Interviews 1993 (Part One)
...Having been called in to spice up the action in Hellraiser III, Barker had finally found himself entangled, yet again, in the Hellraiser franchise. Perhaps on a post-Imajica high he gave freely (well, generously at least) of his advice, engendering scenes of greater carnage as he went. Barker's concentration was, however, focussed on greater things - the second book of The Art. Whilst completing Everville, the story of Pidgen & Theresa was published in the UK, and thoughts might also have been turned towards another short story involving themes close to his heart - Animal Life. To say nothing of the task of inventing the Decamundi - ten 'dimension worlds' at the centre of which the Earth was to occupy a precarious position...
The Art Of Clive Barker
By Fred Burke, Illustrator II - The Art of Clive Barker, 1993
"You know, they say everything is political. Well, I think everything is really metaphysical. It's firmly my belief that you can't deal with anything in your day, whether it be your intercourse with yourfriends or meetings with your lovers or the way you handle your business life, without there being subtextually, maybe even subconsciously, some reference to a belief system that allows or pressures you to behave in a certain kind of way. If you're a Catholic and feel that you can do a bunch of things and then go apologise for them and all will be well, then that metaphysical system - hypocritical, ridiculous as it is - is nevertheless part of the texture of your life. Even the absence of a metaphysical system - that is to say, the disenfranchised youth who doesn't have anything to believe in and guns down his friends on a Monday morning - the very absence of metaphysics in his life is proof of the necessity of it. I firmly believe that one of the reasons that people are brought to my pictures and to my books is not because of the thrills and the sex, though that's kind of fun, but because - I get this out of letters I receive from people - but because there is some reference to a larger schematic in these things. These pieces attempt to be about what life is for. And that is a vocabulary which, regrettably, most educators are scared of, most parents are scared of." A Tribute To The Hellraiser Series
By Anthony C Ferrante and Rod L Reed, The Dead Beat 3, 1993
"I'd never made a movie before. In fact, a week before we made the movie I thought, 'You know , I really should find out about this...' and I went to the library to find a book on directing. And they were all out! It was really embarrassing. So I called up my producer and said, 'Where can I get a book on directing?'
"I'd directed in theatre before but I'd only ever been on a film set once before, so I sort of arrived on the Hellraiser set the first day of principal photography only having been on a film set once before and it was like, well, you're really going to have to fake it this time, guy, you know? Talk about faking orgasms - what about faking directing a film? There are those that will say the evidence is there on screen!" Imaginer : Clive Barker
By Mark Lucas, (i) Comics Interview, No 127, 1993 (ii) quotes used in Hot Tips From Top Comics Creators, edited Don Markstein, 1994
"All of the [Razorline comics] are character-based. A lot of it boils down to who these
characters are, what they do, why they do what they do. We have to look at them case-by-case. I have to say that, as an overview, the characters tend to be extremely ambiguous about their roles, unlike the new tradition of muffled, gun-toting, vengeful, over-muscled heroes who are out there. We all know who we're talking about, not actually by and large from Marvel. These characters, I think, have more rounded personalities. They are not on the page simply to kick butt with a witticism and then go and kick another butt, which I find, frankly, very boring. I was drawn into comics by character. I was drawn into comics because I liked at the age of ten to be in the company of the Fantastic Four. Sure, Ben Grimm was capable of witticisms while he was kicking Skrull ass, but the sense that these were rounded characters - as rounded as comic-book characters can ever be - was the appeal of it, the fact that these were characters who were moving from our dimension into other dimensions, seeing wonders and expanding our and their imaginations, was far more appealing than the fight scenes. I find a lot of the current crop of superhero titles repetitively violent. It's very obvious from my work in every medium that I'm not against violence. It has its place. But if that's all that's going on, if a comic is a 22-page fight, then I'm outta there. I'm just not interested. I want to have ideas thrown at me. I want to have my imagination stimulated. I want there to be some strange poetry in what's going on. These things are not beyond comic books, as a number of great writers out there at the moment are proving. I just feel that they tend to be proving it in non-superhero areas. And I love superheroes. I'm trying to bring some of that to the game." Raising Hell - Talking Tattoos With Clive Barker
By Michael Brown, Celebrity Tattoos, No 1, 1993
"I have seen some really extraordinary tattoos based on my work, some wonderful Pinheads and boxes. One of the things about the Pinhead is that he is kind of iconographic. There is something just so rigorous about the image of the Pinhead. I've even seen some tattoos of the cover of the Books of Blood rendered beautifully. There is something very primal about that. It's fascinating because it's such a commitment to those images. How much more committed can you get than to have something permanently inscribed into your skin?
