In the Mouth of Madness

The third of Carpenter's Apocalypse Trilogy, after The Thing and Prince of Darkness, and the most explicitly Lovecraftian thing he made.

An insurance investigator is sent to find a missing horror novelist whose books are causing psychotic episodes in readers. He drives to a town that does not exist except in the fiction.

Sam Neill is doing a very specific thing: he plays the first hour as a smug professional sceptic, which makes the second hour work, because you watch certainty come apart rather than fear arrive.

The film is about an author whose readers outnumber and therefore overwrite reality, which was a sharper idea in 1994 than it sounds now.

It flopped. Carpenter has said it is the last film he made with full control, and the last twenty minutes are him doing exactly what he wants.