horror, page 1 of 59

After his 1987 novel Weaveworld, Barker at first thought to return to short stories, but instead produced a short novel, Cabal, which (for the first and only time) he drafted using a dictaphone. It was published standalone in the UK in 1988, but in the US was packaged with the stories in the last volume of The Books of Blood.

It starts with Aaron Boone, a troubled man who thinks he’s started to find some peace at last, thanks to the woman he loves, Lori, and a psychiatrist he trusts, Philip Decker. Unfortunately, Decker is a serial killer, who proceeds to convince Boone that, during hypnosis sessions, he’s confessed to a series of horrific murders — which, in fact, Decker himself committed. Distraught, Boone wanders off and, after a failed attempt to take his own life, hears rumours of Midian “a place of refuge… where whatever sins [he had] committed—real or imagined—would be forgiven…” He sets out to find it, but discovers it to be a massive, walled cemetery. Inside, he’s confronted by two men — or not-quite-men — one of whom bites him. Fleeing, he’s found by Decker, who has the police in tow. The psychiatrist persuades Boone to come out of hiding, then shouts to the police that he’s armed, and everyone opens fire. Riddled with bullets, his body is taken to the mortuary, but sometime after that disappears. He’s not dead, but, thanks to that bite in the cemetery, is one of the Nightbreed now. He returns to Midian, where this time he’s welcomed in. Two people come in search of him, though: his girlfriend Lori, and Decker. And upon learning about the Nightbreed, Decker is determined to goad the local police into exterminating the lot of them.

The persecuted and hidden tribe of monsters with which the protagonist ultimately finds a home is a theme that’s popped up in Barker’s work before, from early stories in the Books of Blood (“Twilight at the Towers” and “Skins of the Fathers”, for instance), to the magical/theatrical Seerkind of Weaveworld. Part of the “coming home” feeling is that these “monsters” allow the protagonist to accept his true, full nature, as not quite fitting into the societal norm. (There’s also a parallel to be drawn between Cabal and The Hellbound Heart, as Cabal is, also, a love story, in which a living woman, Lori, seeks to redeem a dead-but-living lover, Boone.)

Of course, there are two types of “monster” here. There’s the Nightbreed, who “didn’t belong to Hell; nor yet to Heaven. They were what the species [Boone had] once belonged to could not bear to be. The un-people; the anti-tribe…” Monstrous in form, they’re nevertheless far more human in behaviour than the second type of monster we meet in this novel, who look human, and fit into society — in fact, occupy positions of trust and authority — but whose actions prove them to be utterly monstrous inside.

Of the latter type, Decker — “the one in the well cut suit, with the doctorate and the friends in high places; he was the man, the voice of reason and analysis” — is the arch-monster. In contrast to Boone who, once transformed into one of the Nightbreed, will say “I’m not behind this face. I am this face”, Decker must don a mask to become the monster he is. And that mask, Button Head — like “a sewing-box doll: zipper for mouth, buttons for eyes, all sewn on white linen” — is the essence of the scary-yet-bland conformity Decker represents. If Decker had his way, everyone would be “sane” — outwardly normal, with their darker and stranger impulses thoroughly contained and repressed, locked inside just as the Nightbreed are forced to live underground. In Decker’s world, only those in power are allowed to indulge this dark monstrousness: Decker’s own murderous sprees, for instance, which he can get away with because he can foist the blame on his vulnerable patients, or the police, whose local chief Eigermann’s philosophy is: “Do unto others, boy, before they do unto you.”

While Decker’s kind of dark monstrousness is all about repression and secrecy, the Nightbreed have reached a state where they can no longer hide what makes them different, like Narcisse, who “could pretend nothing: his wound was a vicious honesty”. But this is what makes them a community, at whose heart is the being they call Baphomet (“Who made Midian. Who called us here.”), whose very essence is a wounded suffering: his enemies took him apart, but he is somehow preserved as “the Divided One”, his sundered body suspended in a flame that both represents his supernatural power and his exceptional pain. Decker, meanwhile, does the wounding to others. As the serial killer Button Head, he likes to attack his victims’ faces so thoroughly they become as indistinguishable as his own blank mask.

I don’t think it’s ever stated explicitly why Decker so instantly feels the need to wipe out the Nightbreed, but in a way it doesn’t need to be: in their unabashed oddity, their explicit woundedness, they represent a sort of dangerous honesty that undermines his own need for conformity and control.