"I've been working on the design for a long time. I want to get it right. But within the next year I will end up with a tattoo... probably a demon!" The Immitable Clive Barker
By Angela Wingard, From Hell & Beyond, 1993 (note : full text online at the Demoriam site - see links)
"I think what we should start with is a sort of statement of intent, if you'd like. This last year has seen me do something which the readers of the "Books of Blood" think would not have thought me likely to do; that is produce an illustrated book which would work for ten-year olds. And there has been a very mixed response to that. I mean there's been a lot of people who have said, "This is very cool, this is great that your imagination is spreading in this other direction" and there's been a lot of people, a certain number of people who have said "Why is there no flayed flesh, you know, where is the multiple orgasm scene...?" Clive Barker
By Robert Neilson and Des Doyle, Albedo One, No 3, 1993
"I did the calculations for Buddy [Vance, in The Great and Secret Show]. He worked out how much time he spent sleeping and shaving. It seems like we're an entropic system and it steadily works its way down into nothingness and we've got to fight really hard to hold on to purpose, to meaning. I feel the battle is against meaninglessness, purposelessness. The only way I know how to fight is by making work - by writing stories, by painting pictures, by making movies, by occupying myself in such a way that the void doesn't yawn quite so darkly or grimly as if I was sitting on my own. I hate being ill and being reduced to being static. I hate sitting in front of the TV and being uninvolved with what's going on. I hate waiting in airports - everybody hates waiting in airports - but we also invite into our lives the mundane because it's comfortable, it's safe, it's strangely calming, the rhythm of something being repeated. And it sickens me. And yet I will seem to have for an extended period an incredibly mundane life. When I wrote Imajica I wrote six days a week for sixteen months. What could be more boring than going to the desk every morning and writing three thousand words? And yet the internal adventure was so full of turmoil and tumult and romance and excess that it seemed to me to be a magic carpet ride."Writers Dreaming : Clive Barker
By Naomi Epel, Writers Dreaming, 1993
"I think the fear of insanity touches everybody who works in the imaginative arts, who is really plunging deeply into themselves. We're like people with one foot nailed to the floor. It hurts hugely to pull away from it. And actually, because we're born with a foot nailed to the floor, we're terribly afraid that if we pull too hard we'll either fall over or float away. And who's to say that isn't the case? I think there are dangers involved. Absolutely. Danger that if you pull too hard you will indeed float away and the bedrock of reality, which we have been brought up to believe is the only reality, will no longer be valid, and we'll just be crazies.
