The Devil in the Details: What the “Prince of Darkness” Taught Me About Writing
I’ve been meaning to write about “Prince of Darkness”, John Carpenter’s horror masterpiece from the 80s, for a while, but I’ve held off because I didn’t want to hose it up. Well, this is my attempt not to gush and still share a thing or two that I learned. As always, take from this what resonates with you and toss the rest into a giant drum of green bubbling antimatter.
Carpenter doesn’t resort to the usual repertoire of horror movie auteurs; there are no jump scares or gory spectacle. Just a steady drumbeat of ever-increasing dread that wraps around you like a frigid breeze around a creaky door. Midway through the movie, before Alice Cooper and his gang of ghouls arrive, it becomes apparent that this movie is about dread itself—not as a reaction, but as an environment. Carpenter builds fear like a architect builds space: through angles, and silence. The slow suffocation of the mundane. Every corridor feels narrower, every shadow heavier.
That, my fellow scribes and interested observers, is atmosphere. Not a setting. Not a weather report. A mood that possesses.
Atmosphere Is Philosophy in a Trench Coat
Carpenter builds his dread out of questions, not answers. The film’s core conceit—that the devil might be a subatomic being trapped in a canister of swirling antimatter (I know, every fantasy plot sounds ludicrous when you say it out loud). But Carpenter doesn’t say it out loud. He lets it hum in the background; like a fan whose blades are a little out of balance.
You can do the same thing with prose. Don’t announce your philosophy—have it haunt the scene. Let the reader feel the weight of unseen logic pressing on your characters. That’s how existential horror works: the mind gropes for structure and finds only cold liminal space.
When you write atmosphere, you don’t describe fog—you describe the way fog makes your main character doubt their direction. Carpenter understands that terror isn’t what we see, but what our brains whisper when we stop trusting the light.
Restraint Is Your Friend, Ambiguity Your Ally
‘Prince of Darkness’ unfolds in a (mostly) single location. Carpenter locks his characters (and us) in that crumbling church like a scientific study in despair. The claustrophobia becomes the message: when human intellect is cornered, it invents ghosts.
Writers often make the mistake of thinking that more explanation equals more immersion. The opposite is true. Ambiguity is the oxygen of horror—and of meaning. When you write, let your readers wonder a little too long. Don’t extinguish the question the moment it catches fire.
If you write a scene in a room, let the air itself have character. Maybe it smells faintly of ozone, or feels charged, or hums with static before a word is spoken. That’s Carpenter’s trick: every corner of the church feels aware. In prose, you can let the environment think alongside your characters.
Science, Faith, and the Horror of Knowing
At its core, “Prince of Darkness” is about belief breaking under the pressure of knowledge. The film takes the language of physics and theology, mashes them together, and asks: what if both were right—and that was the worst possible outcome?
That’s an awesome narrative engine.
As a writer, you can borrow that collision. Don’t be afraid to let your story wrestle with ideas that don’t reconcile neatly. The tension between certainty and chaos is your atmosphere. The most effective prose horror (and honestly, the most memorable fiction of any genre) lives in that uncomfortable middle space—where the world makes just enough sense to keep us hoping, and just little enough to keep us awake wondering about it.
Tone Is a Character—Write It That Way
Carpenter’s camera doesn’t just observe; it broods. It’s patient. The synth score pulses like a heartbeat in another room. That tone—the sense that something vast and uncaring is coiling beneath reality—doesn’t need exposition. It’s simply present…waiting and watching.
In prose, tone is your silent actor. It’s in word choice, rhythm, punctuation, even syntax. Short, staccato sentences quicken the pulse. Long, heavy ones suffocate. Use language like lighting and cast shadows with structure.
Here’s the trick: when you write atmosphere, you’re not painting around your characters. You’re painting through them. Make the tone stick to their thoughts, their speech, their fears. Carpenter’s physicists don’t just analyze the inexplicable—they become conduits for it. By the third act, their scientific detachment has dissolved into metaphysical panic, and the tone has infected them completely.
The End Is the Echo
The final shot of “Prince of Darkness”—the mirror trembling, the dream replaying—is pure literary terror. It doesn’t tell us what happens next. It simply suggests that the nightmare has learned how to reflect.
I believe the best endings don’t close the door—they show you that the door was never real. Leave your readers in a liminal state between comprehension and awe. Carpenter understood that horror and revelation share the same DNA. The difference is whether you smile or scream when the light hits.
Writing in the Key of Dread
If you strip away the crucifixes and chalkboards, Prince of Darkness is a fable about humanity peering into a cosmic funhouse mirror and finding itself distorted. Carpenter doesn’t moralize; he theorizes. His horror is intellectual, but his atmosphere is emotional—it lives in the gut.
As writers, we can learn from that marriage of philosophy and texture. We shouldn’t write to shock; we write to unsettle. Don’t describe the abyss; describe the silence right before it answers.
Atmosphere isn’t a garnish. It’s the soul of the story lurking in the shadows.
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We are a few days away from Episode 4 of The Skin Man. Here is a sample, followed by a link to sign-up for bi-weekly updates of the best serial novel ever written (according to my mother).
Something emerged from the treeline—slow, crawling, but too fast to be natural.
At first, just a silhouette: thick arms dragging it forward, fingers gouging the dirt like claws.
Then light caught its face.
Eyes sewn shut. Jaw unhinged, snapping wide like a snake’s—revealing a second ring of teeth.
Veins bulged along its neck. Black stitches crisscrossed its scalp like angry graffiti.
Whatever this thing was, somebody made it.
It turned toward them—not with sight, but scent.
And it charged.
Brielle drew and fired a warning shot into the air.
The thing didn’t even flinch.
Matt scrambled behind a tree, shouting, “What the hell is that?!”
Brielle aimed and fired again—center mass. It stumbled but didn’t fall. Just hissed—high and rattling—and kept coming.
Matt stole a glance toward the Skin Man.
He was watching—evaluating.
Then he turned and vanished into the trees.
“Shit!” Brielle snapped. “He’s leaving!”
“We can’t follow him!” Matt backed away fast. “Not with this thing between us.”
The deader slammed into the tree between them, snarling. Wood splintered. Its jaws snapped inches from Matt’s shoulder.
It lunged.
Matt hit the ground hard. Claws swiped just over his head. Bark exploded from the tree behind him as he scrambled backward, boots slipping on wet pine needles…
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