Cabal, then, is rich in themes Barker has explored before. If I have a criticism, it’s that the last section of the novel — where the attempted extermination of the Nightbreed really gets going — began to feel a little oppressive in its atmosphere of goodies/victims (the monsters) versus baddies/oppressors (Decker, the police, a hastily-assembled town mob). I could see it was necessary — we need to see the persecution and attempted extermination of the Nightbreed for what it is — but the switch from Barker’s usual subtlety of characterisation to something a bit more clichéd in a way had the opposite effect. Instead of the (moral) horror of actual human beings perpetrating genocide, we see a cartoon all-guns-blazing mob at work, which has much less of an impact. Barker’s at his best when he’s dealing with his characters’ inner transformations and responses to the unusual, mysterious, and horrific (as with Lori, here: “She’d been touched by a knowledge that had changed her inner landscape out of all recognition.”). Perhaps this sort of Western-style shootout isn’t his thing — or maybe it’s just not mine.

Barker apparently intended this to be the first of a series of intertwining tales about the Nightbreed. Certainly, it ends with a new start: Boone is renamed Cabal, and is given his mission to reunite the scattered Nightbreed and heal the sundered Baphomet.

The film adaptation, Nightbreed (released in 1990), became Barker’s second full-length feature as director, one he also intended to be the launch of a franchise. “At last the night has a hero”, ran the tagline to the first paperback edition of Cabal, but it seems that audiences — or film executives, anyway — weren’t sufficiently of the night to see the need for it to have a hero. Personally, I find Nightbreed lacks the dark atmosphere that made Hellraiser so effective. It’s presented far more as the sort of action-fantasy that might well have gone on to be a franchise, only the imagery was perhaps too explicitly horrific for that ever to work for the sort of audience numbers required.

And both Nightbreed and Cabal have a certain amount in common with Underworld (1985), the first full-length film Barker scripted. An underground-monsters-versus-overground-mobsters plot, you can equate Cabal’s police with Underworld’s mob, and the former’s Decker to the latter’s Dr Savary, a man who’s invented the perfect pain-killer — or, one that would be perfect, if only it didn’t leave its users with horrific disfigurements, ending with them living as pariahs in a sewer. Both films culminate in gunfights with the overground forces trying to rid the world of the monsters. Barker was very unhappy with Underworld, but I think if you don’t expect much from the film, it’s not too bad. It looks like a mid-budget 80s music video, so has a certain dreamy, stylised tone, and has some good actors, even if they’re not being particularly stretched: Denholm Elliot, Steven Berkoff, Miranda Richardson and Ingrid Pitt, as well as Nicola Cowper, last seen in this blog as a child actress in Break in the Sun.

It’s been a while since the last Alien film (Alien: Covenant was 2017), surely long enough for something gestating in this hypersleeping franchise to burst forth and cause merry havoc. And now here it is, Alien: Romulus, which I went to see on a Saturday afternoon at my local cinema. (Two days after its UK premier. I assumed it was best to book in advance, but there were only two other people there. I don’t think this is any measure of the film’s success globally, just a combination of a small town and good weather. Really, I’m glad we have a cinema at all.)

The film opens on a mining colony on the sort of planet where you never see the sun rise, and are equally unlikely to die of old age. The female lead Rain and what I at first thought was her autistic brother Andy, but who turns out to be a slightly malfunctioning android (and I’ve only just got the joke, Andy: Android — but he of course prefers the term “artificial human”, so should have been called Art), are working for the faceless (and hug-less) Weyland-Yutani corporation. Rain, whose parents are both dead (the mother, at least, due to working down the mines), has just clocked up enough hours to be released from her contract and sent off to a proper colony world, only to be told, sorry, due to manpower shortages — mostly, it seems, due to illnesses and fatalities — the company has just extended the minimum contract term and she has to stay for another five or six years. It’s then that her ex-boyfriend Tyler turns up with a proposal. A large chunk of space-debris due to crash into the colony planet’s (spectacularly rendered) Saturn-like ring is an old Weyland-Yutani station, and bound to contain some cryonic stasis chambers. If a small group of them get into it, they can remove the chambers and use them to make their own trip to the colony world of Yvaga, where Rain will be able to see the sun rise at last. Of course, we know from the prologue that this chunk of space-debris is a research station that picked up a certain biomechanical-looking thing from the fragments of the Nostromo… (Which, to pick at a minor point, should in no way have been clumped so closely together. Alien ended with not one but three massive self-destruct explosions.)

