For the crime of having murdered over a 100 people, “Meat Cleaver Max” Jenke (Brion James) is sentenced to death and sent to the electric chair. Even though everyone thinks that Max was electrocuted, his electricity-fueled spirit is still alive and pissed off. If this sounds familiar, that is because it is the exact same premise that was used in Destroyer. The only difference is that Max is not haunting a prison and killing a film crew. Instead, he is living in a basement and seeking revenge on Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen), the cop who arrested him.
Lucas is already tightly wound. There is a scene where Lucas is watching as his family laughs uproariously at a late night comic who is telling a not very funny joke about then-Vice President Dan Quayle. When Lucas thinks that he sees Max on TV, he pulls out his gun and shoots the screen. His wife, son, and daughter will probably never laugh at another joke about any vice president. Soon, Lucas is seeing and hearing Max everywhere. Max says that he is going to tear Lucas’s world apart and he means it.
That The Horror Show is going to be a mess is obvious from the opening credits, where the screenplay is credited to Alan Smithee. The credited director is visual effects specialist James Isaac but most of the film was reportedly directed by David Blythe. Isaac stepped in when Blythe was fired by producer Sean S. Cunningham. Full of false scares and scenes where people go down into the basement for no reason other than to become Max’s latest victim, The Horror Show is usually boring, except for when it is violent, gory, and mean-spirited. There are moments of strange attempts at humor that do not seem to belong. In the middle of all the carnage, there is a subplot about McCarthy’s son (Aron Eisenberg) ordering case after case of Nestle Quick. Did Nestle pay for the product placement? Were they happy to be associated with a movie where Lance Henriksen has a nightmare that his daughter (played by DeeDee “sister of Michelle” Pfieffer) is pregnant with Max Jenke’s baby?
The Horror Show provided both Lance Henriksen and Brion James with rare starring roles and they did their best what they had to work with. Also keep an eye out for veteran tough guy Lawrence Tierney as the warden who supervises Max’s execution.
“A prowler has been seen around the campus and, well … he could be dangerous.”
— Miss Allison (Donna Davis) in The Prowler (1981)
Miss Allison was one of those largely ineffectual authority figures who always seems to turn up in slasher films from the early 80s. It was easy to be dismissive of her and personally, I can’t get over the fact that she would actually show up for the big graduation dance wearing pantyhose with sandals. But still, Miss Allison had a point here. There was a prowler wandering around campus and was he ever dangerous!
Of course, this all could have been avoided if they just hadn’t had a graduation dance to begin with. Eccentric old Maj. Chatham (Lawrence Tierney) understood that. He remembered what had happened at the town of Avalon Bay’s graduation dance of 1945, how Rosemary (Joy Glaccum) and her new date where both killed by a pitchfork-wielding maniac. Chatham had spent the last 35 years protesting any plans to hold another graduation dance.
However, in 1980, one feisty student named Pam (Vicky Dawson) finally convinced the town to allow them to hold a graduation dance. It probably helped the Pam’s boyfriend, Mark (Christopher Goutman) was a deputy. The morning of the dance, reports came in that someone had robbed a nearby store, murdered the store owner, and might be heading towards the town of Avalon Bay.
The sheriff (Farley Granger, who played Guy Haines in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train) reacted to this news by announcing that he was going fishing and leaving Mark in charge. And, before the viewer could say, “Wait a minute — how does that make any sense?,” the sheriff was gone, the dance was on, and a maniac in a combat uniform was killing people with a bayonet and a pitchfork.
Yes, Miss Allison, the prowler was quite dangerous.
Having read that plot description, you might have a suspicion as to who the prowler actually was. But you’re probably thinking to yourself, “No, that is way too obvious a solution!” Well, no — it isn’t. You will not learn the Prowler’s identity until the final few minutes of the film but you will have guessed it early on.
The Prowler is not going to win any points for originality. It’s a slasher film from the early 80s, with everything that implies. For people who know their horror history, it’s a time capsule of that brief period when slashers were still making an effort to be American gialli, before the genre became dominated by loquacious monsters like Freddy Krueger and postmodern snark. As a character, the Prowler says next to nothing and really has no personality beyond a few questionable hobbies. But he certainly does kill a lot of people and seems to truly enjoy it.
