Author and critic Mike Thorn swings by to talk about Prince of Darkness, John Carpenter's 1987 horror film, and how it both expresses and interrogates the subject of epistemophobia — the fear of knowledge. It’s a great movie to go into knowing very little, so be aware that we spoil the entire plot in this episode.
We get into how the film withholds or ambiguates information for the audience, the film's balance between pessimism and intellectual humility, and its place in Carpenter's "Apocalypse Cycle" of movies.
In this episode, we discuss:
The ideas behind “epistemophobia” and the fallibility of knowledge systems.
The different approaches to knowledge, disorder, and pessimism in fellow apocalypse cycle films The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness.
How different spaces in the film represent and problematize different systems of knowledge.
The role of sound in the film — how it precedes, obscures, or confuses events.
The parallels and differences between the apocalypse cycle and the classic Italian horror films of Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci.
Additional resources:
Mike Thorn’s thesis deals with the subjects of this podcast and more in much, much greater detail, and is well worth your time. You can read that here.
We touch briefly on Michel Chion’s theories of acousmatic sound in films — Chion’s writing on the subject doesn’t seem to be freely available online, but this idea and others are discussed in his excellent collection of essays The Voice in Cinema.
Mike Thorn
Mike Thorn is the author of Darkest Hours and Dreams of Lake Drukka & Exhumation. His debut novel Shelter for the Damned will be released through JournalStone in 2021.
His fiction has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies and podcasts, including Dark Moon Digest, The NoSleep Podcast, DarkFuse, Unnerving Magazine, Turn to Ash and Tales to Terrify. His film criticism has been published in MUBI Notebook, The Film Stage, The Seventh Row, Bright Lights Film Journal and Vague Visages.
He completed his M.A. with a major in English literature at the University of Calgary, where he wrote a thesis on epistemophobia in John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness.