With spooky season in full swing, I figured it was finally time to review this creepy classic from horror master John Carpenter. In the Mouth of Madness is the kind of flick that has a lot to say about a lot of things, not limited to the publishing industry and its marketing ploys, the worship of best-selling authors, invasion of ideas (although more Lovecraftian than propaganda), and, of course, the writer's brain and how it creates people, towns, and entire universes from nothing.
The movie takes an obvious, but tongue-in-cheek poke at Stephen King and the way his followers hang on to his every new title, losing their cool like parents trying to find the last Tickle Me Elmo in a store during Christmas 1996. Sadly, we've seen this kind of thing get worse with the anonymity of Internet forums and the ease of becoming a troll and all-around asshole online.
We've also seen popular writers brought down by their own words and attitudes, even the more popular. Look no further than J.K. Rowling and her fall from grace because of her transphobic comments.
And we've seen market ploys that try to blur fiction and reality. The Blair Witch, anyone?
But, true or not, that's not what we're here for, is it? We want to see what this awesome, spooky movie has to say about writing and writers.
All writing becomes real -- at least to some degree.
Now, don't get me wrong. I doubt any of us are going to conjure up a town like Hobb's End simply by writing about it, but the people and places we create can and do become a magical kind of real in the minds of readers (and all that without needing a movie made from the book). Linda Styles, editor for the missing writer, Sutter Cane, tells John Trent, the investigator hired to find him:
For about a year before he disappeared... his work became erratic, bent, more bizarre than usual. He became convinced his writing was real, notfiction.
Most of us as writers don't have this confusion, but fiction has a way of affecting readers, particularly the most arduous of fans. Online trolls send hate messages to actors because a character they play may be evil. In the most extreme cases, the worlds of a book series can even become real in the sense that it is recreated as a theme park. (I'm looking at you, Harry Potter.)
Still, even without a real-world blending of fiction and real, at least in reader's minds, the words and the worlds they form do indeed become something a lot more substantial than mere fiction.
This is a theme portrayed in plenty of movies and books, my favorite of which remains Cool World (1992). The very notion that a writer could enter and explore the world they created is one that most writers I know would give almost anything to experience. But, in stories where this happens, it almost always goes wrong. These become nightmares even though they may begin as fantasies.
I know that personally, I would never want to live in the same world as my characters, not after the kind of shenanigans I've put them through. They'd gang up on me and leave me bleeding out in a dark alley, as the cliche goes.
While trapped in the town created by Sutter Cane, Trent and (and more so) Styles find it easy to navigate Hobb's End. Say's Styles:
Styles, how'd you know about this place? l thought you'd never been here before. l haven't. l've read about it. So have you.
That's a good lesson for me as a writer to learn. Are my settings -- at least if they're the ones that are supposed to be a character in the book as much as the people are -- so real that my readers could navigate them if they were real? Have I put that kind of care into them, or are they more a list of generic names that provide the mere outline of a town or city or apartment complex or suburb?
Sutter Cane provides a nice rationale for why we write as well, as he tells Styles:
For years, l thought l was making all this up. But they were telling me what to write... giving me the power to make it all real. And now it is.
It's the voices that guide us. No doubt we've all seen the memes and had these discussions on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit about how writers don't write because we want to, but instead, we write because we have to. I used to think it was BS, that (like the stereotypical addict) I could stop whenever I wanted. But I know that's not the case. I may not write all the time. I may not write to a schedule. But I can't not write. No matter how often I push it away, eventually, it swallows me up again, whole, and won't spit me back out until words touch paper (or screen). "They" are telling me what to write, and "they" will continue to do so.
The last thing I want to say about this flick is the part I (hopefully, at least I try to) identify with most. It's the notion of elevating the expectations of genre writing. At the beginning of his journey, after easily dismissing Cane's horror books as "that horror crap," Trent actually buys several books and reads them to get a better understanding of the missing author he is being paid to find. His reaction?
l picked up some of these Sutter Cane books. l've been reading them. Well, it -- Pulp horror novels. They're all pretty familiar. They all seem to have the same plot. Slimy things in the dark, people go mad... they turn into monsters. The funny thing is that they're kind of better written... than you'd expect. They sort of get to you in a way. l don't know if it's his style of writing... or his use of description or whatever, but --
I love this. It's what I hope people feel when they read my work. Oh, these little pulp adventures or horror short stories or superhero romps, they're pretty similar, but they're kind of different too, not what I expected. If only... (Well, time will tell, I suppose.)
I think I picked up this idea from reading my favorite authors. C.S. Lewis, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut elevated sci-fi to art. Neil Gaiman took fantasy and turned it into a sort of mind's-eye Impressionism. Shirley Jackson and Algernon Blackwood wrote ghost stories that were so much more than "mere" ghost stories.
I want to be that kind of writer. I love genre work, but I also want to love genre work so much that I expect to help it keep growing and never stagnate.
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