Interviews 1987 (Part One)

...While Barker and his cast were still busy giving interviews on Hellraiser, behind the scenes at Cannes Hellbound was being pitched to New World. By July, Pete Atkins was working on the first draft of the screenplay just as Barker was gaining an injunction against Green Man producing any further pictures of his stories. Through November and December Atkins worked on the last drafts of Hellbound, incorporating cast changes as he went, before the shooting script was finalised as the year ended. Poseidon's intended summer release in the US of the Books of Blood Volume 6 (as The Life of Death) was put on hold, to be combined the following year with Cabal instead. Meanwhile, astonished gorehounds found Barker's new departure into fantasy (albeit with the now trademark Barker slant) a little tough to stomach. Fans of good storytelling, however, were happy to follow this new route, and a whole new audience was enchanted by Weaveworld - Collins & Poseidon rubbed their hands with glee... Horrors! It's Clive Barker By [ ], Booktalk, 1987 "I'm trying to write serious books which happen concidentally to be horror books. I am concerned that my work be well written and intelligent. I am writing to the best of my ability. At no point am I condescending to my readers... "People don't believe in garlic and crucifixes anymore. My fiction is about comprehension. It's not simply about getting away with as few bites as possible - it's about understanding why the monster is trying to bite you in the first place." Raising Hell Interview by [ ] for Stephen King's World of Horror documentary video, 1987 "What happens in my fiction is that characters do things for reasons - usually reasons of appetite of some kind or other. Though they may look strange, though their bodies may be inhuman, abhuman, subhuman, their motivation is something we can most of us relate to in some way or other. "There's this nice family unit, there's a status quo, there's a family dog and there's whatever the hell else there is - and suddenly something comes in from the big, dark, outside and threatens the family unit, steals the child, eats the dog, burns down the house, occupies the reality that is dominant up to that point. I am rather on the side of those forces." Trailers Interview by [ ] for Stephen King's World of Horror documentary video, 1987 "Trailers are great. I mean I love 50's trailers: 'Attack of the 50 Foot Woman' - have you ever seen the trailer of that? It's great! They're great stuff; they're an intensification, very often, of what's in the picture and, it has to be said, very often all the best bits of the picture get put in the trailer." [ ]* By Ste Dillon, Adventurer, 1987 "The problem is, in a genre which is full of phallic swords and that kind of thing, it's important to establish female power and female potency, and the eroticism which comes with that. And it needn't all be 'goody-goody' stuff, I mean Immacolata particularly; she 's kind of sexy, yet dangerous at the same time. And yet a virgin, which makes her all the more sexier of course. " Clive Barker Raises Hell By Philip Nutman, Fangoria No 60, January 1987 "The story [of Hellraiser] is based on a novella, The Hellbound Heart... the movie is based on that story, but is quite a distance from it; there have been many changes. It is an original screenplay I wrote with the intention of making it my directorial debut... "We wanted someone [for FX] who has a new eye and was as hungry to produce something as original as we are. We have faith that this picture will break new ground, and we wanted a talent in the special makeup effects department who would be willing to take considerable risks. And what we have in Bob [Keen] is someone with the most marvellous technical know-how married with a tremendous imagination. For us, that's a very potent combination. I see eye-to-eye with that aspect because that's how I view my fiction." Clive Barker, Createur de Monsters II By Indra Bhose, L’Ecran Fantastique No 76, January 1987 (note - translated from the French) "I made a point of keeping control on the way in which the stories which I wrote were shown on the screen. Screenwriters do not have much say on the structure of the films which they inspire, but I wanted to ensure for myself that the images which I introduced into the screenplay would find their way onto the screen..." Hellraiser Photoplay, Vol 38 No 2, February 1987 "I wanted to make something intelligent and fresh [in Hellraiser], something with a little more style than the rest." L'Enfant Horrible By Robin Eggar, Sunday Express colour supplement, 1 February 1987 "Personal relationships have their place but everything is put aside for work. To me, the idea of a wife and children is a millstone, getting between me and the things I want to do. My most intimate relationship is with my imagination. It always has been. My