By the late 1980’s John Carpenter wasn’t very interested in making Hollywood studio films. He wanted more control over the movies he made so he made a couple of independent pictures for Alive Films. The first was the 1987 movie Prince of Darkness.
A priest (Donald Pleasence) invites university professor Victor Wong and some of Wong’s students to an abandoned church where something mysterious has been found in the basement. A cylinder with a liquid substance that dates back centuries and an ancient text beside it is the subject of the scientific experiment. After translating the text it’s revealed that the liquid might be the Anti-Christ.
The liquid starts leaking and soon possesses several of the researchers. It also has possessed several street people, one of them is Alice Cooper, and they have the church surrounded. Meanwhile all the remaining people have been receiving a dream from the future trying to warn them of the impending doom. The liquid is actually connected to the anti-matter universe and it wants to bring the Anti-God over into this world. It becomes a fight for survival and an attempt to stop the Anti-God from breaching our dimension.
Carpenter had been reading about theoretical physics before he started work on Prince of Darkness and he decided to incorporate it into the movie. The movie was the second in what Carpenter considers his apocalypse trilogy. The first was the brilliant The Thing and the last part was the movie In the Mouth of Madness. The film isn’t great Carpenter but it’s pretty good and it’s has a trippy charm about it.