Interviews 1990 (Part One)

...1990 - the year of the 'Breed - or at least that was the plan. Having already coped with an accident on set, additional shooting, the loss of the producer and editor and even the original ending (with the 'Breed left huddled in a barn), Barker slowly realised he had to take on the combined might of Morgan Creek and 20th Century Fox. Initially, the changes born of poor testing were seen as strengthening the film, and when the final test audience at Redondo Beach pronounced the leaner version a hit, even the 20 minutes of cuts were perhaps not quite the body-blow Barker had first thought. It was only when it became apparent that the marketing machines of Morgan Creek and Fox had no interest whatsoever in Nightbreed that the death knells began to reverberate. There was no US press showing scheduled - a gambit sure to leave the critics unimpressed - and what publicity there was followed the well-trodden stalk 'n' slash path. Barker's frustration and his anger that this was as much a result of a political decision as creative ineptitude brought him to declare he was 'crazy as a loon'. Unsurprisingly, box office receipts were less than impressive... Barker sought refuge in the solitude of his desk... Sympathy For The Devil By Michelle Olley, (i) Skin Two, No 10, 1990, (ii) Best Of Skin Two, 1993 "I don't see how you can avoid [sexuality] if you write about how people operate in the world, particularly how they operate in a world where the rules are being changed, because that's what the fantastique is about. You start off in a world in which you think you know the rules and, after page four, the rules have been blown out of the fucking water, you know? So what happens is that the characters have to reassess the rules and have to choose or not choose to confront, and maybe even embrace, and maybe even fuck their fears. Now, they can either be driven to that place or drawn - and what happens to my characters is usually a bit of both. What drives them is a sense of the banality of the lives that they are living at present. What draws them is a series of sensual possibilities and sometimes sexual possibilities which make possible a reassessment of themselves. It's just like the idea that when you have your first sexual experience, you are 'changed forever'. But in fact you can continue to have first sexual experiences right through your life - they're just different firsts." Illustrator By Fred Burke, Clive Barker - Illustrator, 1990 "I love masks for two completely contrary reasons. One is that they're a way of covering up an experience or a feeling. The other is that they're a way of exposing through a liberation. A mask is a way of taking on another personality for a period of time. Now, I play it both ways, I think, in the drawings and in the fiction as well. Clearly there are some things that we can do in masked form that we would not otherwise - this is the classic dramatic device of the masked ball. You put on the mask and you're allowed to do all kinds of things that hitherto you wouldn't do: you seduce the people you would be afraid to seduce unmasked; you say the things you most fear to say unmasked. But there's another way, which is that masks can be something we plaster onto our faces to cover up the possibility of this eruption. I think masks have two quite contrary forms. I think some of the masks I've put on characters are very bland. And then others seem to want to erupt in all directions. That's the paradox." Interview By [ ], Contemporary Authors, Volume 129, 1990 [Re. writing and publicity] "It's a great combination. It exploits a dichotomy in my nature perfectly. I am an introverted extrovert. I enjoy the public stuff... but I enjoy every bit as much getting up on a Monday morning at half-past eight and immersing myself in another world. "[On tour] I think of myself as a barker, up there in front of the show saying, 'Come on in! We've got miracles! We've got transcendance! We've got scares! We've got the biggest fright of your life!' I like to do that. It appeals to the showman in me." Sex, Death, Monsters And Feminism By Jeff Holland, Coenobium No 2, 1990 (note: interview took place 21 January 1990) "The whole idea of the dream pool, if you like, is basically Jungian. There's nothing particularly original about the idea that when we enter our dreams we are entering metaphorically a sea, but it struck me as kind of interesting that this sea might also have islands and something that I thought had never been touched on before - that there might be a huge continent on the other side of the sea and that suddenly became hugely interesting to me. What I wanted to do was something which I know readers enjoy - and I know movie-goers enjoy - and that is to begin to give people some sense of a mythology. I've always felt that underlying the fascination with the fantastique was a fascination with the mythological. The Hellraiser series is also the beginnings of a mythology." Sex, Death, Monsters And Feminism II : The Sequel By Jeff Holland, Coenobium No 3, 1990 "One of the things that comes out after a while in my books is that