And, if you hate these type of films, you’re going to hate The Prowler. But, that being said, The Prowler is actually one of the better examples of the early 80s slasher genre. Much as he would do with both Abduction and Friday the 13th — The Final Chapter, director Joseph Zito keeps the bloody action moving and, though they may be playing stock characters, he gets above average performances from his entire cast. As opposed to a lot of slasher films of the period, you actually feel bad when these people meet their untimely end.
And finally, the Prowler himself is just scary! The combination of the Prowler’s menacing appearance and Tom Savini’s relentless gore effects sets this film apart from other contemporary slashers, like Graduation Day. Even by the standards of slasher psychos, the Prowler is cruel and sadistic. It’s not just that he kills with a bayonet. It’s that he obviously get so much enjoyment from doing it. At its best, The Prowler is pure nightmare fuel.
Finally, on a personal note, I have to admit that it kind of freaked me out that one of the Prowler’s victims was named Lisa. As I’ve said before, slasher films tend to scare me precisely because I know that there’s no way I’d survive one. We always tell ourselves that people in slasher movies die because they do unbelievably stupid things but honestly, I think we all do a lot of stupid things every day. After all, we all behave under the assumption that we’re not on the verge of being attacked by a knife-wielding maniac. Hence, it’s easy to say, “Don’t go in that room!” but why shouldn’t someone go in that room? After all, they’re not watching the movie. They don’t know there’s a killer in that room. Lisa in The Prowler certainly did some stupid things and what freaked me out was that I could easily imagine myself doing the same stupid things.
(True, unlike the film’s Lisa, I wouldn’t go out by myself in the middle of night, strip down to my underwear, and then jump in a pool but I’m planning on conquering my fear of drowning someday soon and who knows what might then happen!)
Seriously, people — be kind to the Lisas in your life.
“Say goodbye to classical reality, because our logic collapses on the subatomic level… into ghosts and shadows.”
John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is a criminally underrated entry in his canon—a blend of philosophical, apocalyptic horror and supernatural mystery that’s as unsettling as it is deliberately strange. Released in 1987, the film often gets eclipsed by Carpenter classics like The Thing and In the Mouth of Madness. Even so, it stands out as a unique organic link between science-driven paranoia and cosmic horror—the sort of film that grows on you as you unravel its layers.
The setup is simple but immediately offbeat: In a derelict Los Angeles church, Father Loomis (Donald Pleasence, always at his nervous best) stumbles on a swirling green cylinder hidden away in the basement. Loneliness and age hang over Loomis as he realizes this is no mere relic but possibly the essence of absolute evil—the literal embodiment of Satan. Sensing he’s in over his head, the priest reaches out to Professor Birack (Victor Wong), a physicist whose rational mindset is quickly tested by the uncanny. Birack arrives with a diverse team of grad students and lab techs, each bringing curiosity, skepticism, and just enough personality to keep things lively.
What starts as an academic investigation quickly goes off the rails. Strange, shared dreams trouble the researchers—fragmented transmissions from the future, warning of disaster in unsettling, VHS-glitch style. Meanwhile, the area outside the church transforms into a kind of urban wasteland: homeless people, gripped by an unseen force, stumble with zombie-like intent, trapping the group inside. Inside, members fall prey to unsettling phenomena, from unexplained possession to increasingly grotesque violence. There’s a sense that the evil in the cylinder isn’t content to simply stay put—and the combination of supernatural implication and scientific uncertainty gives everything a persistent, gnawing tension.
Carpenter directs the film with measured, stifling precision. His color palette—rotting yellows, bruised greens, washed-out sunlight—creates a perpetually uneasy mood. He uses slow tracking shots and carefully composed frames to ratchet up suspense, and the score (co-composed with Alan Howarth) pulses with ominous synths that buzz beneath all the dialogue, making even the film’s quieter moments feel restless and charged with threat. Compared to the gooey spectacle of The Thing, the terror in Prince of Darkness is more metaphysical—less visible monsters, more eroding reality.
