[REVIEW] Hellraiser and Nightbreed at the BFI: 35 Years of Barker

I don’t know where I’d be now without the work of Clive Barker. Growing up queer and obsessed with horror- a genre which has long had ties to queerness in its own right -I felt abstracted from the rest of the world. Horror became my hiding place, a dark corner where I could celebrate my difference, or at least see it in the terrible creatures that tore away at the worlds and comforts of its “heroes”. For a while, I just sat there in it: watching my monster movies, looking longingly at the beasts that reflected back at me, reading Stephen King and loving the mild transgressions that he would smatter his stories with. And then, watching through the so-called classics, I watched Hellraiser, and just like that I discovered what I never knew I needed—a film that felt like I did, all the erotic and sensory desire, all that compacted want that twisted and merged with pain, all the transformative beauty of our plasticine androgyne bodies. Discovering Hellraiser, this incredibly queer romance masquerading now as a “classic 80s horror”, was like discovering a lost part of myself- a limb I never knew I had, suddenly springing to life and writhing in synaptic glee. Finally I could swim in the same feelings as a peer. Finally I realised what stories we as queers could tell, unbound by the structures of normative horror fiction. I read The Hellbound Heart, Books of Blood and watched Nightbreed afterwards (how could I not?) and in so reading brought those feelings back, but in that moment I discovered the unfiltered potential of queer horror. It set me on the path to being a horror academic, and a critic, and well… Here I am.
It’s been nearly 6 years since I discovered Hellraiser, and 35 since it was released. When I was invited to watch it in double-bill with Nightbreed, I jumped at the chance. Hosted as part of the BFI’s In Dreams Are Monsters horror lineup, this double-bill was a total celebration of the work of Clive Barker, with a talk led by Phil Stokes of the Clive Barker Archive. The event began with a screening, and what may have been the UK premiere of, the once-lost director’s cut of Nightbreed, and concluded with a screening of Hellraiser and Q&A with Nicholas Vince (Kinski/The Chatterer) and Simon Bamford (Ohnaka/Butterball). 

There’s something to be said about Nightbreed’s director’s cut on the big screen, an enormous film finally restored in all its strange and queer glory: bold and surreal and dreamlike and still profoundly radical. I won’t go into the history now (you can read more in the Stokes’ terrific new book Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds) but suffice it to say Fox were not keen on that radicalism, which had emerged fully-formed from the base novel Cabal, and issued numerous reshoots and cuts to make the monsters more monstrous, the story more palatable to… well… what the Nightbreed would call “naturals”. Finally reconstructed in 2014, Nightbreed is nothing short of a revelation: huge, sweeping, beautiful and joyous. An ode to the brilliance of being monstrous, the power of fighting back against the forces of normalcy.

Nightbreed finds freedom in falling away from the world, in pursuing difference, in change and becoming newer, better selves—different, ugly, but happy and powerful and free. It’s little wonder that it brings all sorts of thoughts of transition, found family, the queer subcultures that have shaped our own freedoms and celebration of difference. On the big screen, Midian becomes a dark and stunning labyrinth of abyssal architecture and inspired creature design, Elfman’s soundtrack soars with anarchic whimsy. The whole experience is gigantic and tinged with a little sadness. The Nightbreed, as queers, as any minority group, are defined by their hiding and the violence against them lurking just on the horizon. The supernatural possibility of openness colliding with the realities of discrimination, subjugation and denial. It’s a reminder that an underbelly is a necessary hiding place, even if we have power, even if they’re secretly jealous. As the Nightbreed Rachel says: “To be able to fly, to be smoke, or a wolf? To know the night and live in it forever? That's not so bad. You call us 'monsters,' but when you dream, you dream of flying, and changing, and living without death. You envy us, and what you envy [you destroy].”

Watching Nightbreed in its truest form today is looking at all the wonder we could have had, all the potentials of strange, queer joy and being just on the horizon, that have been snuffed out. But then, I like our corners, places like this, where queers and other monsters can roam free. This is what the internet has given us: directions to new Midians, invisible and perfect. 

The journey of Boon from addled outsider to monstrous hero paints a picture of a society where, through pushing back against authority, a kind of queer utopianism can emerge. Here is the story of the seedy underbelly, all the ugliness that comes with it raised to fantastical heights, celebrated and aggrandised in the same way that normative stories always have been. And here celebrated by the British Film Institute. Is this an honor? I don’t know. It certainly feels like something though.

