Interviews 1988 (Part Two)

Hellbound : Hellraiser II By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 75, July 1988 "Tony brings a freshness to the material as well as a passion for science fiction that will tinge the material in a very interesting way. Hellraiser was a medium budget movie with an emphasis on the bizarre, the outlandish, the surreal. Tony has taken the sequel in a slightly different direction. We are opening up the story. We are showing Leviathan, plus the great Lament Configuration. We travel to the hell from which the cenobites were raised and we've even got a how-to-make-a-cenobite sequence! It's going to be a lot of fun. We have a massive body count this time. It's a much more spectacular film." Hellbound : Breaking The Last Taboo By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 76, August 1988 "I think Tony Randel has been getting a little carried away, don't you?" Clive Barker In The Flesh By Dave Hughes, Skeleton Crew, III/IV, 1988 "I think it's safe to say you won't see a slugs novel from me!... "We in Britain can begin to be a force in this kind of area, which we were before in the days of Hammer, and which I don't doubt that we have the technical and imaginative expertise to be again. We've rolled over for the Americans too long, it's about time we took them up the ass." An Interview With Clive Barker Transcript of an interview on KPFA, San Francisco by Richard Lupoff, Richard Wolinsky and Lawrence Davidson, (i) Science Fiction Eye, No 4, August 1988, (ii) Masters of the Macabre II (as "A Talk with the King") "I was born off Penny Lane, literally the road off Penny Lane. I do remember, very forcibly, hordes of teenagers coming and taking photographs of all the houses when the song came out. The Beatles thing has gone with me since Linda McCartney took the photo on Weaveworld. Three out of four articles begin: 'Paul McCartney look-alike, Clive Barker...' It was very interesting because Linda was asked to do this photograph and nobody mentioned to her that this had been said. Which was cool by me. So, I went to the site of the photo session, a long photo session. There were a lot of photos to be taken. About two hours into it she said, 'You know, I just realised who you remind me of.' And I just thought, here it comes. And she says, 'You remind me of my ten year old son...' " Kulture! : Clive Barker By Jon Hotten, Kerrang! No. 202, 27 August 1988 "Back in the old days of Hammer pictures, what made them good - and they produced some very good movies - was the fact that they had a group of creators, and a house style emerged. Now, I have my producer Chris Figg, director Pete Atkins, Bob Keen and the special effects guys. We're spurs to each other's invention and brakes on each other's excesses." Shock Horror By Angela Thomas, Showreel, August 1988 "One of the objections from the critics when Hellraiser came out was, 'it isn't realistic, no-one would do that' and the answer is, 'yes, that's right, it's not meant to be real; what's wrong with that?' Elephants can't fly, but that doesn't mean Dumbo isn't a helluva movie." Little House Of Horrors: Master Of Gore Lives It Up On Blood Money By Juliet Warman, (i) Today, 3 September 1988 (ii) Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden "I wanted things in my house which were a reflection of what I do - the film and theatre posters and the framed book illustrations. I've only been in print three years so it's still all very exciting." Every Fear Is A Desire In London, September 1988 by Lisa Tuttle, Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden "There will be a scene in the movie 'Nightbreed' which I don't have in the book where, to articulate some things which can't be articulated in any other way, Babette takes Lori through a dream-landscape in which a history of persecution is going on, witches being drowned, and werewolves burnt at the stake - everything that is different being destroyed by piously praying Christians. I want it to be very unpleasant. I want the audience to understand who are the villains of the piece, to show them a classic image - the dragon beneath the heels of St. George - and then say, 'Wait a minute, what's wrong with this picture?'" Babel's Child By Mark Salisbury, Fear, No 2, Sept/Oct 1988 "If an author has got sufficient profile, sufficient identity, then the chances are that the reader will follow him. I don't know whether my readers would follow me into cowboy novels. I suspect maybe they'd have more problem with that; I wouldn't follow myself into cowboy novels. But into other areas of imaginative fiction, I think, yes, they will follow, and I think the reason people were reading the material in the first place was not simply because it was visceral