I’ve developed my own sketchy thematic outline for the Alien series. The first film is about pregnancy; the second is about motherhood; the third, after struggling through a few rewatches, is, I have to say, about rape (which, despite it being a well-made film, is perhaps why I find it somewhat repugnant); the fourth I haven’t pinned down yet, but might be about hybridisation; Prometheus is about abortion; Alien: Covenant, again, I haven’t pinned down. Alien: Romulus is full of children (twenty-somethings, yes, but still feeling very much like children) who have lost their parents (and most specifically their mothers, as at least two characters mention how they’ve lost theirs — in both cases due to the Company). It might be subtitled, then, “Raised by Wolves”, only the wolf that does the raising isn’t the benevolent she-wolf who nurtured Romulus and Remus, it’s the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and far from feeding these motherless children from its body’s milk, it sucks the life out of them.

The ultimate aim of the research station is to create a new “perfect” strain of humans, through extracting a certain icky black substance from that biomechanical egg it recovered from the Nostromo wreckage. (And this is this film’s only major connection with the — aptly aborted — Prometheus-direction the franchise had been going in, and I have to say it’s done with the sort of light touch I prefer.) So, you could say, by the end of the film we get to see what a real “Raised by the Weyland-Yutani Wolf” child would look like. And I’m sure it would never call in sick, but I also wouldn’t call it human.

My basic feeling about Alien: Romulus is similar to how I felt about the recent (2022) Hellraiser film. Both are returns to a franchise that had been going awry, if not downhill. Both bring a more 21st-century sensibility — to me, they very much feel like they’re made by the current generation — and both are aware that they’re bearing the responsibility to pay proper respect to their originating films and provide something sufficiently box-office-worthy to enable their franchises to survive. As a result, they’re basically well-made films which provide some nice minor surprises, lots of nods to their originating films (maybe too many, sometimes), and a satisfying watch, but never stray into the truly challenging, truly shocking, truly visceral or mind-blowing, as those originating films did. That might be unfair to ask — great films are rare — but every sequel will be judged against its original. And anyway it’s probably better, in both cases, to have a solid success so the franchise can continue, than the sort of big-idea-loaded messes that Ridley Scott’s last two contributions were (despite being well-directed, shot, plotted, and acted). But, at the same time, you come away missing that essential something from the franchise, and that essential something is, it has to be said, the sort of transgressive, shocking, visceral weirdness that made the originating films so original. The original Alien seemed to exist in a constant state of shock at how weird its alien was; by Alien: Romulus, even the gloopier moments are handled in an almost offhand way, without that element of reverence or awe — that sense of the dark sublime.

(There seemed to be, in Alien: Romulus, a lot of business with doors, multi-layered difficult doors, with obstructive locking systems. I can’t help wonder if that doesn’t reflect, in some way, the creative atmosphere around a film like this, with the weight of so many requirements — commercial and artistic — putting a constant series of checks, blocks, and dead-ends in the way of really free creativity.)

The stand-out in this film, as all the reviews I’ve read so far agree, is David Jonsson as Andy the android, particularly when he gets an upgrade and suddenly becomes a corporation man. The other notable android — sorry, artificial human — is what for a brief second seems like a nice tribute to Ian Holm, as we see another of the same model of android that was Ash in the first film. But then he talks. And the special effects technology is not up to giving us a mock-up of Ian Holm moving his mouth in anywhere near a convincing way. (Film-makers: lay off relying on this until it’s convincing! It’s just creepy, and not in a good way.)

What I’d really like to see, I think, is an Alien mini-series, long enough for a nice, slow build-up and deeper characterisation. Aliens worked so well by tying the SF-horror of the original with another genre — military SF, or the Vietnam War movie — and I’d love to see the series tied to something like a political thriller, full of the sort of commercial shenanigans we only get to glimpse in the films. (Which makes me realise that, in the Alien films, the political and the commercial are one and the same. I’m sure my motherhood/reproduction-based reading of the films can be completely replaced by one saying that the whole series is basically about capitalism. Certainly this film.)