Then there’s Hellraiser. Dear god Hellraiser. A film that continues to dominate my life, that gleams with romance under miles of pierced and peeled-back flesh - a film of such ravishing intensity, and such seemingly contradictory tenderness that its voice today feels as loud, if not louder, than it ever was. The queer cult community has rightfully devoured Barker’s classic, exploding the romantic splatterpunk genre it helped establish into new, bizarre and wonderful directions. But Hellraiser still stands alone, a triumph even after a dozen or so rewatches. Unique, visceral, and incomparably tender. Christopher Young’s score is magnificent, the Frank Reborn sequence still the peak of special effects, its erotic sensibility still unique.

And that’s the rub right? Even acknowledging the strides made in queer rights and representation over the last 35 years, even acknowledging the incredible advances in horror filmmaking and storytelling in that time, very little—if anything—comes anywhere near Hellraiser’s devotion to the extreme queer gothic, few creatures as relatable to a queer and trans transmogrification as the cenobites. Barker’s work appeals in the here and now because it has the confidence to be about sex and violence and personhood and love and do so without so much as a filter. It dares to present the raw possibility of sexuality and its coexistence with pain and blood. The cenobites, perhaps more villainous than we’d like to admit, still stand as icons of queer potential- the freedom to enact on the self, the remarkable transformation that can occur with devotion to the sensation that defines our queer identity. The novella’s Lead Cenobite was my first encounter with an overtly genderless character, a creature that - while unsettling - feels wholly, remarkably self-assured. Here is a reflection of myself, strange, ugly, vindictive, and powerful. Isn’t that what I want? To feel like this, to know these sensations? To explore limitless being?

The choice to open the Lament configuration becomes something of a no-brainer— after all, in a world of untold harm, why not find whatever pleasures we can in it? To be queer and to love and to have sex, those things require more than a little pain: whether it’s the loss contemporary with the film during the AIDS crisis, or the penitent joys of BDSM, or of abuse and discrimination and legal oppression in the modern day. To exist fully requires us to pursue pleasure, to become a little monstrous, to find where we don’t fit in and carve our own utopia out of the pain—embracing the nuances of sex, the freedom of doing and feeling as we please, labelless, only sure of our own pleasures and the necessary masochism. 

The true horror is in denying that pleasure out of the harms intrinsic to it, becoming like Frank—worse than a monster, a monster that believes itself to be a man. 

Watching them today, in 2022, Nightbreed and Hellraiser in their complete forms are still unmatched in their imagination and sheer overwhelming queerness. They are unashamedly erotic stories that use horror not as a crutch but instead as a loose genre marker to tell beautiful stories of love and liberation, without the limits imposed on normative art. Horror is the realm of the antinormative, of the uncanny and the surreal and the different, it provides spaces for those parts of us we’d rather shut away. What makes both of Barker’s masterworks so powerful is their ability to bring those parts to the fore, ugly, and unafraid: they see us—cenobites of other realms, beasts of deepest Midian—and show us that the real violence is held by the ones with perfect skin, the parents and the cops and the psychologists and the doctors.The fear unavoidable, but even so embrace it: be weird, be ugly, be erotic, and monstrous and find your place in the dark. 

2022 has been a hard year for queer people, especially trans people, it’s seen our rights restricted, constant threats on our healthcare, and an increasing number of bigots in positions of power. So much conversation around “resisting” the tightening bonds and actual violence intrinsic to growing fascism - and it is fascism - relies on reflecting back those norms with capitalist identity politicking, attempts to weigh out an oppressive hierarchy rather than doing away with it altogether. It’s in rainbow capitalism, and cops in pink-triangles, it’s RuPaul banking on constant viewership while building a fracking empire, it’s trusting vague ideas of sexless representation in the hopes that it’s a sign of progress. It’s jealousy, hate, revulsion. This is why I worry about the BFI, I wonder if this is defiance, acceptance, or platitude. 

Watching Barker’s work offers a certain level of freedom from that violence, a step away from the ignorance of social norms and toward radically utopian dreams of queer society, toward a radical ugliness and strangeness and, yes, extremeness. Hellraiser and Nightbreed are overtly sexual, overtly allegorical, and boldly transcendental. They draw lines between the queerly erotic and the spiritual, between violence, sex and liberation. Through Midian and Baphomet, Lament and the Cenobites, they make us and our experiences ancient, holy, spiritual—felt, not named.  They let queerness breathe, they let us feel, and they let us say “yes, actually, we are better than you”.