imagination is the one thing that I really like about myself. It is the longest one night stand I've ever had. And it has never let me down. Yet." Hellraiser By Tom Pulleine, Films and Filming, No 389, February 1987 "I believe style has a lot to do with economy - and I don't mean just in the money sense. I've tried to avoid being rococo for it's own sake. After all, the story is the important thing... but that's not to say that we're trying to make some sort of spurious art movie; this is no-holds-barred stuff. "I couldn't be a neo-realist, however hard I tried. It's very important to me to make the motivations accessible, not to have people just succumbing to uncontrollable urges. However fantastic the story may be, the horror is still rooted in human desires. I'm just not interested in the kind of horror film where virgin girls are pursued by men in ski masks. There are no virgins in my movie. And no ski masks either, come to that." Transcript Of Talk At UCLA, 25 February 1987 Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden "Once I've got those ideas, if there are monsters in them, I do drawings because I like to be able to describe a monster nipple by nipple." A Little Bit Of Hamlet Barker at UCLA 25 February 1987, by Dennis Etchison, Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden "I think the censorship lobby has legitimate fears. I could certainly think of pictures that I would not want six-year olds to see… My problem is not that there aren't legitimate concerns but that because the argument is so fractionalized, the real issues are not addressed. The real issues are what values are put across in these pictures. If you start to talk about values I think something very interesting happens; there is quite clearly an argument that can be put against pornography - that it de-humanizes women - which I think is a legitimate argument. But what about 'Rambo' de-humanizing life?" Raising Hell Hellraiser set visit by Stefan Jaworzyn, Shock Xpress, No 6, Spring 1987 "The rule I made at the beginning [of 'Hellraiser'] was that once the picture had started I wouldn't fiddle around with it. We wouldn't ever be at the stage where I was writing scenes one night to be filmed the next morning. It's unfair to everyone involved - actors, special effects crews, technicians. Once we got the pink pages in, there would only be changes in nuance. We worked very hard on the script to get it just right so we could say, 'Now we'll go, we'll make this picture.' " Rawhead Rex By Alan Jones, Cinefantastique, Vol 17, No 2, March 1987 "I just want the film to be an all-out monster movie with lots of blood and cheap thrills. I wrote the best script I could, and I'm hoping for the best." Other Worlds : Conversation With Clive Barker By Matthew J Costello, Fantasy Review, No 100, April 1987 "I'll start another novel [after Weaveworld] just after the turn of the year, and another movie is planned after this one [Hellraiser]. Not a horror picture, a fantasy picture. I have a very low boredom threshold anyway, so moving from medium to medium is fine. But mainly I think it informs the work in one medium to have worked in another one. I can bring insights to bear on film because I have worked in the theatre, or because I have worked in illustration, and maybe the film work will reflect back into my theatre work or my illustrations. I certainly hope so." Larry King Show Larry King Show, 6 May 1987 (Note : full interview online in RealAudio at the Lost Souls site - see links) "Having worked for a long time in theatre, where there is an immediate gratification thing in there - you know whether a piece of theatre is working or not because the audience is leafing through their programme or eating popcorn, or watching the stage. I'm very aware of boredom thresholds; I try to make sure that the book - I am aware of the audience all the way through writing the book - I'm trying to make something which will consistently excite... "If my editor says to me, 'Look, it slows down here,' I will take account of that and won't say, 'Well, it's my book, it's my vision, I'm just going to go ahead and do it anyway.' It's important to me that I'm writing for people and not writing just for myself... I self-edit a lot, and then I've got both my agent and of course my editor at my publishers. I think my various editors would agree that I listen; I disagree sometimes, but I would try and argue the thing through, and it's very useful - you work nine months on a book, you lose perspective, and it takes a clear, clean eye to read this thing and say, well, 'you know it slows down here' or 'it needs a bit more detail there'. So, yes, I certainly listen to my editors." Talking Terror With Clive Barker By Douglas E. Winter during Hellraiser SFX, (i) Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone Magazine, Vol 7, No 2, June 1987 (ii) small excerpt included