third grade, I can remember having premonition dreams. It's never been for anything important, merely flashes of me doing something mundane, but with a particular detail that's sticks in my memory. The first time it was a girl in my class wearing a yellow sweater, which she did the next day. Another time it was sitting in class watching the teacher explain some mathematical concept, but my grandmother was sitting next to me (my elementary school had a Grandparents' Day). Sometimes I remember them when I wake up, other times not until the event takes place. I'm sure there's a scientific explanation, or perhaps it's just coincidence, but it's kind of groovy nonetheless.

Over the weekend, my coworkers were watching some horror flicks, what with Halloween fast approaching. By this point we were watching In the Mouth of Madness, the movie was nearly done. Sam Neill (as John Trent) has finished relating his tale to David Warner. As they sit, regarding each other, one of my coworkers opines that she doesn't believe Trent could draw those crosses so neatly in black crayon on his own face. And there's the flash. Her saying that, as I sit at a very particular angle watching the screen, looking at a guy in a straitjacket with crosses on his face. I can't recall every seeing the movie before (or even having heard of it). I've certainly never watched it with my coworkers. Yet here we are.

Like I said, probably an easy explanation. Still, it's a little creepy to have it happen when you're watching a movie where the main character has to question if he has any control over his life at all, has to question his very notion of reality. I think my coworkers were more spooked by my knowing the correct age Charlton Heston died at without looking it up (he's in the movie, too). I don't know how I did that, either. Luck, I suppose.

I don't have a lot to say about the movie. It was a mistake to show so much of the "old ones" in the sequence where they follow Trent down the path that leads back to his world. They were distinctly not terrifying. Hideous, yes, but hardly the sort of thing that causes ones sanity to recede into the darkest corners of the mind as a defense mechanism. Effective use of shadow would have helped a lot. Other than that, eh, it was all right.

As someone who likes the believe we're all ultimately responsible for our own actions, a film where a person's actions are controlled by the whims of some hack writer is not really one I'm going to dig. Though I guess it's up in the air whether Trent made the decision to watch the film at the end, or if he was written that way. I suspect that latter, if only because it was awful convenient how he wasn't killed, even when his door was ripped loose, and there was clearly something watching him as he left the asylum.