10 Trippiest Horror Movies Of All Time
3. In the Mouth of Madness
Though rarely ranked among John Carpenter's greatest contributions to the horror genre - if more a statement of his output's quality than anything else - In the Mouth of Madness is absolutely the trippiest film the genre legend has ever produced.
This deliriously deranged slice of metafiction is a tremendously entertaining homage to the works of H.P. Lovecraft, focused on an insurance investigator (a brilliant Sam Neill) who attempts to track down a missing horror author all while losing his own grip on reality.
Unarguably the last great film Carpenter made, In the Mouth of Madness sees him masterfully blur the lines between reality and fiction, creating a messy-by-design tableau from which Neill can hang what's debatably his career-best performance.
As a conclusion to the director's Apocalypse Trilogy - preceded by The Thing and Prince of Darkness - it's fitting that Carpenter left the most brain-breakingly ambitious for last. And with modern cinema being what it is, the story's meta elements have aged like a fine wine.