in the Touch of Evil Film Festival brochure, Washington, October 1987 (iii)Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden "The thing is, I don't just push the gore - I push everything. When my stuff is bloody, it's very bloody, but when my stuff is sexy, it's very sexy. When it's funny, it's very ludicrous. I don't like half measures….So I don't think I'm a gorehound. I am an excess-hound: I like to push stories and events and characters to the limits. I would be very distressed if my readership were reading simply to see people torn apart or whatever. That would be a bit like going to 'King Lear' just to see Gloucester's eyes put out, or to Webster to see simply the deaths. I'm not in the genre to gross people out. And I don't write narratives just to give me good chances to gross people out. My narratives, as I create them, lead to moments of frisson that seem to be rather dark and distressing. Some of the moments of distress are going to be gross-outs, but some of them are going to be revelations, moments in which our vision of the world is turned upside down." Interview With Clive Barker By Julia Fitzgerald, Rave Reviews, No 7, June/July 1987 "I live an undramatic life outside of my creative productions... It's a question of the period of my life at the moment - film work, books being written, travel. There's a breathless quality to it all and I feel I must make the most of it, consolidate what luck has brought me and give life to a career until it's secure enough to leave for three months and know that people will still remember my name... I feel as if I'm walking a tightrope and still haven't quite got my balance. It's all so new still." Meet The New (Stephen) King Of Horror, Briton Clive Barker By Andrea Chambers & Jonathan Cooper, People Weekly, 15 June 1987 "I think I write tasteful fiction. I do seek to horrify, but I also seek to disturb, amuse, arouse and intellectually challenge." Hammering Out Hellraiser Set visit, by Philip Nutman, (i) Fangoria, No 65, July 1987 (ii) Fangoria : Masters of the Dark "In The Inhuman Condition, the puzzle stands for many things, such as evolution; you solve the knots, and beasts - which are three separate parts of the evolutionary puzzle - appear. In Hellraiser, the puzzle stands for something quite different - it's a way to open a door to Hell, but it also stands for the puzzle of desire... Puzzles, labyrinths, anything that involves intellectual inquiry, even on a very small level, which then explodes into another world entirely: that's an interesting place to be. And the Lament Configuration is a good visual device. Far better than invoking the Devil with cod Latin and sacrificing farmyard fowl, and more fun than dead virgins!" Some Harsh Words For The Critics From Ballard And Barker By Rodney Burbeck, (i) Publishing News, 24 July 1987 (ii) Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden "I don't read reviews now because they just annoy me so much. I don't read the Sundays, it's tomorrow's chip paper anyway and one should not concern oneself with the trivial opinions of trivial minds; but they do shape the sales of movies, theatre tickets, books." Clive Barker By Nigel Floyd, Samhain, No 4, July 1987 "The challenge for me is to bury the poetry sufficiently deep in the piece of fiction that: (a) it can't be detached from the fiction; and (b) that it's not going to get in the way of the reader or viewer who is just there for the ride...And, obviously, in an ideal world, I am trying to write a fiction or make a movie that collides these two intentions, that gives the reader the thrill of the ride and the sense that there's a destination." Clive Barker: Anarchic Prince Of Horror By Stephen Jones, (i) Knave, Vol 19, No 8, [August] 1987 (ii) Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden "The thing I wanted to be when I was small was Peter Pan - I wanted to be able to fly; I wanted access to a Never-Never Land." The Hell Bound Heart By G. Dair, Cut, Vol 2 No 8, August 1987 "One of my great articles of faith is that I won't look away, I won't avert my eyes and whatever I feel, however sexy, however maniacal, I will actually put on the page. So having that reputation the challenge was to see if I could put it on screen." Is The Future Of Horror A Man Called Clive? By Anne Billson, Sky, No 9, 13 - 26 August 1987 "I don't like send-ups. I like my horror dark. It seems to me that there's a certain reluctance on the part of writers and film makers to treat horror seriously, to suggest that it can actually say something interesting. One of the things I love about it is the ability it gives you to draw in surrealist imagery, to produce genuinely weird images." The Horror, The Horror, The Horror * Panel discussion at Conspiracy '87, 29 August 1987 "There's a lot of devouring goes on in fairy tales, and I remember having an illustration from Hansel and Gretel. There