Anyway, basically a good film, and if I expect too much of it, that’s only because the first two instalments in the franchise are so good. I can only hope there will be more — while also hoping there won’t be so much more it becomes like Disney’s over-ploughing of the Star Wars franchise. But then again, Disney owns 20th Century Studios, which makes this, basically, a Disney film, so I can’t be sure that won’t happen…

Re-reading Barker’s fiction, The Hellbound Heart presents itself as something of a quandary. Overshadowed as it is by its adaptation as Hellraiser (1987), the question is, is this novella a standalone piece of fiction, or just a stage in the production of the film? In his biography of Barker, The Dark Fantastic, Douglas E Winter writes: “Clive insists that The Hellbound Heart was not conceived as a template for a film… but as he wrote the short novel, he realized that it was ideal for low-budget film-making.” But an October 1987 interview by David J Howe for Starburst, quotes Barker as saying that he wrote the novella “with the specific intention of filming it. This was the first and only time that I have done that, but it was useful in that I worked through a lot of the visual problems in the novella and the final screenplay didn’t take that long to draft.” The only reason this matters to me, in this re-read, is I thought the first two-thirds of the novella didn’t quite click, and I wondered if this was because the focus was on a film as the finished product — and so, the visuals and outward drama, rather than the inner lives of the characters. But equally, it could just be that sometimes fiction does take a while to click, even in its finished form.

The Hellbound Heart was first published in 1986 in Night Visions 3, an anthology edited by George R R Martin, which gave a third of its space to each of Ramsey Campbell, Lisa Tuttle, and Clive Barker. Barker’s only contribution was the novella.

The story of both novella and film are virtually identical. Julia is in a passionless marriage to Rory (Larry in the film), which was ruined before it even got started thanks to a one-night stand with his far more adventurous but driven-to-extremes brother Frank. When the couple move into Rory’s now-empty parents’ house, it turns out the long-missing Frank is there with them, only in an all-but-disembodied state. He used the house to experiment with an occult ritual involving Lemarchand’s Box (the Lament Configuration in the film), to summon the demonic Cenobites. Thinking this would open up whole new realms of hedonistic indulgence, Frank quickly finds their version of “extreme” is way more extreme than his, and now he just wants to escape back to reality again. Blood from a cut to Rory’s hand starts the process of reforming his sundered body. But to complete the process — and fully escape the Cenobites — he needs more blood and bodies. The besotted Julia agrees to provide them. Unaware of any of this, Rory asks his somewhat pallid friend Kirsty, who’s silently in love with him (but is his daughter in the film, which works better dramatically but less well thematically), to talk with Julia. Kirsty finds herself facing the Cenobites, and does a deal that will either return Frank to their S&M hell, or let them take her in his place…

As I said, for me, the story only really kicks into gear, as a piece of written fiction, in the last third or so, when Kirsty becomes the protagonist. Julia, the main mover of the first part of the story, doesn’t have the presence she does in the film, with the result that when the narrative wanders off to follow Frank or Rory, it feels less like a diversion and more like the story’s still in search of its narrative centre. But when Kirsty takes over, even though she’s presented as a much less passionate woman — she’s “the girl with the pale handshake” who “had long ago decided that life was unfair” — her perspective is the one that makes the full horror, weirdness and threat really click into place.

The Hellbound Heart does that thing horror does so well, of both indulging in something and issuing a stern warning against it. Here, that thing is one of Barker’s key themes, the “further reaches of human experience”, and the quest into other realms for its fulfilment. It’s clear, here, that Julia is suffering, as a human being, by living such an unfulfilled life with Rory, having been awakened to something stronger, darker, and more passionate by Frank (even though that relationship probably contains just as little love). But there are no gradations here between dour lovelessness and the Cenobites’ realm of unbounded “pleasure”. Because the Cenobites have taken things so far that they, too, have stagnated, caught at the point where what they provide has long since ceased to be pleasure in any sense of the term. Right from the start, they’re presented as an image of over-repletion, tired, empty and chilly:

“A fitful phosphorescence came with them, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold; charmless.”

“…he saw nothing of joy, or humanity, in their maimed faces: only desperation, and an appetite that made his bowels ache to be voided.”

They’re accompanied by a scent of vanilla — a byword for blandness — “the sweetness of which did little to disguise the stench beneath”. The quest for the far reaches of human experience has taken them to a dead end, a one-note world (like the bell that tolls when they appear). Frank, who just wants his sexual fantasies made real, ends up in the position of a jazz enthusiast turning up to hear some legendary saxophonist, only to find their art has advanced to the stage where they honk the same, single note, as loud and long and ugly as they can, on a bent instrument with a split reed.

