10 Greatest Unspoken Horror Movie Plot Points

In The Mouth of Madness might well be the single most underrated film in John Carpenter's filmography, a dizzying supernatural horror in which insurance investigator John Trent (Sam Neill) is tasked with tracking down a missing horror author, Sutter Cane (Jürgen Prochnow), as his own sanity unravels.

Later in the film, Trent meets Cane, who reveals that Trent is merely a character in one of his novels, allowing Cane to effectively alter his reality however he wishes.

Memorably, Trent falls asleep during a bus ride and Cane says to him during a dream, "Did I ever tell you my favorite color is blue?", and so when Trent appears to wake up, the entire world is horrifyingly tinted blue.

But in retrospect, there are a few sly hints that Cane is pulling the strings leading up to this big reveal, namely that every time Carpenter uses a close-up on somebody's eyes - such as the man who tries to kill Trent with an axe early on - they're coloured blue.

While we don't know it on an initial viewing, this is clearly Cane tinkering with Trent's "reality" from the very beginning, given that he's the author of it and all.