was a picture of Hansel (with whom I presumably identified) in a cage; the witch was blind I remember, and he gives a bone to her to prove that he's not getting any fatter... The idea of the witch fattening up this child for eventual devouring is a very early sexual memory. In Weaveworld I tried to make some of that explicit, what I would term the sexual subtext of fairy tales. The devouring image is strong in those things, and it is also strong in horror fiction." Clive Barker : Raising Hell In London By Stephen Jones, Monsterland, No 17, Fall 1987 "I want to direct pictures because I enjoy the movies, but I don't honestly think that there's been a great deal of intelligence applied to the making of horror pictures. The best horror movies touch genuine nerves, things that disturb us. It's a universal form. Horror travels well." Hell St. Blues By Giovanni Dadomo, Tracks, September 1987 "At the start, the budget was very modest and the thinking was that I had quite a name as a writer, so they could always print that big on a video box and at least break even with a video release." Clive Barker By Robert Conroy, Seconds, 1987 "At one point Coil were going to do the soundtrack for the film. But that turned out not to work, it wasn't right for them, it wasn't right for New World. But John [Balance] and Peter [Christopherson] and I, I guess there had been a sort of sense that we could be plain about how far we wanted the imagery to go in this picture. There was a great exchange of sort of secret imagery, photographs that we'd got in our private collections that we weren't going to show to anybody, you know? "It turned out that Peter had gotten access to pictures of rituals in Sri Lanka which I also had. Pictures of people who had hooks through their flesh, and we're not talking about three hooks here, we're talking about dozens of hooks from which they hang goods of various sizes and weights. They're hooked through the flesh the way you would accidentally hook a fish hook, it drew blood but not a huge amount. The whole idea is that you reach a transcendence, an ecstasy via these means. It's a very familiar thing. A Man Called Horse has the same kind of thing in it. You press the body to its limits and then beyond, and at some point mind and body dislocate, because the mind finally says, 'I'm not taking this shit anymore, I'm getting out of here.' "There is an argument that the same thing is going on in S&M clubs from here to Hamburg and back. That whole area of pain as pleasure and pleasure best realised through pain is one that I think fascinates more people than will admit to it. I think probably an awful lot of nice, middle class couples across America are tying each other to the bed twice-nightly, though they probably would never admit to anyone else that they do that. It's very potent imagery. It's got to be potent, otherwise why would it be forbidden?" Slime Time By Nigel Floyd, (i) Time Out, No 889, 2-9 September 1987 (ii) Clive Barker's Shadows In Eden (as "Clive Barker: Hellraiser") "I think in some ways I'm writing a New Gothic. My characters tend to be a return to those marginals and outsiders and whackos and madmen and oversexed visionaries that wander through Gothic novels doing unspeakable things to each other. In fact I think that the anti-Gothic, what I would call bourgeois horror, is the kind of horror which is firmly rooted in the nuclear family, though it tends to show it under threat... "The characters in my fiction are very often dreamers, lost people, people who aren't quite at ease with the bourgeois, the domestic. What interests me is the idea of characters who confront the extraordinary, rather than simply finding some creatures or some forces that they must eradicate or exorcise in order to return to the norm they had on page one.I think of my stories as having happy endings, perversely enough, because they very often have scenes of revelation of one kind or another: characters understanding themselves and realising why they need fresh meaning in their lives. Even if that meaning is called Rawhead Rex, who is nine feet tall and likely to tear off their head. Even so, there is meaning, and there are new ways of looking at themselves in relation to their own subconscious." Such A Nice Lad By Diane Massey, Look Alive, Liverpool, September 1987 "You can see a film about a psycho on the loose and you might go back to your house and imagine there's a maniac in the kitchen and it's a real fear. My films are purely fantasy and what happens to my characters can never happen to anyone in real life. I like to entertain people, I don't really scare them." Beyond Hell By Steve Pratt, The Northern Echo, 4 September 1987 "We didn't say, 'We are going to make a test picture.' From word one we said, 'We may be the new boys but we want to do something different.' We didn't want to be seen to be treading cautiously