Directed by
John Carpenter. Kirby (
Norman Reedus) is the owner of a run-down cinema whose girlfriend Annie (Zara Taylor) recently committed suicide. In order to pay a debt to Annie's hateful father Walter (Gary Hetherington), Kirby accepts the request of eccentric millionaire Bellinger (
Udo Kier) to find and bring him the only surviving copy of the late director Hans Bakovic's
La Fin Absolue du Monde ("The Absolute End of the World"), a film
Shrouded in Myth that is said to be the ultimate
Brown Note.
Tropes:
- Affably Evil: Bellinger is a very polite individual who admits nonchalantly to having murdered people in order to build his fortune, and deserve Hell as a result. And he is obsessed with being the sole owner of, and watching a film so evil that it should never have been made, according to its own legend.
- Ambition Is Evil: Bellinger's single-minded ambition to possess the only copy of the film causes allthe deaths and damage in the episode.
- Anti-Hero: Kirby is the "brooding hero with a dark past" type. Formerly a drug junkie who got his girlfriend addicted and eventually drove her to suicide, he still has few heroic qualities in the present day, and is only doing the job for the money and his obsession with the film. He still cares for his dead girlfriend, though.
- Artifact of Death: Pretty much anyone involved in the production of La Fin Absolue du Monde killed themselves and each other because of it, as do people who go after it or see it.
- Artifact of Doom/Brown Note: La Fin Absolue du Monde drives people crazy just from thinking too much about it.
- Asshole Victim: Pretty much everyone who dies as a result of the film is an asshole of one shade or another, though Kirby and his father-in-law are still somewhat sympathetic.
- Ate His Gun: Kirby eats a bullet under the spell of La Fin Absolue Du Monde.
- Ax-Crazy: Dalibor, a murderous Snuff Film director. He demonstrates this by gratuitously murdering the innocent taxi driver that took Kirby to see him in front of Kirby.
- Bald of Evil: Dalibor is bald.
- Bath Suicide: Kirby's late girlfriend killed herself by slicing her own wrists in the bathtub when they both lived together as heroin junkies. Kirby has to relive the event during one of his visions.
- Bittersweet Ending: Literally everyone dies... except the Angel, who retrieves the reels of La Fin Absolue du Monde and thanks Kirby before leaving the theater, finally free.
- Blood Is the New Black:
- Annie is covered head to toe in blood when she emerges out of the theater screen at the end.
- Downplayed with Dalibor after he decapitates the taxi driver.
- Blood Magic: Dalibor explains that this was the secret to Bakovic's success — blood spilled on film grants it supernatural power, and Bakovic took this to the ultimate extreme by doing so to a sacred being.
- Broken Angel: The main character encounters a pale, gaunt, vaguely male figure with healed stumps at his shoulder blades kept by a deranged art collector. He is the Angel that was mutilated in La fin absolue du monde, the short film that the protagonist seeks. As revealed by Snuff Film director Dalibor, the sheer sacrilege of this act was the key to the late Bakovic's success and turned his film into a madness-inducing Artifact of Death.
- The Collector: The millionaire Bellinger collects various films depicting extreme acts. He's also keeping a mutilated angelic creature locked up in his gallery as part of his collection of La Fin Absolue du Monde.
- Corrupt Corporate Executive: Bellinger admits to having killed people to get his money and flat-out says he’s going to Hell when he dies. He claims the reason he wants to see La Fin Absolue du Monde is to “get a glimpse of Heaven... before the eternity of Hell.”
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Bellinger's suicide. Intestines + film projector = not a pretty combination.
- Dead Person Conversation: Kirby's dead girlfriend Annie appears before him to remind him what he's lost. Subverted when Kirby sees through the illusion and realizes she's not real.
- Decapitation Presentation: Dalibor creates a Snuff Film by filming himself decapitating Kirby's taxi driver right in front of Kirby, and presenting the severed head to him.
- Driven to Suicide: Bellinger cuts out his small intestines and inserts them into a film projector. We don't see him breathe out his last breath, but not much else could have come of it.
- Eye Scream: Bellinger's butler cuts out his own eyes after seeing the film.
- Fan Disservice: In a hallucination near the end, Annie is completely naked... completely covered in blood, and thirsty for some more.
- Fingore:
- Henri reveals that he was the original projectionist at the bloody premiere of La Fin Absolue du Monde. When he tried to stop the film all the fingers on his left hand fused together.
- La Fin Absolue du Monde includes a shot of the Angel scratching a wall until his nails fall off.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: When La Fin Absolue du Monde is shown at the end, Kirby's dead girlfriend Annie emerges from the screen covered in blood and hungry for human flesh. Subverted when it turns out to be another hallucination.