I'm really interested in tribes. The Cenobites are a tribe. The Seerkind in Weaveworld are a tribe. The Nightbreed are very much a tribe. The Naturals who are set against the Nightbreed in the movie are a tribe. The Razor-Eater believed he was part of a tribe but, poor fool, didn't realise he was a tribe of one. The Last European, Mamoulian, absolutely mourned the loss of his tribe. I think that one of the things that fascinates me about this whole tribal thing is the idea of belonging; how much we need to belong, and sometimes we need to belong to very strange sub-tribes. "It's too easy to make people who are simply hateful. It's too easy to simply paint people in one colour; to say, 'hate these guys,' 'love these guys.' All of us as individuals, as sub-tribes and as nations have chosen throughout our lives to make these simplistic judgements and they're always dangerous." A Hymn To The Monstrous: The Making Of Nightbreed By Mark Salisbury and John Gilbert, Clive Barker's Nightbreed - The Making Of The Film, 1990 "The movie has come out so much better than I ever dreamed it would. It's also squeezed out of me so much more energy than I thought it was going to. I went through a very bad period of not just energy-lag but a sense that there was no light at the end of the tunnel and that this would never fucking end. "Robin Vidgeon has worked with Spielberg, and he's been making movies for a very long time, yet he said to me as he left after the enhancement shoot, that it was the most gruelling film he'd ever been on. Major make-ups, major prosthetics, major special effects - fire, explosions, destruction, end of the universe - all for $11 million. And all the time, not being able to say quite confidently, 'Ah, well, this is what we're doing.' "All the time we were trying to find a new way to do stuff and that I think is the greatest challenge. But it means that you don't have the cliches to fall back on. You can't say, 'Oh well, I don't feel terribly energetic this Monday morning, let's just do it the way that X or Y would have done it.' As with always trying to fins new ways to do things, once you've started on that track you can't really go back. You're stuck with it." Straight For The Jugular (Part 2) By Brigid Cherry, Fear, No 13, January 1990 "Comics are not like movies, despite the fact that it is consistently claimed that the spirit of a comic is a movie on the page. For one thing, the image is static, for another the image doesn't operate in time. It works the other way about, too. The term 'comic strip moviemaking' is thrown around with monotonous regularity. Mad Max is supposed to be a comic strip movie. I defy anybody to show me the comic book equivalent of Mad Max. Mad Max is absolutely and centrally a piece of cinema. I cannot see how it would work as a comic strip. How do you get speed? How do you get the fast cut? You just can't do it. It's a different art." Fangoria's Weekend Of Horrors Platform performance at Fangoria's Weekend of Horrors, New York, 20-21 January 1990 "The most often asked question is, 'Don't you have - ' No. The most often asked question is, 'Where do your ideas come from?', that's the most often asked question. None of you ask it, please, because I don't have a fucking clue! "'Do you not have nightmares?' I always say my dreams are other people's nightmares because it seems to me we are gathered here because we like the perverse, we feel at home with the dark, we feel at home with the monstrous. I think it's time we actually stand up, even in larger numbers than these, possibly in Congress. I think Fango should have a senator, the Fango representative who could go into the Oval Office every once in a while and whisper in George's ear, 'You know, you're not being real nice on monsters at the moment, George. Forget Noriega, what about the undead?'" Clive Barker By Stanley Wiater, Dark Dreamers: Conversations With The Masters Of Horror, 1990 "In truth, I don't think I've had a nightmare for years and years and years. I've had a few dreams which have left me uneasy in the negative sense, but there are also dreams of unease which are hugely inspiring. Inevitably, one dreams of about the loss of something, such as a loved one, and I suppose that comes close to the nightmare. But Idon't wake up terrified that my body is being ripped up by one of my own creatures. "I'm very aware of the relationship I have with my imagination, both consciously and unconsciously. I think that my prime obsession has been the honing and sophisticating and employing of my imagination. It's also a major place for self-explanation, the means by which I understand myself best. "Let's deal with the craft of storytelling. I think the whole purpose to telling a story is to take the audience on a journey which they otherwise wouldn't get to take... Let's go where only the imagination can take us! Some of those places are going to be very dark and dangerous, and yes, they're going to be 'over the edge of the map,' if you like. They are going to be the places where we can confront the forbidden. Some of them are also going to be 'dreamscapes' where we can feel