10 Horror Movies That Got Better YEARS Later
2. In the Mouth of Madness
In the Mouth of Madness was a box office flop and critically divisive when it released in 1994, though some three decades later, it's hard not to see John Carpenter's metafictional horror film as incredibly ahead of its time - even if many are only now warming up to it.
For the final entry in his Apocalypse trilogy, Carpenter enthusiastically tears down the fourth wall, as an insurance investigator's (Sam Neill) search for a missing horror author sees the boundary between reality and fiction totally fizzle away. It's fantastically clever and unsettling, and yet mainstream audiences of the mid-'90s seemingly didn't know what to do with it.
Much like Wes Craven's gloriously meta A Nightmare on Elm Street sequel New Nightmare, which released the very same year, In the Mouth of Madness arrived a few years before self-aware horror became in vogue with Scream, and still about two decades before self-reflexive wink-wink cinema truly hit the mainstream.
Watched today, In the Mouth of Madness is far from the jumbled, over-ambitious mess that many dismissed it as back in the day; it's a film that has been vindicated by time as far more ahead of the curve than anyone could've ever anticipated.