April Ghouls Drive-In Monster-Rama is back at The Riverside Drive-In Theatre in Vandergrift, PA on April 24 and 25, 2026. Admission is still only $15 per person each night (children 12 and under free with adult) and overnight camping is available (breakfast included). You can buy tickets at the show, but get there early and learn more here.
The features for Friday, April 24 are Prince of Darkness, Popcorn, Fade to Black and Evilspeak.
Saturday, April 25 has Halloween 4, Halloween 5, A Bay of Blood and Funeral Home.
The second film in John Carpenter’s “Apocalypse Trilogy” (preceded by The Thing and followed by In the Mouth of Madness), Prince of Darkness was the first fruit of Carpenter’s deal with Alive Pictures. The pact was a filmmaker’s dream: complete creative control provided he kept the budget under a lean $3 million.
This is likely the only horror flick you’ll ever encounter that masterfully blends theoretical physics and atomic theory with ancient religious orders and the Antichrist. The DNA of Nigel Kneale (creator of Quatermass and the Pit) is all over this script; Carpenter even paid homage by using the pseudonym “Martin Quatermass” for the screenplay. From transmissions from the future to ancient malevolence being uncorked in the modern age, it feels like a lost Kneale script. Ironically, the British writer was famously grumpy about the association, having previously clashed with Carpenter on the gore-filled Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
Donald Pleasence, Carpenter’s go-to for gravitas, plays a character simply named “Priest” (though fans often call him Father Loomis). He discovers a deceased member of the Brotherhood of Sleep just as a secret is about to leak. It turns out a dilapidated Los Angeles church is hiding a canister of swirling green liquid that represents the Anti-God. This sentient sludge begins transmitting data that requires the brains of Professor Howard Birack (Victor Wong) and his team of students to decipher.
One by one, those students are taken over by the Anti-God or killed by the homeless people and insects that surround the building, led by Alice Cooper. Also, every single person who hasn’t been killed or taken over starts to have the same dream, one where a shadowy figure emerges from the church. Each time they have this dream, a warning sent from the year one-nine-nine-nine, they see more detail. This part of the film, shot on video, played on a television and then reshot with Carpenter’s voice intoning the warning message, is one of the strangest and most surreal sequences ever included in a mainstream film.
I can’t say enough about how much I love this movie. It has great little character bits, moments of true horror and even some great compressed storytelling. I love that, instead of a long explanation of how a physics professor and a Catholic priest could be close friends, one student just offhandedly mentions that they were both part of a BBC exploration of God’s existence. That’s all we really need to know and it lets us answer that and move on to more important matters.
Hw can you not love a film that theorizes that Jesus was an alien and the Catholic Church has known that all along and kept the secret that another alien, an evil one, was on its way…or has a scene where someone just keeps typing “I live!” over and over again, then this message: You will not be saved by the holy ghost. You will not be saved by the god Plutonium. In fact, YOU WILL NOT BE SAVED.”
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