reassured, and where we feel as though we have a glimpse of comprehension rather than of panic. I am as interested in those areas as I ever have been; I'm interested in ecstasy and terror. "I'm particularly interested in the place where one becomes the other. Those two extremes are the twin beacons out there, and I'm most excited when I actually find that I've reached one. Then I want to reach the other." Good Morning America By Charlie Gibson, Good Morning America, 25 January 1990 "I think we all of us have times when we go through times in our lives, passages in our lives, when we have great dreams so when we wake up we feel refreshed and great and we've been on flying journeys, dream journeys that have felt good. And then we go through nightmare times, we go through times when we wake up in a cold sweat at three o'clock in the morning and maybe we're not even quite sure why. I think our subconscious is always telling us stuff and the great thing about fantasy fiction, about horror fiction, is that it allows us the stuff of our subconscious to erupt into book form or into a movie form... "We're not hypocrites in our dreams, we don't hide anything from ourselves in our dreams. If we can touch them, if we can interpret them - and the interpretation of dreams is one of the oldest skills known to man, there's always been people out there who've been trying to make sense, long before Freud, long before psychoanalysis, there have been people - shamans - in tribes who've made sense of the tribal dream. In a way this kind of fiction now is again making sense of the tribal dream - taking what's working in our subconsciouses, in our culture, and trying to make sense of it." Deliciously Terrifying By Martin Booe, USA Weekend, 26-28 January 1990 "I'm not writing horror to reassure people that the status quo is right on. A lot of horror is written to reassure people the values they bring to the book are fundamentally correct. For instance, that goodness will prevail. To me, the great glory of horror fiction is to sell us on a vision, not of the way the world is, but the way the world might be. I don't think of myself as a horror writer. The term is reductive. I'm a writer of dark fantasy." Hot Writer Barker Tones Down Gore By Henry Mietkiewicz, The Toronto Star, 30 January 1990 "I'm like a comedian who has already told a whole bunch of jokes and doesn't want to tell them again. It's an interesting thing, though, about my earlier fiction, because there are an awful lot of writers out there who spend more time than I do describing the way cartilage grinds against bone. But I'm the one with the reputation. I suppose it's because I called my first stories The Books Of Blood, which was fairly up-front. And even though my fiction doesn't deal, for the most part, with the minutiae of physical disintegration, it does tend to make those experiences very intense for the reader. Still, being known for gore is not really a problem. After all, my future books will certainly have their share of chills, scares and stuff that goes bump in the day. It's just that the emphasis will be different. "I don't even think I'm writing horror fiction any more, it's what you could call fabulist fiction - fiction of the imagination. I say 'fabulist', because it isn't exactly fantasy, which conjures up images of The Lord Of The Rings. 'Fabulist' is a term my publisher chose, and I quite like it. It's not a term that most book buyers would be familiar with, but that's okay. If we use it often enough, it'll become common parlance." Horror's New King By Bettijane Levine, Los Angeles Times - View Section, 31 January 1990 "People ask me, 'How can you love a scorpion?' Well a scorpion is a fabulous, wonderful, totally alien thing. What's important is to celebrate the whole world, the whole thing. We live in this wonderful, imaginative environment, often sealing ourselves off from it in little cells of homogenised life. I like people to look at the real world and see how strange it really is. A pet dog, for example, is very strange. He's another entire species who has chosen to be with you, chosen this very primal liason that goes back to the caveman. I tell people, 'You have a tame descendant of a wolf living in your house, with its own thoughts and its own views and yet there's this wonderful unification with that strange thing.'" Future Shockers By Maitland McDonagh, Film Comment, Vol 26, No 1, Jan-Feb 1990 "I never understood the thing with Pinhead. Truly, from the bottom of my heart, I never expected the stuff on the sneak preview cards: 'The guy with the pins in his face is real sexy'. 