suspiciously human

murder suicide is awesome to me bc its like annnnnd im coming with you

"I'm not going anywhere. I'm God now. You understand?"

Ok but can we take a second to discuss the references I think I've found in these titles? So much of this movie pretty outright-ly referenced Lovecraft (the Pickmans, come on! I was so hyped) and the titles of these books seem to be no exception???? In The Mouth of Madness and At the Mountains of Madness obviously, but Hobb's End Horror likely pointing to The Dunwich Horror, The Thing in the Basement and The Thing on the Doorstep (or actually in the basement, in the case of Suitable Flesh, but it's not time for that rant), The Whisperer of the Dark and The Whisperer in Darkness, Haunter Out of Time likely referencing both The Haunter of the Dark and The Shadow Out of Time??? (I haven't quite determined what I think the other two are, so excuse the missing pieces there) I don't think I'm some genius putting this together or anything, I just wanted to appreciate the more subtle references to the works that vaguely inspired the movie. It was the details like this that made watching the movie SO FUN, especially as it veered further and further away from the tropes and expectations of Lovecraft's work.

I think one of the reasons I love In the Mouth of Madness is that the set up is very classic noir with a horror twist. We have all the necessary characters and setting: the jaded insurance investigator, the femme fatale, the wealthy client, all in the big city where terrible things can happen. But we also have some classic horror: the asylum, the axe murderer, the creepy small town, the black church. The brilliance of the film is in how it twists tropes while also staying incredibly true to them.

This! It felt so much like a response and expansion of so much horror media without ever feeling "too familiar" or "overdone". It was the perfect balance of expected and surprising, and it felt like there was respect for the genres it was working in and the work that came before it.