In the Mouth of Madness: Hyperstition Gone Wild

"Hyperstition" is a word invented by Nick Land to describe when something that doesn't exist yet, intervenes from the future in the past to bring itself into being. Land uses "Terminator 2" as an example of how this might happen. In Terminator 2, robots from a future time travel to the past to realize their future selves by effecting the timeline of their creation. Closer to John Carpenter's "In the Mouth of Madness" is Land's example of HP Lovecraft's "Necronomicon," which appeared in Lovecraft's fiction in the early 1900s as if real until it actually became real as a published book in the late 1970s, even though it contained "fake" incantations and supernatural beings, perhaps. And, the characters in Sam Raimy's film "Evil Dead," covered in an earlier episode, use the Necronomicon's necromancy to bring evil spirits into the unsuspecting bodies of the movies characters. In this episode of the "Desire of Horror," come join us unpack how the fictive author of the book "In the Mouth of Madness," Sutter Cane, a reference to HP Lovecraft's "In the Mountains of Madness," becomes all too real when he is able to effect the "real" world with his authorial intentions, or perhaps, they aren't his intentions at all. Perhaps, they are the hyperstitional intentions of the "Old Ones" themselves.

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