Here's what the future dream message featured in John Carpenter's Prince Of Darkness is actually saying. While it might be a cult classic now, Big Trouble In Little China was a box-office failure back in 1986. This was caused, in part, by studio 20th Century Fox not having much faith in the project. They thought John Carpenter's movie would be in the same vein as Indiana Jones, but were dismayed that Kurt Russell's hero Jack Burton was portrayed as a bumbling idiot. His Asian "sidekick" Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), on the other hand, was the real hero.
This subversive element is one part of why the film is beloved now, but Fox did little to promote it and it quickly sank. John Carpenter became disillusioned with studios in the aftermath of Big Trouble In Little China and decided to return to his low-budget roots. This resulted in him writing and directing Prince Of Darkness. This 1987 shocker sees a priest summon a quantum physics professor and his students to student a mysterious canister of green liquid uncovered in a church basement. It turns out this liquid contains the essence of the Anti-God's son - AKA Satan's son - and its slowly waking up to end the world.
Prince Of Darkness is an ode to the work of British sci-fi writer Nigel Kneale, especially his famed BBC horror TV movie The Stone Tape. It remains one of Carpenter's most underrated works, and features one of his best music scores and is filled with eerie sequences. Case in point is the dream all the main characters in the story share, which shows a dark figure exiting the church they're sleeping in. It turns out this isn't a dream at all, but a message being sent from the future warning them of what will happen. The video also features voice over, but it's hard to make out what's being said.
The image of a dark figure emerging from the front of the church reportedly came from a dream Carpenter's one-time producer Debra Hill (Halloween, The Fog) had. The director himself would record the voice for Prince Of Darkness' future dream narrator, and here's what the ominous message is saying.
"This is not a dream... not a dream. We are using your brain's electrical system as a receiver. We are unable to transmit through conscious neural interference. You are receiving this broadcast as a dream. We are transmitting from the year one, nine, nine, nine. You are receiving this broadcast in order to alter the events you are seeing. Our technology has not developed a transmitter strong enough to reach your conscious state of awareness, but this is not a dream. You are seeing what is actually occurring for the purpose of causality violation."
Prince Of Darkness' future dream is the result of people - presumably scientists - in the year 1999 desperately warning the scientists to prevent the rise of the Anti-God. The distorted audio, combined with the odd visuals of the dream, make it one of the most effective scenes of horror in Carpenter's filmography, and it remains the most famous scene from the film. The dream famously changes in the final scene too, though in classic Carpenter style, it's unknown if this means they failed to stop the Anti-God coming through from the other side, or if it really is just a nightmare.