Behind the Couch

John Carpenter’s Prince of Darkness is an underrated, highly moody horror flick from 1987. After the discovery of a giant canister containing an eerie green and swirling mass under a church, a group of students specialising in philosophy, science, theology and linguistics are invited by a troubled priest (Donald Pleasance) to investigate. They realise that the canister will act as a doorway to hell but the only way to open the canister is from the inside… Soon, the liquid begins to seep out and possess the students, one by one. Meanwhile outside, a group of menacing vagrants led by Alice Cooper surround the church and the remaining students must barricade themselves in, unaware that their colleagues are gradually becoming possessed by the evil in the canister. The collective dream shared by the students is, for this reviewer anyway, incredibly creepy and unsettling. A static-hewn shot of a shadowy figure lingering sinisterly in a doorway backlit with spectral light, is perhaps th...