In the Mouth of Madness
"The truth is out there." Is it?
By Not Sure
26 October 2025
In the Mouth of Madness is a John Carpenter film from 1994. Carpenter is mostly associated with horror movies including The Fog, the Halloween franchise, The Thing, Escape from New York, Escape from L.A., and a favorite of ‘the awake’, They Live.
This is not a slasher genre picture which I cannot watch. It is described as a supernatural horror film, ghosts, demons and suspense, not blood and gore. Our protagonist is an insurance investigator hired by book publisher Arcane (known or understood by only a few) to find a horror novelist who has disappeared, Sutter Cane. Cain, Kahn, Cohen, Con…
The investigator is John Trent. Trent. ‘The flooder’? The Council of Trent, the counter to the Protestant Reformation? Clarification on original sin, salvation, the sacraments?
He is aided in his search by Cane’s editor, Linda Styles. (This one is pretty obvious.) Trent believes he may be getting involved in an elaborate publicity stunt, but on the drive Linda Styles begins to experience surreal and disturbing phenomena.
The movie proceeds apace and each scene builds on the tension these characters experience as the boundaries between fiction and reality dissolve. Linda tells John that the events they are experiencing are unfolding as written in Sutter Cane’s unfinished manuscript which foretells the end of the world. She discovers Cane hiding out in a church and he shows her the manuscript which drives her insane.
Cane reveals that John and Linda and all the townspeople only exist because he has written them. So many readers believe in his work that it has now ‘come to life’ and he is enabling the return of the ‘old ones.’
Fans of the horror genre will recognize the Old Ones as H.P. Lovecraft’s Great Old Ones, powerful deities from space who once ruled the earth. They know ‘all that was occurring in the universe’ and can mold the dreams and minds of men to suit their needs.
This may also remind you of The Ancient Ones from Joss Whedon’s entertaining comedy horror film of 2012, The Cabin in the Woods. They live deep below the earth’s surface and must receive their annual ritual of sacrifice or they will awaken and destroy all of humanity.
Alan Watt Redux 233 is from June 7, 2007.
“New Order Schemes to Track Your Dreams
(The New I.D. is a Bad IDea)”
Alan Watt: The elite were never stupid. The elite had, for thousands of years, priests who specialized in histories and the psychologies of the people. The techniques are Machiavellian. We were given a form of democracy, because the elite knew—because they guide the future. They guide us to a planned future, always. The New World Order is always becoming new. It’s a never-ending story. The big builders of civilization, with the old allegory of Nimrod, never stopped. They always plan the future. Therefore, they never lose control, because why would you let people take over from you, if you are in the realm (in their own little religion) of the gods?
Alan Watt’s ‘big builders of civilization’ are here, down through time, not out there in space, or asleep below the earth’s crust. Alan is showing us that the ‘revolutions’ we live through are planned, great experiments funded by bankers, who are forever refining, shaping, and reshaping the Never-Ending Story. Not unlike Sutter Cane creating the world for The Old Ones.
Alan Watt from June 7, 2007. Long quote alert:
Some people, years ago, on short-wave radio in the U.S., couldn’t get past their own indoctrination of knowing, through their studies, that the founding fathers of the U.S.—many of them are freemasons, which you can find out about. We don’t know about the rest, but many of them are verified, in their own writings and in lodge books. The more that they went into their studies, people like Bill Cooper, for instance, tried to hold on to a doublethink, because he’d been brought up on military bases (his father was in the Air Force). He couldn’t get past the stage of letting go of all that he believed in and loved, through his indoctrination, which is God, country, the flag and all that stuff, the American way. He tried to compromise that these Masons gave the American people a chance, they’d either live in freedom or they’d live in slavery. If they couldn’t handle freedom, they’d live in slavery. That’s how he rationalized it. He couldn’t get past the point, even in his own studies. When he found the deviousness of what was behind freemasonry, he still tried to cling on to it until he couldn’t cling on anymore. That’s part of that which brought him down, towards the end, because his whole world was collapsing. That which he’d fought to maintain, he realized he’d never had. It was never his. That’s what I gleaned out of listening to some of his talks, at the end.
From the mid-1990s, William Cooper publicly distanced himself from the alien conspiracy theory and stated that many of the classified documents he had been shown were likely disinformation. Alan Watt spoke with Bill a few times between the late 1990s and his murder in 2001, and in one of their last conversations, Bill invited Alan to visit him in Arizona.