"There's a balance that has to be absolutely struck, and that's a tough one. I think it's important to confess the fear, confess the anxiety, which I absolutely have - that if I ever let my imagination take over completely I would simply not be a rational individual any longer. That one of the things I value most in all the world, the communication of my vision to other people, would no longer be plausible because I'd be speaking gibberish…
"There's a lot of flotsam and jetsam floating around in the dream pool and it's a question of actually trying to make and shape the material which is most potent. So what I'm trying to do and which is keeping me - I was going to say sane, and that may not be too far from the truth - is finding the stuff which is genuinely useful to genuinely articulate something. Making sure the shapes that these images take have a narrative function, have a psychological function. And not simply indulging. I've never had a passion for abstract expressionist painting because; well okay so the paint goes all over everything, so what? What's important is that the colours be made to serve the shape and the purpose. Because art is about communication." A Piece Of My Mind: A Conversation With Clive Barker
By Marty Grosser, (i) Previews, Volume 3 No 1, January 1993 (ii) briefly excerpted as Zombies Invade Europe in Scream Queens Illustrated, Vol 1 No 1, Summer 1994
"Ocassionally I'll do short stories. But to be honest with you, the ideas which have tickled the base of my skull over the past few years have been rather large ideas, and I've always had the idea that the first - and perhaps most important - decision that you make is what form an idea should take. Is this a short story? Is
this a novella? Is this a 500-page novel? Is this an 800-page novel? Is this a movie? Is this a comic book? Or, is it all of those? I'm constantly trying to find places for ideas, and the ideas I've been having of late have been rather large ideas. I mean, Imajica is definitely not a short story to me. If and when those ideas come visiting again, then that'll be the form I'll get 'em down in. But I don't sit down and say, 'Boy, it's time to write an 800-page novel.' The ideas precede everything - they're the impetus. If you're sitting down for many months to write a book then, boy, you'd better be in love with the idea." David Letterman Show
Transcript of an appearance on the David Letterman Show, 7 January 1993
"A little while ago I was at Sunday lunch in England and a pathologist, a mortician, said to me, 'Do you want to come to an autopsy?' and I said, 'Yes - you know, this is my job, I have to go...' You learn extraordinary things. For instance, they'd already sawn the top of the guy's head off, they'd taken out his brain and your brain is under pressure, you know, it had expanded and you can't get it back into the skull after it's been taken out to be examined. So this guy says to me, 'Do you want to sew the top of the guy's head back on?' They use this blanket stitch that sort of folds the two raw edges of the skin back in so that it looks good when it's sitting in the coffin - a nice tidy stitch for the relatives. So I said, 'I have to do this.' So I'm sewing away there and I'm very intent on this and I'm feeling, I think, pretty good because I'm a horror writer, hey, I can do this... And they didn't tell me that this procedure puts the skin of the forehead under pressure... so I'm sewing away and the cadaver's eyes flicker open... I am clinging to the ceiling... And the morticians are like, 'Yuk, yuk, we always do this with you rookies...' " Egos And Ids
By Degen Pener, The New York Times: Styles, 24 January 1993
"Pinhead has become a kind of perverse icon, and it will be interesting to get a look at how he first appeared. There will be other things in the [Bess Cutler] exhibit, [that the MPAA] wouldn't allow me to put on the screen."Alien 3: A Dire Tribe
By Dave Hughes, Aliens, Vol 2 No 8, February 1993
"I had several meetings with David [Giler] in London and L.A. talking about [writing and directing Alien 3], but I could never get my head around the fact that the Aliens didn't seem terribly interesting to me. They're inarticulate. They're essentially machines, albeit organic ones. And that is so very far from what I do. I just couldn't find my way around this warrior tribe of mute, insect-led devourers; murderers. It did capture my imagination, but for far too short a time." Hellraiser III And Me
By Alan Jones, Shivers, No 5, February 1993
"What were the weird trademark Barker excesses I contributed? I added Terry Farrell's bondage scene at the climax, the monstrous thing coming up through the floor in front of her, the extra computer graphics for the girl being skinned and many insert death scenes for the nightclub victims. Pete Atkins did all the extra writing. I threw in my ideas and everything was cut into the movie. The result is a pretty seamless patchwork, but a patchwork nevertheless. The best one can say about the movie is that it's abundant and there's loads of fun stuff going on. At the end of the day it's still a $3 million low budget picture. But for that price it looks fucking amazing!"