'Love the dude with the pins in his face'. I intended the Cenobites to be elegant, strange but sexy?" The Pat Sajak Show Transcript of a TV appearance on The Pat Sajak Show, [February] 1990 "We fear the same things: we fear getting old; we fear losing our sanity; we fear losing our loved ones. You know, those are fairly solid things. But I think there's another thing that goes on which I think is real important - particularly for somebody like me who makes this kind of thing - that we actually enjoy getting scared as well. There's a real ambiguity here, a little part of us says, 'No, no, no. I don't want to see that, I don't want to see this movie' - I've tested Nightbreed with audiences who watch it like this… And there's a real ambiguity there and I love that as I, as a maker of these things, get great pleasure, great pleasure, out of scaring people and them coming out of it shaking and saying, 'I had a great time.' " Creature Comforter : Clive Barker By [ ], MTV to go, February 1990 "Psychoanalysts will always drive you off the edge, won't they? I think that's their function in life. [The antagonism in Decker's role] is significant only in the sense that I think you have to be pushed to the edge to accept certain things. And Boone, who has sort of held on to his sense of the world, his sense of what is real, discovers that something else is real as well. Not that what went on before wasn't real, but the reality was wider and larger and more extraordinary than he'd ever thought. And I think that's one of the things which informs a lot of fantastique fiction - the idea that the world is not only stranger than we know, but stranger than we can know." Clive Barker Shuns Labels, But He Does Admit To Weird By Jeff Strickler, Star-Tribune Newspaper of the Twin Cities, 7 February 1990 "Everything I do can be generally classified under the description of weird. The description of weird is all-encompassing. It fits both me and this place inside of me, some dream place... "I'm back in my childhood, back in a state of adventure where anything can happen: 'We're not in Kansas anymore, Toto.' A kid's mind works like this all the time. The world is soft, it can be pulled and remade any way you want. But as we grow older, we're taught that facts are solid. One of the interesting things about higher physics is that now they're discovering that everything is soft again. The children and the poets were right." A Man And His Monsters By Linnea Lannon, The Detroit Free Press, 7 February 1990 "Would you go and see a movie about the guy who finished off Dracula? No. You'd go see a movie about Dracula. Yes, we kill Dracula at the end of each movie but we always bring him back. We characterise monsters as these things we kind of like - the forbidden part of us likes. Would I prefer to be the guy who can attract virgins from across a crowded room just by moving his eyes, lives forever, and turns into a wolf? Yes, yes, yes! I think I want that!" Breeding Ground By [ ], Fantasy Zone, No 6, March 1990 "I've always loved the demons. I've always loved the vampires. I've always loved the dark side. I want to celebrate the weird." Nightbreed By Bob Morrish, Cinefantastique, Vol 20, No 4, March 1990 "We felt there were some characters audiences were going to like quite a lot, but as things developed, we killed off one of those characters and then thought, 'that may not be such a clever idea,' so we decided to resurrect him. I love movies, you can just resurrect people, just like that." Brit Clive Barker Masters Horror In Movies, Books By Gene Mierzejewski, Chicago Sun-Times, 1 March 1990 "Fantasy literature addresses the paradoxes and ambiguities that have shaped mankind. It's a genre that is looked down on, but it can tackle serious subjects in an entertaining fashion." Barker's Demons A Blessing To Genre By Bob Strauss, Los Angeles Daily News, 2 March 1990 "I love the fantastic on screen and there are some things you can do uniquely on screen. King Kong, the book, would not be of interest to me. I honestly think that The Wizard of Oz is a better movie than it is a book. A movie is very presentational. There are lots of things that are almost fascistic about the filmgoing experience: It sits you down, slaps your face and tells you, 'There it is.' There are liabilities to any kind of art form that demands the kind of control over you. "But Fay Wray picked up by King Kong is a wonderful experience. So is the Yellow Brick Road, and Karloff's first appearance as the monster and the unveiling of Elsa Lanchester (as his bride). The wonderful thing about putting wonderment on screen is that you can say: 'Here it is, guys. Here are these strange, extraordinary sights.'" Fast Track Q&A By Cheryl Lavin, Chicago Tribune, 4 March 1990 "As human beings, it's our lot to be frail. We're at risk both mentally and physically. Our sanity is always teetering on the edge of some abyss or another. At least mine is. And physically, we know we bleed and bruise easily. We're born into a state of fear. The fiction of fear addresses that anxiety in a safe environment. It allows us to confront those things that scare us and to play out such questions as, 'What would happen if?' I think that's a very important process, therapeutic, even." Secret Show Marvelously Complex By Mark Graham, Rocky Mountain News - magazine, 11 March 1990 [re. shift away from horror] "A comedian who does the same shtick show after show, year after year, might get some laughs and even make a lot of money, but he would bore himself." The Inventor Of Techno-Dante By Philip Nutman, Toxic Horror, No 3, April 1990 "There is a large, sweeping religious imagery