Interviews 1992 (Part Two)

Clive Barker By Kevin Proulx, Fear To The World, Studies In Literary Criticism #35, Starmont House, August 1992 (note: interview undertaken in 1989) "Imaginative fiction is very often delving into the business of good and evil, angels, demons, the idea of heaven and hell. I think that, all the time, one is using the vocabulary of theology. The theologians would probably be appalled that it's being used thus, but so be it. It's a fiction about transformation, about transgression; maybe even about salvation. Those are the terms that would be as likely to come from the lips of a priest as a writer... "I suspect that if I live a full three-score years and ten, I may not like the idea of continuing into the everlasting, you know, locked in myself. I'd rather throw my little sum of information into the bigger sea and embrace, in my terms, the information and ideas which other people have gained over their lives. I wouldn't like the idea of continuing on forever just as Clive Barker." The Interview from Hell By Christian Gore, Film Threat, Volume 2, Issue 5, August 1992 "There's always been that sexual thing going on - subtextually, or in the first picture, textually. There is a much larger sexual quality to this one [Hellraiser III]. You go into cutting, blood-letting and orgasm here... In the six years since the first picture was made, ordinary sex is actually lethal sex. S&M is actually safe sex for everyone." Horror In The Southland Report on Horror Writers Of America convention 1992 by Sheldon Teitelbaum, Midnight Graffitti, No 7, Fall 1992 "I've always said if there is a thing to see, let's see it. The best lovemaking is not in a darkened room, the best fantasy does not occur in the mist. The best writers of the fantastique say this is the mystery plainly, this is the way the mystery looks, this is its face, the number of eyes its got, the way it smells. I've shown you this, be aware that the mystery is not the way it looks but what the thing is. The point of anxiety for me is that horror fiction is increasingly divided from its underlying metaphysics. And no new metaphysics has come to replace it. The old solutions, which are basically Catholic solutions, or certainly Judeo-Christian solutions, are still dragged in kicking and screaming to solve a narrative. But those very solutions are in doubt as to their efficacy in the real world, not just among the writers but among the readers too. There is a real issue here about what, if anything, this stuff really means." Hellraiser III - Electronic Press Kit By [ ], 4 September 1992 "Well, you know in the first movie we saw Pinhead as a force, a demon raised from hell because of the solving of a puzzle-box. In the second movie we discovered something about the man that he had been before he had become Pinhead; the human being who had done the deal with the Devil and become this soul-gathering monster as a consequence. At the end of that movie the two halves of Pinhead - the human half and the monster that he had become - were driven apart and as our third picture begins, the husk of Pinhead, the thing which is the monster, which has no moral qualms whatsoever any longer, is free on the earth, and that's a fairly terrifying thought... "In the third picture, we're actually creating not one, but a whole host of Cenobites there - we've got a whole slew of creatures and that's sort of fun because it means that the audience is gonna have the central image, the central device of Pinhead there to give them pleasure - and a little pain, of course - but they're also going to have a new army, a sort of 'dirty half-dozen' of Cenobites to surprise them." Pinhead Revisited By Phantom of the movies, New York Daily News, 10 September 1992 "Freddy managed to be scary and funny at the same time but there's no way Pinhead can get away with that. He's got a couple of lines that are Oscar Wilde-styled witticisms, if you like, but basically Pinhead takes himself very seriously. I take him very seriously." The Man And The Myth By Joe Leydon, Houston Post, 10 September 1992 "We're able to explore another rich vein of horror mythology here, and that's the sort of Jekyll and Hyde element that's usually embodied in a single figure. Here, we've got the two elements separated. And I think the climax of having the monster face to face with his alter ego - with the creature that's almost a man, who evoked him in the first place - is a pretty neat idea. And one I think that the audience welcomes... "What's interesting about Pinhead as a character - as distinct from Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers or Freddy Kreuger - is that he has an agenda which is pseudo-metaphysical. He's much more interested in the souls of the individuals, and how he can transmute them by his machinations, than