Prince of Darkness

A team of graduate physicists are brought to a Los Angeles church to study a cylinder of swirling green liquid in the basement that a secret order has been guarding for centuries. It is the Anti-God, and it is waking up.

Carpenter, writing under a pseudonym, mixes theology and quantum mechanics with total seriousness: the liquid is a message, the homeless outside are possessed, and the film keeps sending a recurring transmission that claims to be a tachyon broadcast from 1999.

It is talky, slow and quietly unsettling, and the collective dream the characters share, a grainy shape emerging from the church doorway, is one of the most frightening images Carpenter made.

Alice Cooper appears as a possessed vagrant and kills a man with a bicycle.

It flopped and is now regarded as one of his most interesting films.