in my work. And that's true of a lot of horror. One of the principal components of this sort of material is the conflict between the holy and the unholy, the sacred and the profane. That kind of imagery wanders through the classics like Frankenstein and Dracula. These are books that deal very much with the holy and the unholy, with what is God's work and what is the Devil's work. I think it's always been there in the genre. Only lately this has stopped being true - because people don't believe in these religious icons anymore. Now we have movies where the vampire can reach out and grab the cross and not be burned by it. This was true in Fright Night. A movie based on one of my stories, Rawhead Rex, has a priest devoured by a creature who is completely unimpressed by the Christian iconography. I think that reflects a new audience cynicism concerning religious matters. The days are gone when the Van Helsing character can pull out some holy water or a crucifix and the force of evil will automatically retreat... Now the trick is to make the religious aspects fresh for an audience that is often reluctant to deal with it. In Hellraiser, for example, the Cenobites form a weird sort of priesthood. At least, that's how they come across. They have their rituals, they have their rites, they have their bag of tricks. Pinhead comes across like the High Priest of pain. Theirs is a perverse religion, but nonetheless a religion." Clive Barker - Lord Of The Breed By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 91, April 1990 (Note : interview took place in June 1989) "One should be wary of pretension. I don't want people to see me as some form of higher literary life. My primary concern is to tell a good story and I'm just responding to the world around me and what flows through my subconscious onto the page or screen. My passion for classical literature is no stronger than my passion for B movie, film noir, AIP exploitation movies, Hammer Gothics or Disney films." Nightbreed - The Reshoot By Philip Nutman, (i) Fangoria, No 91, April 1990 (ii) Bloody Best Of Fangoria, No 9, 1991 "The conclusion reached at the focus sessions after the test screenings was that this is a wildly original, highly disturbing film, the like of which has not been seen before. The main problem was that initially we were not realistic about the budget." In Search Of A Great And Secret Place To Relax By Ruben Sosa Villegas, The Blood Review, Vol 1 No 3, April 1990 "I have never been reviewed well. I don't make tidy, easily-understood work in any medium. You have to have rhinocerous skin... Reviewers go into horror movies pre-disposed to dislike them. Reviewers will see the different angle and are twice-disposed to dislike it. Reviewers that like it, get it. Nightbreed is a new, different kind of movie, less visceral. It has a fantastical premise. Hellraiser - three years later - there are some reviewers who were against it who now admit it was a benchmark movie..." Cheap Chills By Maralyn Lois Polak, Philadephia Inquirer Magazine, 15 April 1990 "Ah, really frightened? Well, I was a Caesarean birth, and I struggled for 24 hours to get out. I think probably then [was the first time I was frightened]. I don't have a conscious memory of that, but I'm absolutely certain I have a subconscious one. And my mother almost died, and I almost died, so I think under certain forms of therapy I'd probably rediscover that experience. I don't particularly want to. I might even be writing something out of it." Horror's Hardcore Hero By W.C. Stroby, Asbury Park Press, 15 April 1990 "The Great and Secret Show is complete unto itself. The book is a complete arc; it [The Art]’s much more a series than a serial. I haven't left Pearl White tied to the tracks. So I feel like it’ll probably be the book after next that I'll go back to it. My feeling is the mythologies will be there, I’ll return to them at some point. Now there are new obsessions coming to the fore... "I feel like I've done a lot of stuff in a short time. There's been a lot of preoccupations which have been explored and developed. But I'm having a good time. This last year of work has had wonderful things in it, it's been an embarrassment of riches... "This year should be a little bit more sedate. I'm fairly itching to get at the new book [Imajica]. So I'll go back to London in the drizzle and be quite happy." Mini-Interview: Clive Barker By Glen Leon, Lights Out! The Robert R. McCammon Newsletter, Vol 1 No 4, May 1990 (Note: partial transcript of a Q&A by Barker in Vancouver, 8 February 1990) "I never listen to music when I'm writing; I think it actually changes the rhythm of what I'm writing. I think my style speeds up when I play the samba. That may seem like nonsense, but I genuinely think that's the case. In the last year I've been making a movie, so I've been playing a lot of movie music, but I will play just about anything else, and I do have a passion for the great singers. I love songs. I'm an incredible sentimentalist - it's painful sometimes!" Click here for More 1990 Interviews More 1990 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.