According to Winter:

“The evil of appetite is a repeated theme in Barker’s work, and in The Hellbound Heart he offers a searing condemnation of lust in the guise of love — and the pursuit of pleasure in fulfilment of a spiritual void. Frank’s sin is not his self-indulgence, but his hollow — and thus hellbound — heart…”

But elsewhere, though very briefly — in the one moment where the character of Julia starts to come to life in the novella — we get a glimpse of how the promise of pleasure, in a world devoid of it, can attain an almost spiritual dimension, capable of transforming everyday reality. Watching the news on TV while she thinks of the promise of the slowly-regenerating Frank, Julia is already in another realm of being:

“What did the world have to tell her? Little enough. Whereas she, she had news for the world that it would reel to hear. About the condition of the damned; about love lost, and then found; about what despair and desire have in common.”

But, like all of Barker’s fiction that deals with transcendence, transformation, and elevated realms of being, this is still just about the body. The Cenobites — “angels to some, demons to others” — are utterly physical, “their anatomies catalogues of disfigurement”. Their realm, their power, lies entirely in what they do to your body, your nerves. Frank’s return from death means not some magical rebirth, but the disgusting business of remaking a new body out of other, freshly-slaughtered bodies. In bed with Rory, trying to distance herself from her own despair, Julia thinks of herself as nothing but a body with its physical processes, reducing herself to the least she can be as a human being. Next to the Lead Cenobite (better known as Pinhead), the book and film’s crowning image is of the body revealed beneath the skin: Frank as nothing but a pulsing, naked nervous system, “this too vulnerable body”, as Julia thinks of it.

It seems odd, then, that the centre of this tale would turn out to be the supposedly passionless, pallid Kirsty (though even in her, the ever-lubricous Frank sees possibilities), but probably she only seems passionless in comparison to Julia and Frank. Kirsty loves Rory and will do anything for him (he just doesn’t ask much); hers, then, is a very human form of passion. And she can see the horror in Frank and the Cenobites that Julia can’t, because Julia is blinded by her own desperation. (Perhaps the real villain of the novella is Rory, for being so inadequate to the women in his life.)

Perhaps, though, the reason the first part of the book doesn’t have the impact I wanted it to have is simply because I already know the story from having seen the film so many times. (If so, it’s something the film doesn’t suffer from, as that’s still a thrill to watch.) It’s hard — certainly for me, having never got used to watching pre-Hellraiser films till after I’d seen Hellraiser — to really appreciate what a game-changer the world presented by this novella-and-film-combo really was, for the horror of its day. It sits alongside Alien and The Thing as a milestone in the genre.

The puzzle box, for instance, did away with years of the same old cinematic occult rituals (pentagrams and women sacrificed on altars). And it wasn’t just a visual coup; the box captured as never before the difficulty and self-absorbed, driving obsession of such a magical operation (while also no doubt chiming with an audience who’d grown up trying to solve a Rubik’s Cube, and were now glad they hadn’t).

And then the Cenobites themselves: a whole new class of demon, with the suaveness of the vampire, the grossness of the zombie, and that added Barkerian element, a philosophy, and the eloquence to defend it.

Hellraiser is a more finished form of The Hellbound Heart, and one that works all the better for having actors bring it to life. It’s a rare film whose strong emotional drama matched the impressiveness of the day’s cinematic effects (whose new levels of “rubber reality” all too easily dominated 80s genre films, to the point where they were visual spectacles first and human dramas second). I’ve only seen the two immediate sequels (both have nothing on the first film) and the very latest reboot, which neatly franchise-ifies the first film’s elements into something that feels just a little bit too packaged to retain the raw-nerve edge and sense of danger of the original. As for Barker, Hellraiser proved him to have a cinematic sensibility as developed as his literary and artistic ones, thanks to its occasional arthouse touches of surrealism and dark beauty (seen best of all in his short film The Forbidden) — though, I have to say, that’s an element of his work as a director that didn’t survive into his subsequent movies.

And speaking of what’s next (skipping over my favourite Barker novel, Weaveworld, which I’ve reviewed before): another novella-and-film pairing, with Cabal/Nightbreed.