he is in the simple business of slaughter. "Of course, there is slaughter on the way to achieving his infernal ambitions but the interesting thing is that there's a lot of talk of souls. There's a lot of talk of damnation. And judgement. "It seems to me that one of the things that people go to horror movies for is to see that judgement in action. It's a very primal satisfaction that's being offered up here. It's the satisfaction of seeing people judged for their wrongdoing. It just so happens that the judge, the jury and the executioner are all embodied in that same individual - Pinhead." From The Mind Of Clive Barker By Nicole Peradotto, Buffalo News, 11 September 1992 "Over and over, it's the confrontations with the great villains in books like Treasure Island, Pinocchio and The Wizard Of Oz that, when you're a kid, give you a delicious combination of fear and pleasure. I'm not the only child I know who liked the 'Night On Bald Mountain' sequence in Fantasia. It's no accident there are as many dark passages as there are bright in Disney films, and it's no accident that those dark passages are the ones you remember. "Thief is intended for my fans, but it's also a book that will be accessible to 10 year-olds, particularly if they're little 10 year-olds like I was. Twisted." Of Hell And Hollywood By Ken Berg, (i) Orlando Sentinel, 11 September 1992, (ii) as 'Barker Keeping A Tighter Rein On Projects', Las Vegas Review-Journal, 12 September 1992, (iii) as 'A Bit Of Hell For Hollywood' [Knight Ridder], 1992 [After Nightbreed] "I've learned a lot about not being a passive film-maker, about not leaving decisions in the hands of people who maybe have another dozen movies to sell. Your baby is your baby and you have to take responsibility for it all the way along the line until it has met its audience and it's out on video." Creator of 'Pinhead' Believes Imagination Is Key To Success By Paul Jarvey, Telegram & Gazette Worcester, 11 September 1992 "I want to put my fingers in as many pies as possible. I've only got three score years and ten, I want to spread my imagination as wide as possible. My growing fascination with fantasy and children's fiction offers all kinds of new possibilities. I'm in my 40th year, and I think my brain is busier than it has ever been. I want to write historic fiction. I don't think you can expect any romances from Clive Barker. Beyond that, I feel as though the most an artist can ever do, whether you are writing or painting or making movies, is to chase your imagination. It's always a step ahead of you. My logical faculties are sluggish compared to my imaginative faculties. My imagination is telling me, 'hey, this is something we should be looking at.' I [chew] it over. Then and only then does sweet reason come in and tell me why I should be particularly interested in this area.." Clive Barker And The Horror Of It All By Richard Harrington, The Washington Post, 11 September 1992 "All of us have these thoughts floating around, some of which will be defined as fantasy. That's the experience of consciousness, this shifting morass of thoughts: 'Have I got enough food in the fridge?'...'When do I pay my taxes?'...'Boy, would I like to kill my boss.'...'Boy, would I like to make love to my secretary.' "Then there's the wilder fantasy: 'Boy, would I like to fly to the stars.'...'What's it like on the dark side of the moon?' You also enjoy those sorts of thoughts. Even people who describe themselves as very prosaic can entertain those thoughts in the downtime that they're thinking about the tax return and the mortgage. It's always going on, it's part of the texture of our thoughts... "We live on lots of levels. Just as our minds are this shifting collection of ideas, so we live on the level of trivial moment-to-moment necessities: 'I'm thirsty, I have to get a drink of water.'...'I'm hungry, I have to eat.' And as we go down, it isn't a level of descending values, it's a level of ascending importance as we slip into the unconscious towards those primal things - 'Why am I here?'...'What is the eternal part of me?'...'Do I have the capacity to perform magic?'...'Am I a good person or a bad person?'...'Will I be damned?'