but because there were imaginative elements which have carried over into the fantasy fiction and will carry over into any other area that I write; whether it be erotic fiction, or science fiction or whatever else, it will be the imaginative thrust; the imaginative enthusiasm is a constant." Weird Tales Talks With Clive Barker By Robert Morris, Weird Tales, No 292, Fall 1988 "I think... that the six volumes of the Books of Blood were, in a sense, an entire statement - me doing as much as I possibly could in the genre. The books were my version of a one-man circus - I juggle, I walk the wire. I tried to be as comprehensive as possible, as eclectic as possible. To do something that had erotic overtones, to do something with a comic touch, to do some very graphic things, and to be able to put it under the six covers, seemed like a lot of fun. Some of them are going to work better than others. Some people are going to like certain stories a lot better than others, but that's part of the pleasure. "The thing which I think finally excites me most and which is very difficult to express totally... is the thing about making all of this work a continuum of some kind or other. So that however it's described - horror fiction, fantasy fiction, science fiction - and however it's expressed - in paintings, movies, novels - it's part of a cohesive whole. And that's a difficult thing to address." Weaving Words With Clive Barker By Leigh Blackmore, Terror Australis, Vol1, No1, Autumn 1988 "Who wants to do three of anything, you know? I could be down at Pinewood, but I really don't want to be directing Hellraiser II. What's important, I think, is to be fresh, and also, I think, to feel as though you're breaking personal ground, because I do very strongly believe that the best sort of fiction is written from personal concern. Those concerns have to be fresh in your head, and if they're not fresh in your head, then they're dead. "I write out of anxiety and obsession, I write out of hope and passion. I don't write out of stale marketing ideas because someone paid me a million bucks." Hellbound : Hellraiser II By [Philip Nutman], Fangoria Poster Magazine, No 3, Fall 1988 "One of the great things about Hellbound is that it starts off at a run. When I'm writing short stories, I can actually begin in the middle of things and then track back. It's much more difficult to do that in movies. We tried to do a little bit of that in Hellraiser with all that flashback material of Frank and the box. "I like that approach. The first film was a teaser; there were so many things in there that we never got around to explaining. So I see Hellbound as being both an advance on the first picture and a filling in of that detail." If You Knew Clive Like We Know Clive By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 78, October 1988 "I write imaginative fiction to the limits of my imagination and will continue to do so. My fiction will continue to be down and dirty, will continue to be visceral, erotic and graphic. What people want to call it is academic." Clive Barker By Karin Aderhold, TIP Filmjahrbuch, No 4, October 1988 (note - translated from the German) [Why is erotic literature so dangerous?] "To me, it appears to be connected with the fact that sexuality is an area in which we lose and give up any control. By their nature the people in governments are control freaks. People who go into positions of power are control freaks, otherwise why they would look for power? Don’t tell me that it is to do with the fact that they worry themselves about the welfare of our souls. Plato says in his writings about the state, that for an absolutely stable, perfect government, first the poets must be exterminated. What kind of power must poems have then! Also the ruling powers of the Third Reich said we must rid ourselves of these degenerate artists. Art is dangerous for a state, and art which concerns itself with taboo topics such as sex and death, is doubly dangerous. I mean, Steven Spielberg is naturally a danger for nobody. Plato would have probably said that he could stay." Book Report - Sign Here By David Streitfeld, (i) Washington Post, 9 October 1988 (ii) much expanded version as part two of Who's Afraid Of Clive Barker?: The Titan Of Terror And His Studies In Dread Reckoning in Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden [Re: signings] "Generally I feel that I'm involving myself in a personal relationship with someone whom the overwhelming likelihood is I'll never meet again. But we've had for a brief time an exchange which has certainly meant something to me and probably something to them, too. I can't go out to dinner with every single one of them, can't go drinking with every single one of them, and