Barker Psychosis
By Edwin Pouncey, New Musical Express, 13 February 1993
"We did a week and a half of reshoots, a whole slew of new special effects, the ending - the entire to-ing and fro-ing between the two sides of the Pinhead character, the bondage scene with the girl, the multiple deaths in the club scene, the skinning of the girl... those were the things that were added. I tried to make the thing work more like a rollercoaster ride.
"The first Hellraiser was dark, claustrophobic, small and scary. The second was more apocalyptic with a science fiction feel to it in terms of scale. This one is Hickox's picture with a lot of style, a lot of very beautiful people, a lot of speed... I think it's certainly the slickest of the three Hellraiser movies." From The Thief Of Always To Where No Writer has Gone Before
By J. B. Macabre, World Of Fandom, Spring 1993, Volume 2 No 18
"I have a great relationship with my editor, and always have. They are in business with me, and I with them, to make better books. That's our prime goal and our joint responsibility. I will disagree with them, violently sometimes, and we will debate it to and fro. Let me give youan example, I have still on file some tightly typed twenty pages from both my American and British editors on Imajica responding to the draft. I would say that about seventeen pages of those notes were acted upon. Certainly two and a half months of work were done as a result of those notes.
"I want insight from my editors, bearing in mind that I have a strong sense of what I'm trying to achieve. If they tell me that I'm not achieving it correctly, then I will try my damndest to do better. If they don't like what I'm trying to achieve, then that's a different thing. Then I'll say I'm sorry, but that is what I'm achieving. It's the difference between making a better ploughshare and having someone tell you they wanted a sword, in that I case I say, 'That is not what I'm interested in making.' By and large, I've never raised my voice to an editor, and I've never had an editor raise his, or her, voice to me. My editors have mainly been women, and I like working with women editors. I think they have a focus, which I enjoy. And frankly it should be a friendly relationship, it should be a relationship based on mutual respect." Clive Barker, Horror Novelist, Brings His Art To Soho
By Sascha Brodsky, The Villager, New York, 17 February 1993
"The artwork and the books are completely interrelated... The movies are directly inspired by the things I've painted. They come from the same place, the space between my ears...
"I hope that the fiction I write will empower us to both comprehend our secret dreamselves and understand the profound intimacy we share with every other human being." Clive Barker: Metaphysics And Aliens
By Keith Seward and Lisa Petrucci, (i) Bess Cutler Gallery, March 1993 (ii) (First half only as "Hellraiser In Soho - Part One") Demoriam No 22, August 1999 (iii) (Second half only as "Hellraiser In Soho - Part Two") Demoriam No 23, November 1999
"If art isn't democratic, it's crap. It's got to be democratic. I loathe elitist art, which is why I've always fallen shy of doing a gallery until now. I'm sort of coming into this from another angle. I'm coming into this as a filmmaker, as a writer. I'm bringing an
audience from another direction. I think Lorc's drawings are beautiful, Cocteau's drawings are beautiful, Einstein's drawings are beautiful, Fellini's drawings are beautiful, Pasolini's drawings are beautiful - but we don't see any of that stuff. There's a lot of cross-referencing that we are denied because we are compartmentalized. It's a lie, 'you do this, you do that'. You have an imagination which does whatever it does, and you try to find avenues to express it, shape it, direct it.
