Horror Directors Feature #1: Clive Barker

Clive Barker's accomplishments include more than just film directing--his primary passions are writing and painting, and he hasn't directed a movie in more than fifteen years. But this entry is going to focus on his three considerably worthwhile directing outings: Hellraiser (1987), Nightbreed (1990), and Lord of Illusions (1995).

Hellraiser, based on Barker's novella The Hellbound Heart, broke new ground in the late eighties, introducing the S&M-styled demons, the Cenobites, in particular Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley. Bradley would go on to reprise this role in about a thousand Hellraiser sequels (none past the fourth film in the series are actually worth seeing), and, to horror fans, will always be best known as Pinhead. The first Hellraiser movie is startlingly graphic, but only in spurts. A creepy, "haunted house" kind of atmosphere pervades most of its scenes, set in the new residence of sixteen-year-old Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence, who would reprise this role in three more Hellraiser movies). Kirsty's uncle Frank (Sean Chapman, early scenes; Oliver Smith, later, "skinless" scenes) previously took up residence in the house, and while there incurred the wrath of the demonic Cenobites. He returns from the dead with the help of Kirsty's evil stepmother, Julia (Clare Higgins). Julia kills for Frank; each time she offs someone, he's able to add another layer of skin, muscle, and/or bone to his depleted frame.

As is the case with Barker's novella, the Cenobites take a backseat for much of the action, giving way to a story of familial horror, with Kirsty slowly becoming aware that her stepmother is cheating on her father with his recently deceased brother. An influential film, Hellraiser has been a favorite of horror fans since it first arrived nearly twenty-five years ago.

(Dimension Films currently has a ninth sequel--for the first time sans Doug Bradley--and a 3-D remake in the works. Jesus wept.)

Barker's second film, Nightbreed, is sometimes referred to as the Magnificent Ambersons of horror. It shares with Orson Welles' second film the unfortunate circumstance of being chopped up by its studio, with the excised footage subsequently lost (or destroyed). For years, horror fans have signed petitions and hoped for a "director's cut" release of Nightbreed. Things began to look up last year, when a full cut was found on video. Since then, however, the studio has announced no future plans for a full restoration. Too bad, because it's an underrated and exciting film.

One of the elements Morgan Creek/20th Century Fox and the MPAA ratings board took issue with was the fact that the "good guys" in the film are the monsters, a bit of a reversal on tradition. The monsters in the film being the residents of the town-within-a-cemetary, Midian, confined to live in secret, unable to come out during the day. Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) plays a man framed for murder by his doctor, the homicidal Decker (played by director David Cronenberg). He is killed, only to be brought back to life due to the powers of Midian. From here, Decker leads an attack on Midian, and true to the MPAA's complaints, the "good guys" of the cemetary city are the clear protagonists of the film.


Nightbreed was marketed in an odd manner (the cover art pictured to the left hardly invokes the mood of the film), and the studio's trailers attempted to sell it as a slasher film, which it isn't. What did we lose thanks to the meddling movie gods? At least a half hour's worth of footage. Nightbreed is an excllent horror-drama, and hopefully someday we'll get to see Barker's original vision.

The last time Barker sat in the director's chair was for Lord of Illusions, a unique mix of horror and film noir, based on a short story found in his Cabal (1988) collection (title story Cabal being the novella on which Nightbreed was based). This story introduces the character Harry D'Amour, who would go on to appear in the novels The Great and Secret Show (1989) and Everville (1994), and the upcoming Scarlet Gospels. Played by Scott Bakula, D'Amour, a private investigator specializing in supernatural mysteries, travels from New York to the Mojave Desert, to discover the truth about magician Phillip Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), who has apparently been killed in the middle of a show, in full view of a packed theater house. D'Amour ties Swann to the mystical cult leader, Nix (Daniel von Bargen), murdered a dozen years ago in the desert.

MGM was somewhat put off by Barker's blend of horror and film noir, and thus asked him to cut out many of the noir elements for the theatrical version. However, the movie that was subsequently, and fortunately, made available on video, and later DVD, was Barker's original director's cut (many video stores carried this cut, and not the theaterical cut).

In the time that's passed since Lord of Illusions' release, Barker has been attached to various projects, and rumored to have another film in the works. He has, however, kept his Hollywood involvement limited to the role of producer (Gods and Monsters [1998] and Midnight Meat Train [2008], among many others) and writer (films based on his stories, including Bernard Rose's excellent 1992 film Candyman, based on the short story, The Forbidden).

He's recently been tapped to direct Tortured Souls: Animae Damnatae, based on Todd McFarlane's gruesome line of Barker-inspired action figures. With two books on the way in 2011 (the next Abarat novel and the previously mentioned Scarlet Gospels), I'm not holding out much hope. But it would certainly be a treat for horror fans if he did return to film directing again, at least one more time.

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.