if they were all to line up in front of me, I'd have great difficulty remembering their names, so this is what we do instead... "You see the photograph from the flap, maybe you see them on telly once in a while. They're not exactly on public display most of the time. So I think there's a kind of pleasurable intimacy that comes from the fact that you once talked to this person." Censorship: National Film Theatre Report and extracts from a talk at the National Film Theatre, London on 28 June 1988, (i) as An Evening With The Censor by Alan Jones, Starburst, No 122, October 1988 (ii) as Depraved And Corrupt by Brigid Cherry, Nexus, No 8, October 1988 "Are acts of violence more likely to be propagated by material as unattractive as Last House on the Left or the immaculately back-lit Sylvester Stallone with a phallic gun in his hand? If we are talking about role models, surely Sly is more likely to be a focus of tension and self-aggrandisement than the shabby no-accounts in Wes's movie?" Larry King Show Larry King Show, 11 October 1988 (Note : full interview online in RealAudio at the Lost Souls site - see links) "My room is complete chaos - it looks like a bomb dropped in there: there are research papers and notes and things literally piled high on every side. It's an absolute nightmare. It's the way I always wanted my bedroom to be when I lived at home, but my mother would never allow it to be." Ripping Yarns: Clive And Dangerous By Graham Linehan, Hot Press, Vol 12 No 20, 20 October 1988 "I hate it when characters are reduced to a sort of low animal cunning because they can't find any other way to deal with the dangers that they're confronted with. I'm saying that the human imagination works lots of ways, and when confronted with evil it doesn't have to take a sawn-off shotgun and blow its head off. Equally, we all have a fascination with violence. We all have a fascination with violent death. We all have a fascination for forbidden material, whether it be the forbidden material of sexuality, or transcendance, or physical transformation as in the images of a Cronenberg movie, and it doesn't hurt us to confront those images vicariously through fiction. In fact I think that it's actually very theraputic." The King Of Fantastical Fiction By Bob Lundegaard, Star-Tribune Newspaper of the Twin Cities Mpls.-St. Paul, 24 October 1988 "I'd directed for the theater before, so I had a sense of dealing with actors, and I love special effects, so I felt reasonably comfortable about that. So all I was really ignorant about was cameras and lenses, and that's not that difficult to pick up... "When you're shooting two closeups, obviously one person looks camera left and the other camera right so that their glances seem to meet. Now if you move the camera while they're talking, the glances are going to move, and if you shoot them the wrong way and intercut it, they no longer seem to be looking at each other. "I had this fabulous assistant [on Hellraiser] who every now and then would mutter, 'You're crossing the line, Clive.' So far on Hellraiser 2 we still rate an `X' after four tries, and we have to get an 'R.' We keep making adjustments based on what they say, but we aren't making enough. They keep saying, 'You're crossing the line, Clive. Oh, boy, have you crossed the line!' I guess in all kinds of ways I've spent most of my career crossing the line." Monsters Lurk In Barker's Mind By Ann Trebbe, USA Today, 28 October 1988 [Re: his imagination] "I'm not suggesting it's sent down by Venusians. My imagination is with me on a day-to-day basis. It's there. It's me. It's who I am... I forbid my thoughts nothing." Clive Barker Digs Deep For Horrors In Cabal * By Cathie Lou Porrelli, San Gabriel Valley Tribune, 31 October 1988 "I've always loved Highgate. It's really a necropolis like Midian." Clive Barker, Horror Heir Apparent By Karen Liberatore, San Francisco Chronicle, 31 October 1988 "Happy endings have to do with revelation, if we've learned something or come to a self-understanding. We can pretend we don't believe in this [fantastic] stuff. We can say, 'Don't show me, or I'll have to face it.' But we do believe in it as metaphor. We are all vulnerable to our human condition." Fear And Loathing In Hell By Mark A. Altman, Galactic Journal, No 23, Winter 1988 "Sartre said hell is other people. I think hell is bad producers. Hell is something different for everyone. Making love to someone for an afternoon and finding out they're out of your life forever, that's hell." The Future Of Horror Is Here : His Name Is Clive Barker * By Curt Schleir, Inside Books, November 1988 "It would be wonderful if I could produce something gross from my past. But my pets lived to ripe old ages. None of my relatives