...'Why am I out of it?' All those things are very fundamental questions... And those things seem to me to be awash with very primal substances. It's the stuff of dream seas and blood and birth and corruption and pure, white light and profound darkness. In other words the visual imagery which is the stuff of the deepest descent - those things have always been preoccupations with me... like my nerves were stripped to those things." Hellraiser III Mixes Humor With Horror By Cindy Pearlman, Chicago Sun-Times, 13 September 1992 "When you come out of Hellraiser III, you'll have a smile on your face, since the horror is funny. Coming out of Candyman, you'll need a stiff drink." To Hell And Back By John Wooley, Tulsa World, 13 September 1992 "It's kind of interesting - the first one was Chekhov, wasn't it? It was the family drama, played as a monster movie. The second was the 'madhouse' movie, and then it moved into hell. The third one is urban. Again, if you've got a mythology, there are always new ways to explore, new routes to explore. "There are three Hellraiser movies now, enough for a Hellraiser all-nighter, and if you watch all three movies, if you put them all side-by-side, there'll be no repetition, which is very important. If you put all the Friday the 13th pictures side-by-side, it would become incredibly boring. Like halfway through the third picture, you'd say, 'Enough already.' Actually, I'd say it rather earlier. I think in time you'd get bored with the Freddys too. "The nice thing about seeing the Hellraiser movies side-by-side is that there's some sense of progress, some sense of a narrative line that links them. Though they're completely different in style, all three will play very well together, I think." Pinup Boy By Michele Romero, Entertainment Weekly, 18 September 1992 [On Pinhead not having a singing role in the Motorhead Hellraiser video...] "I wouldn't want to hear this character's voice." Sharpening His Pencils And His Pins By Jane Sumner, The Dallas Morning News, 19 September 1992 "People raise their eyebrows that Clive Barker's writing children's fiction, but many of the things which led me to dark fantasies were seeds sown when I was very small. You look at Disney movies. There's a large slice of darkness in the middle of those movies. The things that made impressions upon me when I was a kid were the dragon from Sleeping Beauty or The Night on Bald Mountain sequence from Fantasia. They completely etched themselves in my imagination in a way that the good fairy never did. It's true for a lot of kids. If you ask kids what they remember, it's not the three pastoral fairies. It's the dragon; it's the force of darkness. "I've grown to adulthood, so now it's the Candyman stalking the ghettos of Cabrini Green or it's Pinhead, the lead demon from the Hellraiser movies, on the streets of New York. But the essence, the inspirational point, remains the same, if you don't have fun with it, you shouldn't be doing it." Hooked On Horror By Hal Lipper, St Petersburg Times, 22 September 1992 "I have always been fascinated by sadomasochistic imagery and the ambiguity we feel toward the pain-pleasure threshold. [In Hellraiser III] the bondage elements are back, those elements come up in my books all the time. But sadomasochism and self-inflicted wounds and any sense that it might be pleasurable really pushes the wrong buttons as far as the film ratings board is concerned. "The function of horror movies is to create interesting, disturbing, bizarre, occasionally scary images. It isn't to provide cheap laughs at the expense of the monster. In the case of Hellraiser III, I offer my imagination in terms of honing or adding a touch of perversity, and to preserve Pinhead from any trace of self-parody." Barker, More Than Just A 'Hellraiser' By Tom Green, USA Today: Life, 24 September 1992 "The big man [Stephen King] goes his way, a force of nature. I'm never going to sell as many books as this guy. I'm too weird. I don't write about small-town America. I write edgy stuff with a lot of weird sexuality and strange political angles. Nobody's going to pick up Imajica in the airport and say, 'Oh, this'll be fun on my trip to Barcelona.' " Horror Films Keep Creativity Alive By Michael H. Price, St Petersburg Times, 30 September 1992 "While the market for horror has been weakened in recent years by bad video, still the fans remain loyal to the films that deliver the goods for them. Our Hellraiser pictures have been among those that deliver, and even if they don't break out to mass-audience acceptance, still they are being seen - and widely so - by people who make considerabledemands in terms of quality." The Politics Of Hell By Alan Jones, Cinefantastique, Vol 23 No 2/3, October 1992 "All monsters totter off into the the night on their own at some stage. Now it's happened to one of mine. Quite honestly, I'm not too concerned. It doesn't seem such a terrible thing to have happened. Peter [Atkins]'s script is spicy, contains some wonderful thrills and goes like a locomotive. Hellraiser III recalls the original's black perversity yet has been written on an extensive, intriguing canvas. Peter's grasp on what makes the myth work is very strong and I really have no cause for complaint." The Devil's "Candy" Editorial by Anthony Timpone, Fangoria, No 117, October 1992 "It would be interesting if someone put Hellraiser III and Candyman on a double bill. Both films came from the same