Alan Watt had listened to some of Bill Cooper’s talks over the years, and there were a couple of specific talks he played for me. I never asked Alan if he had read William Cooper’s Behold a Pale Horse. This book was not in Alan’s collection, but a listener sent me a copy not too long ago.
This morning I read the introduction, and Bill Cooper’s love of God, his parents, his family, and his country leap off the page. In a section entitled This is My Creed, he wrote: I believe first in God, the same God in which my ancestors believed. I believe in Jesus Christ and that he is my savior. Second, I believe in the Constitution of the Republic of the United States of America, without interpretation, as it was written and meant to work. I have given my sacred oath “to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States of America against all enemies foreign and domestic.” I intend to fulfill that oath.
Long quote alert:
I also re-read page 7 of Alan Watt’s Cutting Through trilogy, volume 1: To find truth obviously entails smashing the illusions we have come to love and hate at the same time. The addict wishes escapism, the Hero-In will destroy him. Yet the initial rush pushes all care to the rear and for a short lapse of time he blesses his killer. To search for THE CREATOR we must put all given religions to the side, as the addict must his syringe. We must bear the pain of withdrawal. This author does not belong to any group, religion or secret fraternity. [In other words, Alan Watt swore no oaths.] I will not give new information as a “hook” whilst bending your mind into a prepared slot, enabling your handlers to Form the Shape of “THINGS” TO COME. I do not wish to terrify (the function of most “conspiracy” books) the reader, but to show the way out. Only in the Disneyland of Politics and Social Conditioning are words and meanings altered to fit THE AGENDA. Truth is Eternal and cannot be compromised.
Alan Watt closes that paragraph with the prescription. Hearing and understanding TRUTH demands change and that begins with You. The familiar, and even relationships may go down the drain. “…yet that is the price demanded in the past, to-day and for always. That which is lost had no foundation to begin with.”
John Trent destroys Sutter Cane’s manuscript, thereby putting a stop to Cane’s objective of freeing The Old Ones. He returns to the publishing company Arcane and tells the publisher (Jackson, son of Jack, Jack in the Box, diable en boîte, the Devil) what he went through. Jackson denies any knowledge of an editor named Linda and tells John that he delivered the manuscript months earlier. Why did he forget this? In fact, because John Trent found Sutter Cane, and returned the manuscript months ago, it has already been published and a film adaptation is underway. John’s grip on reality is unhinged, he kills a Sutter Cane fan, and is committed to an insane asylum.
John tells a psychiatric doctor that humanity will soon end, and that night screams are heard throughout the asylum. His cell door opens, and John discovers that the hospital is abandoned. A radio broadcast alerts of a worldwide ‘epidemic’ of violence, and John Trent wanders the city streets, avoiding the mayhem. He enters a theater that is showing the film adaptation of In the Mouth of Madness. He sees himself depicted on the screen as his character insists that “this is reality.” John breaks into hysterical laughter.
On September 19, 2018, Mark Jacobson published a piece in The Wall Street Journal entitled, Pale Horse Rider: William Cooper, the Rise of Conspiracy, and the fall of Trust in America. Jacobson wrote that Cooper shared a sense of alienation with his readers and listeners, that he mourned the vanished (if only imagined) past of a white picket fence America. He wrote that Bill Cooper believed that these “imagined” losses of liberty, of the failed promises of his beloved Constitution, occurred because a group of conspirators betrayed what was and what could be.
Jacobson seemed to have some sympathy for Bill Cooper’s search for truth but wrote that his need to explain and make sense led him to form connections where none existed. Cooper ended his days “a madman,” writes Jacobson, “holed up in his [Arizona] hilltop home.”
I do not think that William Cooper ended his days as “a madman” but I understand Alan’s statement that he tried to hold onto doublethink and that is part of what brought him down in the end. “His whole world was collapsing. That which he’d fought to maintain, he realized he’d never had. It was never his.”
Alan Watt cut through our illusions. He may not have supplied quick fixes, but he regularly showed the way out: be an individual, be your own champion, and have empathy for each other.
© Not Sure
Additional listening/viewing:
Alan Watt Redux 233 “New Order Schemes to Track Your Dreams”
https://cuttingthroughthematrix.substack.com/p/new-order-schemes-to-track-your-dreams