Despite a prolific and acclaimed career spanning nearly 40 years in literature, Clive Barker has only directed three feature films to date. The reasons for this aren’t particularly difficult to understand: Barker’s first film cashed his check in Hollywood, so to speak, while his sophomore effort, the divisive Nightbreed, was unfortunately a victim of creative compromise and studio interference. The result, however credible in its ambitions, ultimately squandered more than a bit of the goodwill that Barker had established with his previous film.
A Clive Barker Primer
Barker, of course, is an artist who needs no introduction. As the author of essential works of contemporary horror such as The Damnation Game (a Faustian tale of unholy pacts) and the tremendous Weaveworld (a sprawling work of dark fantasy in which an entire, imagined world is discovered sewn into the fabric of a carpet), Mr. Barker has established himself as nothing less than one of our great living masters of horror. To hear Quentin Tarantino tell it: "To call Clive Barker a 'horror novelist' would be like calling the Beatles a 'garage band' ... He is the great imaginer of our time.”
Barker’s most famous cinematic offering, of course, is the immortal 1987 nightmare Hellraiser, itself based on the author/filmmaker’s own novella, The Hellbound Heart. Hellraiser is one of those movies that is so totemic, so instantly iconic from the moment you first lay eyes on it, that you soon come to understand, to one degree or another, why Hollywood felt it necessary to construct an eleven-film franchise based on the success of the original work. The image of the Cenobites – that pale cavalcade of fiendish inter-dimensional sadists, personified largely by their terrifying master, the aptly-dubbed Pinhead – is one that has worked its way into our popular movie-going consciousness; this is true even if, for one reason or another, you’ve yet to see Hellraiser itself.
Welcome to Midian
Nightbreed, then, was supposed to be Barker’s big follow-up act. The film is another adaptation of one of Barker’s own texts: this time, the 1988 novella, Cabal. The hero of Cabal – which is one of Barker’s finer works on the whole, at least in this writer’s opinion – is a tormented loner named Boone. Early in both Cabal/Nightbreed, Boone is confronted with a hideous possibility: His shrink, an odd man named Decker (played in Barker’s film by a deliciously droll David Cronenberg, of all people) has informed him that he is responsible for a recent slate of gruesome executions. To complicate matters further, it is eventually revealed that Decker himself is actually a heartless, albeit extremely methodical serial killer, and that he is both (a.) responsible for the slayings in question and (b.) attempting to gaslight Boone into believing himself a murderer. Just wait until you’ve seen the director of Crimes of the Future wielding surgical blades and wearing a sack over his head, one adorned with tiny, creepy, sewn-in button-eyes. It truly is something to witness.
The majority of Nightbreed involves Boone absconding to a mystical realm known as Midian, which is technically a network of subterranean tunnels that resides beneath a cemetery somewhere far off the beaten trail. There, Boone meets inhuman, malformed creatures that less charitable writers might think to describe as monsters. These are beings with strangely feline features -- one with a moon-shaped face, and a fellow with two large, ghastly tentacles emerging from his belly. As viewers, we are prepared for the worst. Our hero, it would appear, has stumbled unwittingly into a nest of predators.
Yet, because Barker’s sympathies always lie with the ostracized, that is not what happens in Nightbreed. To his surprise, Boone finds himself accepted by the denizens of Midian, though not without some initial hesitation. Boone – who, like Barker himself, has professed to occasionally feeling alienated and at distance from the world at large – seems to have finally stumbled upon a community that not only accepts him, but welcomes him.
Who Are The Real Monsters In 'Nightbreed'?
Barker saves the reveal of the true villains of Nightbreed for the film's second act, when we are introduced to a spiteful small-town cop named Eigerman (Charles Haid) who ends up teaming up with Cronenberg's increasingly unhinged Decker to capture Boone and bring Midian to its knees. Much has been written over the years about the queer-coded allegory that is central to Nightbreed, and that subtext is elevated here in terms of how the film chooses to depict these so-called upholders of law and order. Here, the police are depicted as savage, incurious enforcers of a status quo that favors the ruling class and punishes just about everyone else. After all, what is Nightbreed if not the story of a confused, repressed outcast who chooses to flee from a normal life and a stifling heteronormative relationship and seek refuge in a subculture far removed from his own?
By all accounts, Barker, who has written about monsters at great length in his novels and short fiction, embarked upon the journey of making Nightbreed as though it were the very definition of a labor of love. Alas, the production was seemingly fraught from the word “go,” with last-minute creative changes, clashing egos, and no shortage of setbacks plaguing principal photography, as well as post-production. To be clear, what Barker achieved with his collaborators in costuming, visual effects, and set and production design in Nightbreed is still fairly remarkable. If the residents of Midian are not quite rendered with the same visceral hideousness that distinguishes them on the pages of Cabal that’s probably for the best. In Nightbreed, the "Breed" that Boone meets in hidden underworld are at least supposed to appear human, even and perhaps especially when they are decidedly not.
Clive Barker's Personal Statement
Barker was purportedly displeased with the theatrical cut of Nightbreed that was released in February of 1990, hence the existence of Nightbreed: The Cabal Cut, the Barker-approved vision that more openly brings the novella’s homoerotic underpinnings and surreal, horrifying indulgences to the fore. While Nightbreed is certainly packed with conventionally scary horror movie iconography (ghouls, graveyards, gore, etc.), the philosophical dichotomy it examines on a metatextual level is even more disturbing: that is, being forced to exist in a world of meaningless binaries, and the anguish of submitting to an oppressive hierarchy that can only be upheld at the expense of our own, collective humanity. While Hellraiser endures as the Clive Barker picture novices should start with, Nightbreed is the one with the most to say about Barker himself -- his art, his soul, and why he chooses to tell the stories he tells.