mind, but they are completely different. There's room for both approaches, don't you think?" Candyman : A Nightmare Sweet By Daniel Schweiger, Fangoria, No 117, October 1992 "Candyman is less florid and baroque than Hellraiser. You don't have to believe in Lament Configurations to enter its world. Bernard has made something that's less supernatural and broader in its appeal. Though Candyman will be coming out at the same time as Hellraiser III, the two films couldn't be more different. Candyman is a new style of Barker, and it's going to be the scariest film of the year." Clive Barker By Anthony C. Ferrante, Pulse!, No 109, October 1992 "When people had me fixed as a horror writer, I gave up horror and turned to fantasy. Now that I'm established in people's heads as a fantasy writer, I'm moving into children's fiction. So I want to continue to move and change and surprise people. Plus, this [The Thief Of Always] is a classic crossover book. For the child it's an adventure about a house that seems to promise everything. To an adult, it's a story about the problems of time and childhood and what you give away in the moments of your youth you could never get again." A Spinner Of (Horrorific) Tales By Robert W. Welkos, Los Angeles Times, 11 October 1992 "When I was a kid, I had all kinds of experiences that have vanished from my memory. People that I should have loved, people I should have felt more for, who are gone. And education that flitted in one ear and out the other. But did Jim Hawkins go away? Did 'Treasure Island' go away? No, they stayed... Something that profoundly touches the imagination carries more weight in your present mental geography than things that actually happen to you. "Let's suppose we are sitting in Ireland in 1901 and Yeats is telling us about fairies and how much a part of his nation's identity and how much a part of his poetic identity they are. Even though [fairies] don't exist and they don't come into a room and have a cup of tea with us, they become a more important part of our world than a whole slew of events that may have occurred during that time." An Honest Dollar's Worth Of Horror By Laurence Chollet, The Record (Bergen County, NJ), 11 October 1992 "I'm very interested in stories, and storytelling - why we tell stories. Storytelling, particularly horror storytelling, is very important in our culture - it's almost like we need the comfort of something terrible happening down the road to give us the feeling that our own lives are not so terrible - we haven't had our throats cut. "Urban myths, legends, are a kind of storytelling, and that's what I was exploring in 'The Forbidden.' It's a story about a woman who goes into this place in a detached way, actually feeling sort of intellectually superior, to debunk the myth - and the myth bites back. It refuses to be compliant." Clive Barker Breathes Life Into The Horror Genre By Stephen Hunter, The Baltimore Sun, 16 October 1992 "My enthusiasm lies in urgently passing the parameters of any thesis - to push the potential as far as it can go. That's the attraction of fantastic writing: to be an exorcise medium for the collective imagination. TV is full of banalities; politics is bankrupt. I want to go into other areas, to examine the roots of our taboos and find out what's there. I believe there are fascinating, vibrant, protean things... "The melting-pot concept has led us astray. I've always been drawn to celebrate what is unique in man, what makes him different from his brothers. I hate it when people try to be what they're not. You have to be what you are." Struck By Frightening By David Kronke, (i) Los Angeles Daily News, 19 October 1992 (ii) The Baltimore Sun, 22 October 1992 (as Clive Barker Explores Life's Darker Side) "The only way to have any effect is to pass yourself off as something else. One of the reasons I'm writing children's fiction and making pop movies is because I don't want to be discounted as one of the elite... I want to be a maker of stories for the people. That means I don't get good reviews from The New York Times, but it does mean I'm getting to people who are at the grass roots of the country. People who see Candyman are people who are not even interested in the [family values] debate that we're having. But they will have something to bring away from the movie to think about. Hopefully, this [Thief of Always] will find its way into nurseries across the country. That satisfies me deeply... "I don't write scary books, I write weird books: you don't read my books and are scared in the way you are by a Stephen King book. Stephen's dynamic is very clever - he takes people we feel very protective of and then puts them in situations of great jeopardy. I take people who are kind of edgy in the first place and then put them in even edgier situations, where