From master horror/sci-fi director John Carpenter comes the story of top horror writer Sutter Cane (Jurgen Prochnow), whose ghoulish novels have driven his readers to insanity. When Sutter disappears, his publisher (Charlton Heston) sends insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) to locate him. However, as Trent gets closer to the author, he finds that the boundaries between reality and fiction are rapidly blurring.
The mind-bending worlds of author H P Lovecraft have long interested horror directors but the films have rarely successfully captured his nightmarish mix of madness and mythology. John Carpenter's In the Mouth of Madness is not directly based on Lovecraft's work but screenwriter Michael De Luca draws his inspiration from Lovecraft's Cthulu mythology and then adds his own ingenious twists. John Trent (Sam Neill), an insurance investigator recently fitted for a straightjacket, tells his story to a psychiatrist. Hired to track down the missing pop-horror phenomenon Sutter Cane, a Stephen King-like author whose fans are literally mad for his books, Trent finds the supposedly fictional Hobb's End. He watches the town collapse into madness, murder and monstrous transformations: the fantastic horrors of Cane's novels played out in front of his eyes. "Reality isn't what it used to be", deadpans one zombie-like towns person. In fact, it is how Cane writes it--but is he Devil, dark oracle or simply a preacher in the service of an evil that grows stronger with every soul his books convert? The script never quite gets a grip on the blurry relationship between fact and fiction but those details fade in the face of Carpenter's demented imagery, shiver-inducing twists and dark wit. It's more eerie mind game than straight-out horror, a portrait of a world gone mad, and Carpenter relishes every hallucinatory moment.