Nightbreed

We Return To Midian To Unravel The
Secrets Of Clive Barker's Nightbreed

By: Jake Newton

Even after 10 years, it is still impossible to define Clive Barker's monster extravaganza Nightbreed. Was it a failure? Yes. Is is a success? Yes, that too.
This was Clive Barker's second film, begun when he was riding high on his startling world-wide success with 1987's Hellraiser. But here the set-up was completely different. Whereas Hellraiser had been shot with a small crew in one North London house, Nightbreedutilized practically the whole of Pinewood Studios to create a fabulous underworld, a distaff Oz somewhere under the rainbow.

Novel Approach

Nightbreed was adapted from Barker's 1989 novel Cabal, but the reverse may also be true. Cabal differs from much of Barker's output in that it is considerably shorter and has a much more linear narrative -- it is not difficult to believe that it was written as a screenplay, adapted into a book, and then subsequently adapted back again. Bob Keen and Geoff Portass, special effects technicians on Hellraiser and founders of the Image Animation company, maintain that Barker gave them a personal scene-by-scene performance of what he was planning for Nightbreed before Cabal was ever written down.
Nightbreed was made by Morgan Creek films and 20th Century Fox. Barker was allowed more or less complete creative control during filming but there was considerable studio interference afterwards. It would be easy to say that Barker's vision was scuppered by the unfeeling studio, and while this is certainly true to an extent, some of the blame for the film's mixed success must undoubtedly lie with Barker.

Telling The Tale

The story is simple. During a rash of attacks by a psychopathic serial killer, a young man called Boone (Craig Sheffer) is convinced into believing that he is the murderer by his psychiatrist, Decker (David Cronenberg). After a failed suicide attempt under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs given to him by Decker, Boone learns of a region called Midian which is supposedly inhabited by monsters. Still believing that he is a mass murderer, Boone abandons his girlfriend Lori (Ann Bobby) and makes his way to the area. Decker -- who is actually the serial killer -- gives chase.
Boone discovers Midian to be a vast cemetary, where, after sunset, he is attacked by a savage creature called Peloquin. Peloquin's bite transforms Boone into one of the Nightbreed, weird creatures, the last of the Tribes of the Moon, who live hidden from the eyes of man in a vast complex of tunnels under the necropolis.
But Decker's hatred extends even to these monsters, and he allies himself with a fascistic local police chief named Eigerman to launch an all-out attack on Midian. In an underground temple, Boon encounters Baphomet, the God of Midian, and is told that he will be the saviour of the Nightbreed. But with enemies all around them, there is nowhere to run. There follows an apocalyptic battle between Eigerman's mob and the ranks of the Nightbreed.

Monsters

Clive Barker is now one of the most prominent gay writers and film-makers in Hollywood, but he had not come out publicly in 1990 when Nightbreed was released. It must be said that he drops some pretty big hints in the film, however. It is a veritable hymn to acceptance and the fearful crimes delivered upon the 'different' by the supposedly 'normal'. All of the principal characters in Nightbreed are monstrous, but Barker's stated intention was to show the physical 'monsters', the disfigured and deformed Breed themselves, were the most sympathetic characters of all.
"When Garbo first saw Cocteau's La Belle et la Bête," Barker told the seminal comic magazine Deadline, "in which the noble beast is transformed into a handsome prince through love, she reputedly said 'Give me back my beautiful beast!'. All of us have this sneaking passion for the bestial creature. Our folklore carries our deepest desires. We only associate creatures like the Cenobites with evil because the Judaic Christian teaching goes back to the Israelites' tribal ass-kicking. They made the gods of every other tribe into villians or demons."
"Without wishing to get too Freudian about it," Barker insisted, "in dreams we are all unnatural. One of the great dreams of humanity is to be protean, to have the ability to change and allow ones inner condition to be reflected in the outer condition." He gave the shape-changer Rachel a keynote speech to Lori in which she says "You call us monsters but when you dream, it's of flying or changing or living without death. You envy us... and what you envy... you destroy."
"You are allowed the luxury of getting to know them," said Keen of the Nightbreed. "Because most of the leads are monsters, this is a first. The idea was to get away from the horrific images of Hellraiser, to look for an art image, and all the concepts grew from that." (Ralph McQuarrie, the artist who designed much of the Star Wars hardware, was brought in late to the project and as well as designing additional monsters, painted the Midian mural that tells the Breed's story.)
Barker wanted to find different ways of altering the human form. "Nothing was planned," Keen noted. "He used to get people to come in and strip them naked. We knew that the creatures wouldn't all have prosthetics on or be particularly monstrous in form. We... wrapped people in string, put bones on their heads, wrapped them in cling film, anything like that. Once we got the looks, the clothing guys came in and made lots of stuff from all the Oxfam shops. Making coats out of 50 cardigans or making trousers out of a hundred ties."

Grotesques

Much work was done with theatrical techniques such as body-painting. One creature had flames painted on his body, another, an oriental boy, has another mouth painted over one of his eyes. A promotional book accompanied the film with gorgeous photographs of all the principal breed, giving back-stories (written by Barker) and photographs that lingered on every leer and wall-eyed grimace, treating the grotesques as if they were supermodels. This, one imagines, was rather close to Barker's intent than the final film. The only downside to this near-microscopic scrutiny is that some of the make-up, 10 years on, looks rather basic. But the Breed were still only one part of the story. "One of the things I wanted to do with Nightbreed," Barker said, "was a riff on the masked psycho killer. I wanted to invert the conventional Horror movie structure in which the priest, cop and psychoanalyst are the good guys. There are three kinds of monsters in this picture. The Breed, the human monsters, as represented by Eigerman and Ashberry, and the late 20th Century psycho-on-the-loose, Decker. That's three quite distinct and discrete elements. I find it intriguing because I have always loved the creatures of the night, and here was a chance to have a compendium."
"The anal retentive as villian has always made sense to me. You see it to some extent in the early traditions, but the figure of the rational scientist with no spiritual values doesn't become a villian until the atomic age. Characters like Decker seem to have cut themselves off from the human dimension and cannot be appealed to."

Cronenberg Coup

The casting of Horror director David Cronenberg as the killer Decker was regarded as something of a coup for Barker and for the film, although Cronenberg had done very little film acting other than cameo appearances in John Landis's Into the Night and his own film of The Fly.
However, Barker discerned something in the contrast between the urbane, gentle voiced Cronenberg and the unfettered, visceral horror of his movies that mirrored Decker -- "a highly paid analyst in a nice suit who is also a mass murderer."
"If you read the novel," said Cronenberg. "Decker isn't physically like me at all, although that's irrelevant in the movies. I said to Clive, 'are you sure you wouldn't rather have a real actor instead?' I was worried for him. I don't know if I would cast myself in my own movies."
The remainder of the casting went smoothly -- Doug Bradley, Pinhead from Hellraiser, played the Breed patriarch Lylesburg (although he was subsequently and inexplicably dubbed) actress Ann Bobby, a believer in psychic channeling played Lori and Charles Haid, who had played Renko in Hill Street Blues during the 80s was cast as Sheriff Eigerman. Craig Sheffer was chosen for his angular features -- which prefigure the more recent night creature David Boreanaz -- and worked with Barker to find a 'thread of delicacy' in the character. His Breed make-up was based on South American ritual scarification, interpreted by Barker.
The shooting went ahead with few hitches, but it was only afterwards, after several previews for the producers, that the trouble began...

~Shivers, Issue #81, September 2000~