they very often find that they're not as unhappy as they think they are. "What in a Stephen King book would be some unspeakable terror, in my book they say, 'Ah. OK.' That's what Helen does in Candyman. She discovers that her other life is far more banal, far more morally dead than the life - or death - that Candyman offers. So her process is away from the warmth of the hearth, or the chill of the hearth, into something much more dangerous and illusive and ambiguous." Grisly Urban Legends Are Clive Barker's Inspiration By Robert W. Welkos, Chicago Sun-Times, 23 October 1992 "The main thing is not to frighten people but to mesmerize them. What was it like to be in Jeffrey Dahmer's apartment? Now, we are disgusted by that. We are morally repulsed, but we are fascinated and we are liars if we don't admit to the fascination. Dahmer is basically a very pitiable character. Candyman...elevates you above the prosaic desires of a lonely man to collect body parts. It has a more elevated agenda. One of the healthiest things about a movie is that there is a total arc to the story. In the case of Candyman, the audience's point of identification, Helen Lyle, is a person with whom we can feel something. She is like us. She is not unnaturally courageous. She is someone we can relate to as an ordinary person." CSN Spotlight: Clive Barker By Cliff Biggers, Comic Shop News, No 279, 28 October 1992 "The Barkerverse postulates the existence of superheroes going back to the dawn of man. I am very keen to cast an intelligent backward glance over what superheroes have been - and indeed, we can ignore the word 'super' and just focus on the word 'hero' for a moment, in the Joseph Campbell sense. "One of the things which has always underpinned my horror and fantasy writings is the sense that the folkloric and fairy tale and mythological origins of this material have their echoes in the stuff that we're all doing now. The image of the vampire in the horror story, the image of the superhero in the superhero comic, they all have very elaborate traditions stretching back to the very beginning of storytelling. The notion of the great lizard, the blood-sucker, the hero who will save us from the blood-sucker and the great lizards - these are actually a part of what we are as a species, I think. I love the fact that a very popular form like comic books can have these echoes of much, much earlier forms of storytelling." Opening The (Puzzle) Box Of Delights By [ ], Comic World, No 9, November 1992 "Morte Mamme was first defeated by Cenobites many, many, many years ago, and has been buried alive. But she sends out waves of power to bring a new series of Harrowers under her control, and through their eyes we will learn a lot more about the way Hell works. "I think part of the problem is that basically, with few exceptions, once a human being gets in the company of a Cenobite that's it. There may be a few twists and turns, but by and large the Devil always wins, so you never get to investigate the mythology very far because you're always feeling with the human perspective, which is very limited. It's a cul-de-sac. Now, finally, we have human beings who are going to enter this world, the world of Hell, and deal with the Cenobites in a significant way. I think that's going to be a very interesting battle because at the same time as serving the desire to make chilling narratives, I think we're also going to allow a kind of weakness and humanity into the narratives." Pulling Away The Veils By Stan Nicholls, (i) Writers' Monthly, Vol 9 No 2, November 1992 (ii) re-edited and slightly extended as A Strange Kind Of Believer, Million, No 13, January - February 1993 (iii) in Wordsmiths Of Wonder by Stan Nicholls, 1993 "The worlds which open up in Imajica, just in terms of their physical scale, not to mention their metaphysical scale, are so much larger than I would have dared attempt even a couple of years ago. My readers, and they number in their hundreds of thousands, are very glad that they have more than the shock tactics to engage them through an 850-page book. And remember, the horror, the darkness, has never gone. Imajica has still got some very dark passages in it. So have The Great And Secret Show and Weaveworld.What's been added is this, hopefully, transcendental level. "What's also been added is a sense of thoroughly created worlds; I mean worlds with names, tribes, flora and fauna, religions, cults and so on. I did hint at dimensions hidden in secret places in the horror fiction, obviously, and a lot of it contains the sense that if you open the wrong door you're going to find yourself lost in another world. The way I'm doing it now, it's not just opening the door but knocking down the whole damn wall and saying, 'Here it all is.' The readership, I think, is very excited by that