died in particularly odd circumstances. The most dramatic thing was the sheer banality of growing up in a town that was not of great interest to me. Right through my childhood I was supplied with all of the things I needed in the way of imaginative materials. My mother was keen that I should be reading, and allowed me to range through the library. I suppose for imaginative kids, deprivation comes not in the home, but in school. That's certainly where I felt it most keenly, because that's where the world is divided up into the real and the unreal. That's where you learn the gross national product of Chile. That's where live things are dissected - and I speak both literally and metaphorically. That's where people bully you and shame you into pretending that you don't actually like the things you actually like. That was the time I saw the world." Clive Barker : Tearing Your Soul Apart * By [ ], Your Worst Fears Confirmed, November 1988 "I think I'm a little more pro the body than David [Cronenberg] is. David tends to be quite down on physicality and finally there is an argument that he's being repulsed by the flesh he's writing about, whereas I tend to be having a good time with it. 'Long Live the New Flesh' would be a cry that would come from both our lips." Hellbound By [Stephen Jones], Hellbound US Press Kit, 1988, reprinted in The Illustrated Clive Barker by James van Hise, 1989 "Christopher Figg and I often spoke about making a sequel if Hellraiser worked, but we weren't prepared for it to work to the extent it has, both critically and commercially. I was certainly aware that the first story left open ends, some of which were quite deliberate. Others were there because we didn't have the resources to follow some of the ideas through to their logical conclusion. Hellraiser II: Hellbound will answer some of those questions, but it also opens up a new level of possibilities... " Hellbound By [Stephen Jones], Hellbound UK Press Kit, 1988 "The first picture came out of my own passion for modestly budgeted horror films. I also wanted an emphasis on the bizarre, the outlandish and the surreal, plus a conscious desire to take the imagery just a little bit further - pushing those limits. I didn't direct this time because I had responsibilities to my publishers to deliver a new novel. However, I had a very strong creative involvement and there is a great sense of continuity - and that continuity would have been there, whether I directed or not. It's based on my story and I feel that it is very much in the tradition of Hellraiser." Hellbound By [Stephen Jones], Hellbound Electronic Press Kit, 1988 "We follow Kirsty into Hell, into the secret of the box, to discover something of what the cenobites are, what the box is for, what indeed Hell as it was interpreted in the first picture actually is... That's exciting, to see the doors open, and open, and open again - and see new panoramas... "There was certainly a good deal of blood in the first picture: I think there will be a fair amount in the second one too. You know, you can't make omelettes without breaking eggs and you can't make horror movies without breaking heads!" Welcome To The Magic Show By Cate Terwilliger, Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph, 4 November 1988 "So many magic worlds are about the liberation to the foulest kinds of wish fulfillment. Men go into enchanted worlds and manage finally to be able to slaughter, like barbarians... Women go into enchanted worlds and become queens and princesses and are worshiped like goddesses, but in actual fact become wholly passive in the same process. "What I wanted to do was create a pacifist paradise. Could I create a moment for Cal in the book [Weaveworld] that was magical to the reader and yet didn't require him to, you know, like kick major alien ass?" The Secrets Of Our Success By Bill Strickland, Writer's Digest, Vol 68 No 12, December 1988 "The day I'm sure I've succeeded will probably be the day I stop writing and take up cattle rustling... "I forbid my imagination - and hence my pen - nothing." Chains Of Love By Mark Salisbury, Fear, No 3, December 1988 "It ['The Great And Secret Show'] will have the same mixture of the fantastical and the strange and the sexual and the weird and the magical and the visceral as 'Weaveworld'. The kind of fiction which is in a lot of categories and so probably is in no category except imaginative fiction. I want people to buy a Clive Barker book and say, 'Well, what's Barker cooked up for us this time?' And that becomes a more interesting challenge in a way than trying to write it for a particular slot." Clive Barker : The Horror, The Horror By John Leland, Spin, Vol 4, No 9, December 1988 "Out of just scaring people in the