Sound and image work together to keep the audience on edge: moments of unsettling silence are punctuated by visual oddities, like swarms of bugs or the warped geometry of the church’s shadows. The group’s scientific attempts to decode the evil—a jumble of quantum theory, apocalyptic Christian lore, and unsettling mathematics—do more to ramp up anxiety than offer answers. Carpenter seems to delight in ambiguity; the revelations never clarify so much as deepen the void, giving shape to a primordial kind of fear.
The film’s most iconic device is its recurring nightmare sequence, where the group—cut off from the world—witnesses a cryptic, shadowy figure emerging from the church, broadcast as a tachyon transmission from the future. It’s classic Carpenter: deeply unsettling, oddly hypnotic, and open to any number of interpretations. The blending of science fiction and theological horror feels fresh and ambitious, and it’s fair to say these sequences alone have ironically kept the film alive in horror culture discussions and remixes.
The cast, featuring Pleasence and Wong, manages the film’s shifts in tone—moving from banter about theoretical physics to genuine terror with surprising ease. The grad students are likable enough for you to root for, especially Lisa Blount and Jameson Parker, who carry the emotional brunt as things collapse. Alice Cooper’s cameo as a silent, menacing street dweller further anchors the film’s reputation for “unexpected creepy” in the best way possible.
While there are flashes of gore—possessions, injuries, even some memorable stabbings—Carpenter resists making violence the centerpiece. The real horror here is psychological: paranoia, loss of agency, and the collapse of foundational beliefs. Where The Thing was about trusting (or not trusting) your friends, Prince of Darkness is about grappling with a world where even faith and science seem powerless and interchangeable in the face of the unknown.
Thematically, this is Carpenter at his most cerebral and bleak. The notion that neither faith nor science can adequately tackle the unfathomable echoes Lovecraft, yet Carpenter grounds it all in urban decay and deadpan dialogue rather than Gothic flourish. The questions get bigger—what good is faith if truth is poisonous, and what does science matter against a force older than logic? Dialogue about quantum uncertainty and theological paradoxes isn’t there to solve anything, but to make everything less secure.
If the film has a flaw, it’s that its pacing feels deliberately patient—some might say slow. Tension accumulates gradually, and you’re invited to sit in the discomfort as the group loses sleep, loses one another, and loses touch with reality. As the stakes escalate, the line between dream and waking life shreds, leading to an ending that’s haunting, ambiguous, and deeply open-ended. There’s no neat wrap-up or cathartic victory—only trauma, unsolved terror, and a lingering sense that evil never really left, just waited.
It’s this refusal to explain or comfort that gives Prince of Darkness its lasting cult appeal. Carpenter puts cosmic pessimism front and center: knowledge itself stands as a kind of curse, and both faith and reason bend beneath the weight of mystery. Rather than offer solutions, the movie warns about the dangers of peeling back reality’s surface—a theme that’s only grown more unsettling in the years since it was made.
Watching Prince of Darkness now, the film may not fit everyone’s idea of a fun Friday-night scarefest. But if you want horror that’s slow, dense, and sticks with you, this is essential viewing. Carpenter delivers a bleak, hypnotic nightmare about what happens when explanations fail—when the universe itself seems ready to swallow us whole. Whether you’re a die-hard genre fan or someone looking for something different, Prince of Darkness is cult horror at its most unshakable—proof that the scariest stories are often those that leave their deepest secrets unexplained.
For the crime of having murdered over a 100 people, “Meat Cleaver Max” Jenke (Brion James) is sentenced to death and sent to the electric chair. Even though everyone thinks that Max was electrocuted, his electricity-fueled spirit is still alive and pissed off. If this sounds familiar, that is because it is the exact same premise that was used in Destroyer. The only difference is that Max is not haunting a prison and killing a film crew. Instead, he is living in a basement and seeking revenge on Lucas McCarthy (Lance Henriksen), the cop who arrested him.
Through the Shattered Lens 