In the Mouth of Madness....with John Trent?

But it is just as it is. The end seems more like an explanation scene for the viewers to understand what really happened. The last scene and especially his laugh which transforms of howls of despair is a masterpiece! This last moment he realizes everything is epic.
After all many fantastic movies had plot holes and so the more realistic ones.
Now tell me do you read Sutter Cane? (devil)

Who was the first to forge the deadly blade? Of rugged steel his savage soul was made!

For this movie, it's a case of everything makes perfect sense *because* it makes no sense. Reality has been shattered, and everything we know of how we perceive reality- time, space, reason- is gone. You can't take anything for granted. You can't trust anything you see. You can't reason it out.

"Illogical touches like that take the me right out of the plot and remind me that I am in fact watching a movie."

Lol; the title of this film is "In the Mouth of Madness", and madness is NOT logical. The only "logic" to this film is that of madness.

Illogical touches like that take the me right out of the plot and remind me that I am in fact watching a movie.

So other people do see these things, but it's like they DON'T, because they're all a part of what's going on?

These two points are those that a lot of people conveniently ignore.

People who are yet to view the movie can stop here to get an experience and then visit here, I'm avoiding use of spoilers because I'm not revealing anything from the movie as such, but interpretations of what I saw.

The entire movie that we viewed is Cane's work of fiction, which explains why people become insane reading his books.

Cane builds his own reality in the book that merges with the reality (the epidemic and his disappearance - probably staged to make the novel prove its point). It is evident that the entire movie is a mental trip taken by Trent while reading 'In the Mouth of Madness' which has references to Cane's previous book 'The Hobb's End'.

Cane intelligently distorts reality and inserts bizarre elements in his book. When any experience for a common man is purely fantastical, or purely real, his/her perception is never tested. Only when there is a thin line between reality and something else, a person's senses and perception will get doubted, sometimes one's own's.

The significant part of this is, Trent wakes up from dreams multiple times in the movie, therefore they could be said as Cane's tools to trick the reader, introducing multiple layers/worlds within the same book.

The climax implies that Trent is still within Cane's book, after several trips to other inner layers was back within his cell, which further implies that the movie started within one of the layers of Cane's book.

This is what I thought all along. These are just characters in Cane's book...one where the author wrote himself as the bad guy...an author who can basically control reality.

So the movie scene isn't so far fetched, after all. It's almost a surreal way of reminding Trent that he is a charcacter in the book.

The title of the movie is In the Mouth of Madness. Given that, I've always assumed the only way to apply any logic to the denouement is to assume Trent has gradually become obsessed with Sutter Cane to such an extent as to lose his sanity altogether. The movie is overtly Lovecraftian, and obsession with revelations of darkness often drives Lovecraft's protagonists to insanity. That would make the idea that Trent descends into lunacy plausible. Since it's Trent's fantasy at the end, wouldn't it make sense he'd imagine himself as the protagonist of a movie he himself dreamed into existence?

Carthago delenda est.

Pretty much it.

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It does all get pretty vague by the end, but that's kind of the point - you are watching the movie version of a fictional book - and since, in the book, Sutter Cane's work has become more popular than the bible, the character of John Trent is known to the millions who have read it (think Indiana Jones or Harry Potter), which could explain the marquee.

The "book" exists within itself, just as it does in the movie, and enough people (in the book reading the book) believe what's written in it that the lines begin to blur between reality and insanity, including pulling the actual character in the book into what is considered reality. His descent from fantasy (the book) into reality is the same as everybody's descent from reality to fantasy, and they meet somewhere in the middle.

I think.

Yeah, Zachanscom, and what is up with that Picasso fellow? His drawings don't resemble reality at all. Noone really looks like that! Don't even get me started on that Escher guy's impossible staircases. You could never make them in real life, so what gives???? IT MAKES NO SENSE ON ANY LEVEL!!!

/sarcasam

"power of the Dark Ones"

Or,(how I interpret it) Sutter is just some guy who wrote a story. He's basically the god of the universes that he writes. This film is a story in which the main character becomes self aware of his own fictional-ness, and goes insane. Anything Sutter Cane wants make happen, happens. Their doesn't need to be any logic.

If I were Carpenter, I would have gone for a double mind screw at the end: After Sutter Cane ends the story, he himself realizes that he's a fictional character in the movie.

It seems that almost everyone who has responded to this post has forgotten the central premise of the film: Sutter Cane has written a novel that, due to the power of the Dark Ones he was releasing from their prison, has become reality. All concepts of logic no longer apply because reality is now whatever Cane wrote in the book. If he wrote that a film version of In the Mouth of Madness was released starring Trent, then it was. As the farmer said to Trent before committing suicide, "Reality isn't what it used to be..."

I think everything is kept ambigious & the interpretation is left at the viewer's discretion.
Either
1. Trent is insane & imagining everything.
2. Trent wrote the book while his mind was the devil's factory & all thos things did happen for real.
3. An eerie combination of both.

One thing which I am not able to comprehend, & perhaps its because I had to watch this movie in 2 parts, is who is, or who is 'shown', if you will, to be the author? Is it Trent or Suttercane?

In the climax, Trent was shown to be the author, but if hes the author why Suttercane has control over him? Or is Trent Suttercane?

I have never watched the same movie twice in like 10 years, but I think I may have to make an exception for this one.


I was always fascinated with the enemies of heaven -Crowley