I’m trying to find the name of this metafictional work. I can’t remember if I saw it as a movie or read it as a story (or possibly both!) I can’t remember who wrote it, but I swore it was Stephen King. It might be, and I just can’t find it.
The ending is what I remember the most. I know the story is something with a guy who ends up in some odd small town, where weird things happen. But I know at the end, he walks into a movie theater which is showing him walking into that theater… that what has been going on is really not real, or something like that.
I’ve recently rekindled my interest in metafiction, so I really, really want to find this story and re-read it, or the movie and re-watch it, whichever it was. I’ve been going out of my mind all morning trying to find it and I just can’t seem to find it… HELP!
Sounds like “In the mouth of madness” by John Carpenter. More based on Lovecraft than King actually (but with King like aura and fame for the mysterious writer).
It’s possible, but it doesn’t seem quite right. I don’t remember him being in an insane asylum. I could be wrong, though.
If I remember correctly (and I may not), I thought it was more along the lines of he gets stranded in some small (New England?) town, and after many odd occurrences it climaxes with him entering a movie theater, showing him entering the movie theater. That image of him walking into the theater, showing him entering the theater is such a powerful image inscribed into my brain, that I’m all but certain that scene was in the movie/story.
Well, Sam Neill, in the movie is kind of stuck in a New England town, he cant escape it, and the way he got there is strange. He’s investigating a mysterious writer that is a combination of Stephen King and Lovecraft. Towards the end of the movie he walks in a theatre to see the movie adaptation of the last book written by said mysterious writer, and of which Sam Neill is actually the main character.
Fits the bill.
I think I’ll rent it and see… From what I remember, I didn’t think it was so supernatural. Fewer monsters and demons, more creepy people. And I really don’t think an insane asylum was in it… but I could be wrong.
If anyone has any other suggestions, let me know. Otherwise, it could be something I thought up after seeing something similar. I’d hate to write that story if something else out there exists… damn plagiarism allegations!
There are very few scenes in the asylum, it’s mostly in the begining, and a few more scenes towards the end (Sam Neill is telling his story to head shrink David Warner, sometimes we cut back to the asylum but most of the movie happens outside of it).
I’m ready to bet a tenth of my soul that’s the movie you’re thinking of. Frankly, if it isnt, it sounds like a serious rip off of it.
Do you have any other element of the story/movie you can think of?
My husband suggested that it could be a Hitchcock movie, or episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, or perhaps The Twilight Zone. It sounds like it could be the plot of one of those type movies/shows.
I remember walking out of the theatre in a very shaken up state (seeing it in a theatre definitely adds to the experience, considering the ending). One of Carpenter’s best movies, in a filmography that has more than a few.
I think it may have been in color, but older. I vaguely remember the guy wearing a 60s looking suit (though it may have been 50s). Then again, I may be combining movies in my head…
I’m thinking I may have seen it in college, and my friends and I would frequently spend entire weekends watching movies. We’d have King weekends, Hitchcock weekends, Eastwood weekends, etc, etc. A lot of the movies kinda blur together after this much time has passed…
So, apparently it’s not “In the mouth of madness” (I guess by now you have checked the utube video). A fifties movie in colour? I dont see Hitchcock behind this, he rarely dabbled in fantastic/sf tropes.
You know you remind me a lot of my parents there, they do that all the time, ask you for the name of a movie while providing you with very few details (and usually totally contradictory). I’m not snarking, I’m just amused as this used to drive me nuts.
My husband is bad at that also - he’ll mentally mash up about three different books or movies and ask me to look “it” up for him, convinced that it’s all from the same place.
I’ll look and look and look and not find what he’s looking for, and suggest gently that maybe he might be a little mistaken or be combining ideas, and he’ll get so mad - “of course not! I remember it happens just like this!!!” and so forth. So I’ll look more, and get more convinced that it’s actually several things.
Then eventually I’ll find one bit or the other and bring it to him to watch or read, and afterwards he’ll grudgingly admit that he *might *have remembered them a little wrong, but he was right about most of it!
As I skimmed through the list of Twilight Zone episodes, I thought perhaps these two might have something to do with it. (A World of Difference and The Theater) Who knows, perhaps in my head, the three of them have been combined into one terrifying story.
It’s actually very typical of what people do on the SDMB when they ask us to identify a movie or TV show. A lot of the time, and perhaps most of the time, they won’t be remembering details correctly. Generally this is because they are mashing together several movies or TV shows.