PRINCE OF DARKNESS

John Carpenter's Prince of Darkness 1987
When the guardian priest of an abandoned church in Los Angeles dies, Father Loomis finds a diary and a key, opens the door of the basement and finds a cylinder with a gruesome green fluid. The priest contacts Professor Howard Birack in the local university and he invites a team of students to research the findings and translate manuscripts. Their discovery leads to the fact that the tube contains the Devil's son, and a prophecy that "when the sleeper awakens the son will release the father." The tube is locked from the inside and the sleeper is beginning to stir.






















TRIVIA

# Screenwriter 'Carpenter, John' is credited as "Martin Quatermass". The pseudonym is a homage to Professor Bernard Quatermass, the lead character of "The Quatermass Experiment" (1953) and several subsequent TV series and film versions. In the original press notes he was described as 'the brother of Professor Bernard Quatermass, head of the British rocket programme.' In a further nod to Carpenter's influences, the character Wyndham is named after science-fiction author John Wyndham and Anne Howard's character is named after the star of The Wasp Woman (1959), Susan Cabot.

# Donald Pleasence's character, Father Loomis, is named after the character he played in the Halloween movies.

# 'Jameson Parker', who plays Brian, was sporting an old leg injury he picked up while making TV series "Simon & Simon" (1981), and would sometimes need to rest in his trailer because of the pain.

# When actor Peter Jason, who plays Dr. Leahy, introduces himself to Dr. Birack ('Victor Wong') for the first time, he wasn't expecting Wong to walk away in the middle of the scene. Jason's subsequent confused appearance and awkwardness is natural and unscripted.

# Rock singer Alice Cooper is among the hordes of homeless people that surround the church during the film.

# This is the second film in what John Carpenter calls his Apocalypse Trilogy. The others are The Thing (1982) and In the Mouth of Madness (1994).

# Peter Jason hurt his shoulder in the scene where he and Jameson Parker try to break the front doors of the church down to escape. He claims that the pain still flares up to this day.

# The movie was shot in just over 30 days.

# The scene where Wyndham (Robert Grasmere) is stabbed by the bag-lady at the back of the church is inspired by a smiliar stabbing scene in the Terence Fisher movie Curse of the Werewolf.

# Alice Cooper used the bike impalement trick in his stage shows prior to this movie. The bike he uses was his own personal prop.

# In the scene where Brain and Catherine are in bed in the morning, Brian says to her, "Who was he, the one that gave you such a high opinion of men?" This is a fairly well known quote (among others) from To Have and Have Not (1944), only the sexes are reversed here. The original has Lauren Bacall saying, "Who was the girl, Steve?" To which Humphrey Bogart replies, "Who was what girl?" And she responds, "The one who left you with such a high opinion of women."

# The audio of the "broadcasts" that Brian receives in his dreams was sampled by Marilyn Manson in the song "Down In The Park".

# Factual errors: (At 12:25) The Priest (Donald Pleasence) tells Dr. Birack (Victor Wong) that the Catholic Church containing the demonic fluid, located in Los Angeles, was built in the 1500s by Spanish missionaries. The Spanish did not colonize California with missions until 1769, with the founding of San Diego by the explorer-missionary Fra Junipero Serra. The mission where filming took place, Mission San Fernando Rey de España, was not founded until 1797.

More Info on IMDB.com