Don't Be Afraid of the Dark - dir. by John Newland (1973)

The Guillermo Del Toro-produced remake of Don't Be Afraid arrives in theaters early next year. Looking to go the same route as Eli Roth with The Last Exorcism (coming later this summer), Del Toro and director Troy Nixey shot their film with a PG-13 rating in mind, only to receive the more restrictive R.

"By agreement," Del Toro said at this summer's Comic Con, "we shot a movie with no sex, no gore or profanity, because we thought it was the way to avoid R. The MPAA came back and said, it didn't matter, that it would be rated R anyway, for 'pervasive scariness', which in a way is fantastic to hear."

It is fantastic to hear. Now, hopefully the studio won't try and cut out some of that "scariness" between now and January. It isn't Fox, so there's a good chance the film will go out as intended.

The movie this is based on, made for TV in the early seventies, is a damn good piece of horror that is helped by its simple premise and director John Newland's ability to create tension and suspense, while leaving his villains mostly in shadows for the film's duration.

Those villains are nasty little bastards too: small, almost puppet-size, humanoid monsters set free by a curious woman (Kim Darby) unable to ignore the warnings of her dead grandmother's housekeeper. He tells her to leave the fireplace alone, not to mess with the bricks which have sealed it ever since her grandfather's death. Pretty soon, she's seeing the little monsters all over the house, but only in brief glimpses. She tries to tell her husband (Jim Hutton), who naturally doesn't believe her, and the monsters continue tormenting her, before mounting their big attack.

TV movies got their start in the seventies, and were fairly popular at the time (programs like the "ABC Movie of the Week," which was before my time). Some are rather good--I'm thinking Wes Craven's Deadly Blessing (1981) and Frank De Felitta's Dark Night of the Scarecrow (also 1981). And then there are some quality Stephen King miniseries as well, later on (It [1990], The Tommyknockers [1993]). I'd rank Don't Be Afraid of the Dark up there with some of the best in the horror made-for-TV genre, and I think, with Guillermo Del Toro producing, we have a pretty scary remake to look forward to next January.

Sacrament by Clive Barker (1996)

I’ll start this by saying that I am aware that Clive Barker is not strictly a horror author. I’m sure it’s been somewhat frustrating to him over his career to have carried this label years after writing his last true piece of horror fiction, Cabal, in 1988 (a case could be made, however, for Cold Heart Canyon [2001] or Mister B. Gone [2008], being horror). But his style of fantasy, even his children’s novels such The Thief of Always (1992) and the Abarat series (2002 and 2004), are so dark, and contain so many elements of horror fiction, that it isn’t difficult to see why he still gets pegged as a horror author. And, I’m sure his involvement in mainstream horror film series (Hellraiser, Candyman) helped contribute as well.

Anyway, I’m now going to discuss his 1996 novel, Sacrament, which is a fantasy, a parable of sorts, and is not a horror novel, but does, as I said above, contain plenty of horror content, like his other fantasy novels, and thus is suitable for discussion on this blog.

The scope of this novel is not nearly as large as some of his other works. A recurring theme of Barker’s stories is that of a world hidden within our own world; or a doorway from our world leading into another. In Imajica (1991), the heroes of the story travel through Four Dominions, other planes of existence linked to Earth, the Fifth Dominion; the characters in The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994) travel across a mystical dream sea known as Quiddity, to explore the unknown areas lying on the other side. Sacrament, on the other hand, involves a man, Will Rabjohns’, journey across the Arctic, through his hometown in England, and to his new residence in San Francisco. The vivid and fantastic descriptions this time around are focused not on otherworldy places, but right here in our own fantastical world.

One thing Barker does so well in this book is show an enormous appreciation of nature and our planet in general. It isn’t a preachy story, but one doesn’t have to look hard to find an environmental message of sorts. Rabjohns has made a career as a photographer snapping pictures of wildlife in its last throes, species on the verge of extinction. When a polar bear knocks him into a coma, he is taken back through his memories to his childhood, when he came into contact with two bizarre, powerful beings disguised as humans, Steep and Rosa. He finds that it was Steep who, when he was a child, gave him his first taste of death and provided him with his lifelong interest in the end of life, particularly with the extinction of entire species.

Will Rabjohns is the first gay lead in a Clive Barker novel, and sections of the book deal with Rabjohns’ and his friends’ coping with, and understanding of, “the plague,” Barker’s word for AIDS (he also referred to the disease by this name, and this name alone, in Imajica). Indeed there are parallels drawn between the AIDS epidemic, and also the gay lifestyle, and Rabjohns’ and Steep’s respective places in the world. Steep is a man who has lived for hundreds of years and is continuously vexed by the fact that he does not know what he is or where he came from; his entire life is an attempt to reconcile this, to hopefully figure out what he is. He has transformed Rabjohns, in a way, or rather, set his life on a course he otherwise wouldn’t have intended; and because of this, Rabjohns has doubts and questions about his career and motivations. But his identity, who he is as a person, as a gay man and artist, are never unclear to him. His security in himself is in sharp contrast to the murderous Steep, who can never be fully satisfied due to his lack of understanding of himself.

Like Barker’s other novels intended for adults, Sacrament contains some fairly bizarre violent and sexual content, mixed in with scenes of great beauty and some philosophy. He’s stated that this is his lowest-selling novel (I don’t know if that’s still the case). Too bad, because it’s an excellent story, told through flashbacks, with a great pace, startling moments of horror, and is certainly worth reading for fans of dark fantasy, fantastique, fables, or however you’d like to call it.