prospect." Evil Not Just A Fantasy For Horror Master By Chauncey Mabe, South Florida Sun-Sentinel, 15 November 1992 "I believe in this stuff. I believe in magic. I believe that we have an essential divinity and an essential demoniacal quality as human beings. We should not be afraid of these things. "Many of my contemporaries in horror and fantasy fiction don`t believe. They tell damned good stories, but the difference between my work and theirs may be that what comes from me is the conviction that these stories and images are metaphors for real states of mind." Barker Writes On The Wild Side By Michael Blowen, The Boston Globe, 17 November 1992 "I like to stay busy, I was born to work but by working I have fun.. "People are surprised, but the roots of my books and movies are in the dark fantasies of childhood. Disney turned it into an industry. The Thief of Always isn't a children's book in the traditional sense. It's not for kids who are used to tamer books." In The Flesh By Michael Brown, (i) Dread, No 8, 1992 (ii) quoted in Fine Cast Enlivens This Obscure Fable by Julie York Coppens, Charlotte Observer, 12 November 2005 "I am a Jungian, not a Freudian. I believe that the collective unconscious - a pool of shared images and stories which all humanity is heir to - exists, and that the artist dealing in the fantastique is uniquely placed, in that he or she can create stories or paintings which dramatise the eruption of the unconscious into our day to day lives. "I've pointed out many times that we spend one-third of our lives asleep. During the adventure of dreaming, we are making both a private investigation into our hopes and fears and also swimming in the dream pool which we share with the rest of our species. "I hope that the fiction I write will empower us to both comprehend our secret dream and understand the profound intimacy we share with every other human being." A Conversation With Clive Barker By Tyson Blue, Cemetery Dance, Vol 4 No 1, Winter 1992 "I think the problem with commercial fiction is that it's become kind of soulless, in a way. I know that there are a lot of writers writing science fiction, writing horror fiction, writing fantasy fiction, who are writing things they don't even believe. Now I don't mean believe in the sense that I believe Cenobites really exists, I don't. But I do believe that the moral and philosophical underpinnings of my books are things that I would defend in an argument." Clive Barker Transcript of a talk at Kepler's Books, Menlo Park, California, 2 December 1992 "Yesterday, I was in Denver and I went to speak to a class of some fifty students, maybe ranging in ages from 11 through 15, to talk to them about creativity. Basically, they wanted to hear about the movies and books and so on... "I said, what little you know of me, you should know that my imagination is fairly wild and much of what I get, I get from dreams. We started to talk about dreams and all of them started to pour out these angst-ridden tales of dismemberment and drowning and physical transformation - little 11 year olds. And the members of staff who, up until this time, hadn't seen their little charges speak this way, were aghast, their jaws were hanging open hearing it. 'Oh, yeah, sometimes I wake up,' one sweet little girl said, 'I wake up feeling there's this spike all the way through my chest' - don't ask, don't ask, but certainly Freudian - 'all the way through my chest, protruding out a good six inches.' Protruding six inches, imagine! So she had this imagining, very graphic. Something that came up over and over again. "It was interesting, because we all have these things and as kids we all have them buzzing around our heads all the time and finding ways to articulate them is difficult." Sweet Talking Guy By Simon Bacal, Shivers, No 4, December 1992 "When Bernard [Rose] came to me with thoughts, observations and anxieties, I always tried to give him the benefit of my opinion. I felt it important to be very supportive towards Bernard. I wanted him to feel the film reflected his own true vision, not mine. But during the test preview process, there was some question as to how the film ['Candyman'] should end. While I don't feel audiences' wishes should be accomodated too much, I encouraged Bernard to put back the original ending he'd written. And now it works very well indeed." The Heights And Depths Of Hellraiser By Douglas E Winter, (i) Fangoria, No 119, December 1992 (ii) Fangoria : Masters of the Dark "I hadn't shot an inch of celluloid and no-one was going to throw a large-scale budget at me - and I didn't want one. I mean, If I am going to screw up, I want to screw up on a low budget!" Professional Imaginer Clive Barker's Eclectic Talents Defy Pigeonholing By John Marshall, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, 8 