simple sense of making them jump or feel grossed out, I don't get much satisfaction. That's only like the garnish. The steak is getting to talk about death, madness, obscure forms of sexual activity, and selling it to people who thought that they never wanted to hear these kind of things talked about." After The $30 Million Success Of Hellraiser, Clive Barker Puts Out 'Tougher' Sequel By John Wooley, Tulsa World, 18 December 1988 "The things I learned from the first picture were that special effects take longer than you think they're going to, and that has to be scheduled in. You can't expect every special effect gag to go right the first time. In fact, you can't expect it to go right the third time, sometimes. "Also, you can't predict audience response to moments or, indeed, audience response to characters. Whoever would've thought that Pinhead would become the little icon he's become, a jigsaw in Japan or all the other things he is? I created that character in innocence. And what I tried to say to Tony [Randel] was, you can try and manipulate the audience's response to all kinds of things, but they'll surprise you. There are moments in the second movie, which I've seen with audiences on several occasions now, that I never would've thought the audience would've enjoyed as much as they do. And then other moments that you think are going to be a major 'wow' moments turn out not to be. "Now, I like that. I think one of the nice things about that is it proves that audiences are not putty, that Pavlovian planning will not work. You can construct movies every which way hoping that it will all fall exactly into place, and audiences will still surprise you with their response." Gore Master * By Wilder Penfield III, The Toronto Sun, 22 December 1988 "I think there are better things to be doing with celluloid than watching young girls be hacked to pieces in showers. "[Nightbreed]'s not going to be a splatter movie the way the Hellraiser pictures are, but we have about 60 monsters in it - it has thrills and spills. It's going to be a very erotic movie. I'm auditioning stars all afternoon, and I said don't come along unless you're willing to do two things - get covered in prosthetics and slime, and do major sex scenes." Barker Kept Head, Appeased Censors By Steve Dollar, Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 23 December 1988 [Re David Cronenberg] "He'll be playing the mass-murdering psychoanalyst. I said to him, I'd seen him on the BBC doing an interview about himself, and he was so massively calm, so massively in control of himself. I thought if this guy was dangerous, I'd be scared..! I'm just glad he's a good guy." Clive Barker Wishes You A Hellish Little Holiday By Peter Keough, Chicago Sun Times, 25 December 1988 "Part of the problem with the holiday scheduling of movies is you get all the Disney remakes, you get Scrooge, what have you, maybe a comedy or two. But a movie like this, which is a perfect antidote to an excess of goodwill, such pictures are conspicuous by their absence. So if I was an audience member, I would be pleased because this will be a fast, fun ghost train ride for Christmas. It's also going to be the toughest horror movie of the year. I spoke to someone in the MPAA, and he said he was surprised by what they let us get away with. "So, if there are a few critics out there who are outraged, I say there are still Care Bear movies out there for you this Christmas. No one is dragging people to the screenings. People are not going to a film called Hellbound: Hellraiser II with a picture of Pinhead, expecting to see The Turning Point!" Hellbound's Horror Fiction Lion By Patrick Goldstein, Los Angeles Times, 28 December 1988 "I was given a book to autograph by this perfectly normal looking guy, who sounded quite articulate and self-possessed. And before I knew what was happening, he took out a razor, and slashed his arm open, ripping the razor along his veins. I put my hand into the blood on his arm and asked him, 'Do you want this in your book too?' He nodded his head. So I signed the book, planted my bloody palm print next to my signature and told him to have a bloody nice day." Cabal UK Presskit By Peter Atkins, Cabal UK Presskit for Fontana Books, Winter 1988 "My work is fuelled by a refusal to acknowledge any distinction between the Fantastic and the Realistic. I know my stuff falls between two stools: it's too loyal to the art of storytelling to be avant-garde and too weird to be mainsteam fiction. Fortunately for me, the gap between those stools happens to be full of audience!" * Quote taken from extracts presented in Clive Barker's Shadows In Eden, edited by Stephen Jones - full text wanted. 1989 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.