Hey, you in the mood for some old-school Secret Sun insanity?
Yeah? Me too.
We've been having Eighties movie parties for Secret Shocktober, and the other night we watched The Hidden, a horror/sci-fi/comedy masterpiece from 1987, starring Kyle MacLachlan (who looks even younger here than he did in Dune, made four years earlier) and Michael Nouri.
And aside from being an Eighties nostalgia goldmine, The Hidden is also a tidy allegory of our present real-world predicament, namely the mass entity possession of human beings on a scale never before seen on this little planet of ours.
Kyle MacLachlan plays a benevolent alien inhabiting a human host — an angel, put simply — who came to our world in pursuit of an evil, insectoid alien who switches human hosts at random while on a vicious crime spree — a demon, put simply.
MacLachlan takes the identity of an FBI agent named Lloyd Gallagher that the demon-alien murdered and teams up with an LA detective named Tom Beck (Nouri) to try to capture the cosmic baddie.
Yeah, I'm definitely thinking David Lynch was a really big fan of The Hidden, especially the whole spirit-possession thruline. There's also the fact that MacLachlan and Nouri are visually indistinguishable from MacLachlan and Ontkean.
MacLachlan's performance as the awkward alien cosplaying as a Fed should be uncannily familiar to Twin Peaks fans, as many have noticed.
From MovieWeb:
Gallagher's mannerisms are also quite similar, albeit not identical, to Cooper's. Like he would later do with Cooper, MacLachlan plays Gallagher as calm and polite, which starkly contrasts with the intensity and coarseness of Beck in The Hidden.
Gallagher speaks in quick, matter-of-fact statements, a personality trait that is also reminiscent of Cooper. For example, when Beck demands that Gallagher disclose everything that he knows about the cause of the crimes, he calmly replies, "An explanation will not help you."
When Beck persists, Gallagher simply repeats his answer with the exact same tone of voice.
I couldn't help but wonder if MacLachlan dove into The Mothman Prophecies (meaning the book, of course) because his performance reminded me quite a bit of some of the witness descriptions of the Men-in-Black.
On the happy side, The Hidden has got your classic Eighties soundtrack, filled with new wavers like Concrete Blonde, Hunters and Collectors, and Lords of the New Church — all acts on Miles Copeland's IRS Records label, for whatever that's worth.
On the miserable side, you also get big, beautiful eyefuls of peak Los Angeles before it became a horrific dystopian hellscape filled to the brim with literal demonic vessels.
For anyone who's been to LA in the past 15 years or so, you can't help but mourn just how far the city has fallen, a process that's only become impossibly worse in this decade.
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