December 1992 "Best-sellerdom is dominated by repetition; to be a brand-name author, you do what you did before with a minimum of change, but in my books, I like to prove I can fly off in different directions. My imagination leads me to do what makes sense to it. My imagination is my polestar; I steer by that. "I'm not the Stephen King of the '90s - that's not what I am; I'm not the future of horror, either. I'm Clive Barker, a guy who's imagination flies off in different directions. I'm a professional imaginer, with work that ranges from very visceral, down-and-dirty horror to erotic material to fables to stuff about angels. If that seems like an eclectic bunch of things to have done, it all comes from the same space in my brain. I see myself as someone who speaks out of his imagination and trusts it... "I would hope my work isn't harmless fun; I would be very disappointed if people considered it that. I take this very seriously. This is metaphor, an examination of what's dissolved in the subconscious, which is then reconfigured in various ways by every reader. This is part of the tradition of fantastique, work with a layered quality, meaning different things to different people. It is work with resonance." L A Gore By Paul Mungo, GQ, December 1992 "My major bad habit is work. I've always got five projects going." This Man Will Give You The Creeps By Christie Hickman, Midweek, 10 December 1992 "The imagination that delivers you into the dark places is the same mechanism that delivers you into fairyland. Many images in kids' books are very dark and surreal and disturbing, and those were always the images that I and my friends took pleasure in when we were young. I think children love taboo; the stuff just behind the veil. If you go to a Disney movie, there is always some darkness. The point is that there should be triumph over the darkness... "One of the wonderful things about the fantastique is that every possibility should be addressed and celebrated. It should be a genre that opens every door, when so often it is a genre which concerns itself with closing doors completely. If fantasy is to come of age, and I believe that it is still finding new forms, then it has to say: 'What does the adult imagination do when it is blocked in every way by the mortgage and the tax return and the whole business of nine-to-five? How can the imagination fly? And how does the fantasy, having taken you for the flight, deliver you back into that blocked place when you're eager to find ways out?' At its best, it seems to me that fantasy is confrontation and explanation and exploration, not escape, because it offers parables for being, not ways to sort of erase yourself. "It's impossible for me to speak of what I do without straying into metaphysics, because it's why I do what I do. I think escapism is the denial of reality. In a different way to Stephen Hawking but in a parallel way, I'm doing what he's doing with the mathematics of my imagination what he's doing with the mathematics of equations and higher physics. That's saying: 'We know so little, but the doors are open on every side and we don't even see them'. Imagination, you know, is eternal delight." The Road To Hell By Dave Hughes, State, Issue 3 Vol 1, December 1992 - January 1993 "[My involvement in Candyman] was that of a very present executive producer, and somebody who developed the material with Bernard so that it made cinematic sense. So it's a picture I feel particularly wedded to because I was there from word one. I'm certainly not passive about movies. If I'm there at the dailies, I have views and I voice them. But I also think it's very important, having been beaten up by producers in my own time, to let the director do what he wants to do, because that's who you've hired." Lock Up The Kids - Horror Titan Clive Barker Unleashes A Children's Fable By Sean Piccoli, The Washington Times, 16 December 1992 "For the 10-year-old who reads Thief of Always, it is, I think, an adventure primarily. It is about a child who has time stolen from him and revenges himself royally upon the power that steals from him. "I would defend to the death the moral care with which Thief of Always has been written. This is not a casually anarchic book. It's a book... the author of which believes totally in the underlying morality of the fiction... "Once you become an adult, it becomes your responsibility... to stop children fudging the line between fantasy and reality... to remind them that life is about the hard realities of the tax return and the mortgage, when in actual fact we know in our hearts that the tax return and the mortgage will turn to dust just the same way we will, but that the life of our soul, the dream life of our soul, is accessed to - the eternal." 1993 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.