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Popular Culture Review
horror and sci-fi genres. Critics John Muir and Robert Cumbow both describe in
intimate detail the textual similarities between Prince o f Darkness and one of the
big-screen Quatermass films, Five Million Years to Earth. In both films, the
Christian myth of Satan is explained through scientific means to be based on alien
invaders (Muir 140; Cumbow 154).
In Prince o f Darkness, identity is stolen in two different ways. The first,
and the most obvious, is Mien the gl owing green liquid that has been hidden for
years in the basement of St. Godard’s is ingested. The result is that a once
“regular” theoretical physics graduate student becomes a shuffling zombie, intent
on spreading the noxious green vomit to others, thereby releasing the Antichrist.
The second way that identity is stolen occurs when several of Professor
Birack’s team members fall asleep. We tend to see our subconscious as
something personal. It is something that is not, and mostly cannot, be shared with
others; it is something that defines us. However, this attitude is challenged when
all who slumber in the vicinity of the church experience the same dream
sequence: the exterior of St. Godard’s; a cryptic, garbled, auditory warning from
the future; and a dark figure emerging from the front door of the church. This
communal dream begins to break down the individuality of the team members’
most personal of realms: that of their own dreams. This attacks the ever-present
American myth of bootstrapping oneself from poverty to the upper echelons of
society. In a way, the characters of Prince o f Darkness do nothing but act out the
cliched phrase “follow your dreams.” However, in the context of the world of
Prince o f Darkness, these attempts serve to satirize the naivete of an earlier
generation.
Like The Thing, Prince o f Darkness has been seen as a metaphor for the
AIDS virus. The public’s misinformation and general ignorance about AIDS had
not significantly improved since The Thing's 1982 release. According to Muir,
the threat of AIDS was felt so strongly in the United States “that even the
traditionally hedonistic James Bond films were eschewing rampant promiscuity in
favor of restrained monogamy (The Living Daylights [1987])” (142). AIDS is a
disease transmitted through bodily fluids. An obvious connection is that the
demonic possession of Prince o f Darkness is spread through the vomitous
ejaculation of a green fluid into another person’s body. As no cure for AIDS has
been discovered, contraction of the disease essentially spells the demise of the
diseased. Prince o f Darkness takes this fact and distorts it to play on the
prevalent fears at the time: once the Antichrist is ingested, the self is cut off and
the body becomes stuck in a half-live, half-dead state, seeking only to spread the
disease to as many others as possible, with the end result being a nation of
infected minions. This is, in fact, very similar to the 1950s fear of corruption by
communist ideals, where everyone loses the “freedom” they believed they had.
Muir expounds upon this AIDS metaphor at great length, and also the
connection between the misled notion that AIDS was a homosexual disease, and