- Gorn: Quite possibly the most Carpenter has ever put into a single feature since The Thing.
- Greater-Scope Villain: Whatever enigmatic figure or group bankrolled Bakovic to create La Fin Absolue du Monde and presumably got him the captured angel. The idea that it might have been Satan himself is brought up and not wholly discarded.
- Haunted Technology: La Fin Absolue du Monde is a haunted movie.
- The Hero Dies: Kirby ends up killing himself under the cursed film's influence.
- I'm a Humanitarian: When the film is presented at the end, Annie emerges out of the theater screen. Her father comforts her, but she's "hungry", and takes a bite out of his neck. It turns out to be another hallucination.
- In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: The title card reads "John Carpenter's Cigarette Burns" and the episode is often referred as such.
- Jerkass: Both Kirby and Annie's father are rather unpleasant to talk to.
- Jerkass Has a Point: Annie's father. Kirby treats him like an unreasonable jerkass, but Kirby did get his daughter killed by indulging her drug habit, abysmally failed to get her on the right track despite agreeing to do so, is still massively in debt to him, and just evades him whenever the topic of repaying the loan comes up. It's only when he resolves to kill Kirby that he crosses the line into outright villainy.
- Le Film Artistique: La Fin... is pretty much an exaggeration of this trope.
- Murder-Suicide: At the end Kirby kills his late girlfriend Annie's murderously unhinged father under the evil film's effects because they both keep bringing her back with their remaining love for her. Moments afterwards he eats his own gun after pleading at another vision of her that he's sorry for everything.
- Only in It for the Money: Initially Kirby only takes the job offer to look for La Fin Absolue du Monde to pay off his enormous debts. Subverted later on as he becomes increasingly obsessed with the film itself due to its corrupting influence. This is lampshaded by Bakovic's widow who notes that the money is just an excuse. Ultimately, he wisely decides not to see it, only to accidentally watch it along with his father-in-law when the projector starts on its own accord.
- Our Angels Are Different: In this case, angels are corporeal creatures and can be tortured, and the one seen in the episode is uglier than one would expect at first (he has a bald, bulbous, pale head and looks like the Engineers from Prometheus).
- Posthumous Character:
- Kirby's late girlfriend Annie is seen only in flashbacks and periodically appears before him as an apparition during his search.
- La Fin Absolue du Monde's director Hans Bakovic died long before Kirby set out on his search. His film was so evil it even killed its creator.
- Riddle for the Ages: While most aspects of the film are directly addressed (e.g. the entire film crew being dead), no one knows who exactly produced La Fin Absolue du Monde. Bakovic's widow says her husband never directly talked about them, only saying they were "people behind sorrow". Kirby sarcasically asks if The Devil was involved, to which she essentially shrugs. How exactly they got a hold of an angel is also left unclear.
- Sole Survivor: The only character present at the climax to survive is the angel. We also earlier hear the only surviving member of the La Fin Absolue du Monde crew is the DP, who is blind and insane.
- Troubling Unchildhood Behavior: Part of what makes La Fin Absolue du Monde so evil - it depicts an angel being mutilated by children.
- Sanity Slippage: Anyone who watches or is involved with La Fin Absolue du Monde.
- Snuff Film: Kirby visits a Snuff director called Dalibor while searching for the film, and La Fin Absolue du Monde itself depicts the torture and mutilation of an angel by schoolchildren.
- Shout-Out:
- The film playing at Kirby's cinema is Dario Argento's Deep Red.
- Bellinger says he skipped out on watching La Fin Absolue du Monde to watch "the first Phibes".
- Kirby briefly mentions the esoteric film critic Myers as "Kael's most interesting disciple", presumably referring to controversial film critic Pauline Kael.
- What little see of La Fin Absolue du Monde seems reminiscent of famously horrifying, controversial and sacrilegous film Begotten (both being deliberately black-and-white, silent films featuring the brutalization of divine beings).
- Shrouded in Myth: La Fin Absolue du Monde was buried years ago after the initial massacre at the premiere and is nearly untraceable. Kirby remarks that everywhere he goes to look there's a wall of silence surrounding the topic.
- Slashed Throat: How Dalibor is killed, though it takes him a while to actually die.
- Vancouver Doubling: Referenced in-universe. Late in life, La Fin Absolue du Monde's director moved to Vancouver because he thought it would be a good place to make movies and would be cheaper than Hollywood. His widow notes that he was proven right twenty years later.
