Clive Barker's Dark Worlds
The faculty at Liverpool’s Quarry Bank Grammar School went about in black academic gowns when Clive Barker was their pupil. He recalls an evil French teacher who “had ball bearings sewn into the lower lining of his gown. And when he didn’t like what you were doing, he had a way, in one swift, even elegant motion, of taking it up, swinging it round … and bringing it down on your hand or your head.” That teacher may have been one prototype for the many sinister figures haunting the fiction of Barker, famously called “the future of horror” by Stephen King in the ‘80s, before he was widely known.
To the general public, Barker is the writer-director of Hellraiser (1987), the film that brought into this world the skin-crawling image of the entity dubbed (in the sequels) Pinhead, his shaven head punctured by dozens of nails. Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds, the new book by the writer’s archivists, Phil and Sarah Stokes, delves deeply into their subject’s horror-fantasy literature as well as his films. Dark Worlds is lavishly illustrated with movie stills and Barker’s demonic paintings and drawings. In every dark corner of his fiction lurks a monster, some more malign than others. Not unlike the shambling, resentful figure in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the perspectives of the monsters sometime become understandable.
“He was a perfectly normal lad,” his mother once said. Barker disagrees, insisting, “I was very scared of the world outside—I was a fat, short sighted kid who was basically the definition of ‘nerd’ and very socially uncomfortable.” He adds that his imagination saved him from the monotony of middle-class life and opened the door to his profession of unease.
With the success of Hellraiser, the momentum of Barker’s career became furious during the ‘80s. “The second film in the Hellraiser franchise followed hard on the heels of the first, with the screenplay commissioned before the first film arrived in theaters,” the authors write.
Barker didn’t write or direct Hellbound: Hellraiser II. “I had just signed a four-book deal with Collins, my publisher, and I was in the middle of writing The Great and Secret Show, so there was no way I could get involved with a movie at that time,” Barker explains.
Barker’s films can be taken at the level of bloody shockers, which belies their literate mythopoetry, their exploration of dread and death and the 50 shades of good and evil. Set in Chicago’s Cabrini Green, Candyman (1992), set to be remade by Jordan Peele, uses the deep scars of racism as material for a modern gothic.
Barker’s career in film is more extensive than generally recognized. He was, for example, executive producer of a fascinating film, Gods and Monsters (1998), with Ian McKellen playing director James Whale (Frankenstein) in his final days. Barker was living in Hollywood by then, and his name opened doors (and returned phone calls) for the production.
In 2003, Barker formed his own production company, Midnight Picture Show. “This was an attempt to sort of go back to first principles,” he said. “The first principles are what I consider to be the golden age of low-budget horror films. I think some of the best work was done by people who were not bound my massive budgets.” The experience proved frustrating, although he did manage to produce several films including The Midnight Meat Train (2008) and Book of Blood (2009). Even Barker’s familiar name couldn’t smooth all wrinkles in the furrowed brow of an industry preoccupied with marketing categories and maximizing profit.
Still, Barker continued to juggle cinema and adaptations of his work as graphic novels and video games. “The older I get,” he said, “the more interested I am in the subtleties of how fantay works. My commitment to the fantastic is as immovable as ever; I believe that writers and artists and filmmakers of the fantastic have a chance to describe reality in a much more complex and interesting way than so-called realistic writers.”
Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds is published by CernunnosAbrams.