over familiar ground... "This is an adult movie about adults... I think it's perfectly correct that this kind of material doesn't find its way into the hands of four or five-year-olds, or even fourteen-year-olds. But I believe if you are eighteen you should be able to see what you like in the cinema. "I would not advocate the kind of movie that's mindless mayhem. I was very insistent that whatever we put into the picture in the way of gore and slime was justified by the narrative." Raising Hell For A New Horror By Anne Billson, The Independent, 4 September 1987 "It seems to me that there's a reluctance to treat horror seriously or to suggest that it can say something interesting. I don't like send-ups. I like my horror dark, and mean-spirited with a lurking subtext... "I don't like stalk'n'slash pictures, I think that they're boring and sexist. You have an incredibly obvious divide between what the men and women do. The women tend to get into showers and wet T-shirts, leave the door unlocked and scream. I wanted to have women who were not standard victims." As A Splatter Of Fact By Elaine Paterson, Record Mirror, 12 September 1987 "I have trouble with terms like evil. Frank isn't evil, he goes out seeking experience - pleasure and pain intertwined - of a kind that's bound to lead to bad times. So I wouldn't see this initial drive as evil. But when he gets strong enough to turn his back on Julia he does so, and I think even a casual reading of the film suggests that had things gone well for the couple, it wouldn't have lasted. They would have been at a marriage counsellor eventually! "I said to Oliver Smith, 'The trouble is we've got to believe this man. Play it sexy.' I didn't want Frank to be the bogeyman." Perfect Skin By Tony Mitchell, Sounds, 12 September 1987 "Many of my books are about sex, rather than sex happening as light relief between horrors, but it has to be said that, as far as the censor is concerned, sex with horror is a real problem, because of the whole sex-and-violence thing. "It seems to be OK to have sex in movies that are have-sex-and-die movies. As soon as there's a flash of naked flesh in a Friday The 13th movie, you know the naked flesh has about 30 seconds to remain warm. There's a certain puritanical morality - the young people screw and they die. "Of course, Hellraiser's rather more mature people also screw and die! But they are much more authors of their own destiny than the nubile victims of the have-sex-and-die pics. "It was very interesting when Frank has got into his brother's skin and he and Julia have the love scene. New World said, 'Do we really need this?' I said, 'You're kidding me. I'm not going to have these people going through all this suffering and not get to fuck at least once!'" Clive Barker Is Determined To Give Everyone A Scare By John Hartl, The Seattle Times, 14 September 1987 "I have a brother who is very different from me, and so do several of my friends. I wanted to deal with sibling rivalry, and the fact that two people from the same family can have such completely dissimilar lifestyles. Then I got into the sexuality and obsession that are so much a part of my books. It's something I feel I've brought to horror that hasn't been there for a long time: the perverse erotic frisson." Beauty Of Horror Adds Up For British Writer By Chris Farley, (i) Chicago Tribune, 15 September 1987 (ii) (as The Monster Maker) The Dallas Morning News, 29 September 1987 "The assumption is that horror fiction is just bad fiction, or cheap fiction or exploitative fiction, which of course some of it is. But most genres are judged by the best in their fields. Horror, unfortunately, is often judged by the worst... It's a very subversive, but relevant genre. You're talking about things you can't address any place else, things you're told you shouldn't talk about - death, insanity... You can deal with all sorts of forbidden subjects and that's a great thrill... "Hellraiser is not like a hunt-and-slash picture full of teenagers cut to pieces. It's quite an adult piece of work, I think, with people suffering adult problems. We do have our teenage hero in the person of Kirsty, but she doesn't hold any wet T-shirt contests... In stalk-and-slash pictures you see bad performances because the actors have been told to play victims, not to act. An actress is put in a scene to be killed by a machete. But what's the motivation? 'Forget that,' the director will say. 'You're just here to be killed by a machete...' This is a movie with real relationships in it and human emotions." Click here for More 1987 Interviews * Quote taken from extracts presented in Clive Barker's Shadows In Eden, edited by Stephen Jones - full text wanted. More 1987 Interviews | Interviews Index | Home page This page has been created for information and entertainment purposes only. All quotes remain the copyright of the original owners.