"I've seen three UFOs in my life, all at the same time, over Denver, doing amazing things in the sky. I completely believe they're visiting us all the time. It's perfectly plausible that we are the children of their experiments... I was going to a restaurant in Denver. I was in the parking lot, I looked up and three lights were describing the most elegant dance in the sky. It was a clear night and there was no way it was anything but a UFO, or three UFOs. No jet could ever have done this; the technology does not exist to do this. It was fabulous. I watched for ten minutes. They moved off slowly, they were just making arabesques around each other constantly. It was just fabulous."Clive Barker On The Art Of Clive Barker
By [ ], Clive Barker On The Art Of Clive Barker documentary, Bess Cutler Gallery, 1993
"I never think through exactly what the image is expressing for fear of it becoming literal, for the fear of it becoming something it would have been better to make a novel of." Clive Barker At The Bess Cutler Gallery
By Nina Kempf, Coenobium, No 9, 1993
"In my relationship with my readers - I don't like the word 'fans',because it implies a sort of distance between us which I don't really think is true - I mean I feel the relationship is much more of shared imaginings in a way - my relationship with my shared imaginers is, and always has been, a very close one. I mean, you know, I try to go to conventions and talk honestly; I try to talk honestly in interviews about what I'm doing and why I'm doing it. Sometimes I say things that, perhaps, are indelicate. But on the whole I prefer to do that than fuck around, I mean it seems to be very much part of what one should do, part of one's responsibility to one's fellow imaginers. To actually celebrate that, and to celebrate the imagination!" Carnival Barker
By Alan Jones, Film Review, March 1993
"From the start it was clear the production company [for Hellraiser III] (Trans Atlantic Entertainment who bought the franchise from New World Pictures) and chairman Lawrence L. Kuppin wanted their stamp on it more than mine. While they had to pay me $20,000 because the original ideas and characters were my creation, they already had four pivotal elements in place: Doug Bradley reprising his Pinhead role, both Hellbound director Tony Randel and scripter Pete Atkins, plus special effects supervisor Bob Keen and his Image Animation team. So they didn't need me.
"[After the change of director] Kuppin said to me, 'Endorse it and we'll give you money.' But I refused to put my name on it. I really don't want to be like Stephen King!... As it didn't reflect my vision of the Hellraiser mythos, I had no desire to be associated with it in any way."Carry On Screaming!
By Mark Salisbury, Empire, No 45, March 1993
"If one of the intentions of a horror film is to horrify, then 'Jaws' certainly falls into that category - it remains a genuinely horrifying film. It's clearly a monster movie and remains tremendously effective in that respect even today. The head falling out of the boat is one of the great shock moments in modern cinema, and despite the fact that Spielberg is weighed down by the problem of the rubber shark - and there are certainly three shots that give away how rubbery it is - the power of the picture, particularly the first hour in which you only really see the fin, is absolutely the power of the horror film: the idea that something dreadful and inhuman is going to devour you. It looks like a period picture now, but I don't mind that, I think it's part of its charm. And I don't think that one should forget that bang in the middle of it you have four tremendous performances. Robert Shaw, Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider and Lorraine Gary all give really superb, focussed performances which make the movie so much more scary because you care about these people. In addition, the movie is massively enhanced by what John Williams did. There are few movies which are so identified by their scores. You say, 'Jaws' and people go, 'Boom-boom-boom-boom'..."These Ghoulish Stings
By Edwin Pouncey, New Musical Express, 20 March 1993
"The Forbidden was about the idea of the forbidden thing which can only be talked about in gossip, which can only be told as rumour, which can only be exchanged in an oral tradition. That fascinates me.
"The Forbidden is also about doubt, about intellectual superiority, about someone feeling so intellectually superior that they doubted what they were told....
"Helen feels intellectually superior, not only to the subject matter but also to the people who are producing it. It's not too large a jump to see that as a condemnation of the entire body of reviewers and commentators who find horror fiction and films as repugnant, unnecessary or ridiculous and feel intellectually superior towards them. I just want the Candyman to come up behind every single one and eviscerate them. It's wishful thinking... Yeah, with a great big especially sharpened hook for Barry Norman!"An Interview With Clive Barker
By Wayne Markley, Advance Comics, No. 51, March 1993
"I'm not really the writer [of Night of The Living Dead: London], I'm sort of the instigator. I'm the guy who came up with the weird stuff to start with and Steve [Niles] will be doing the writing chores on the book. What happened was, the guys came to me, Tom and Steve, and said, 'We're doing Night Of The Living Dead and we want to do something in London. You know zombies and the town, so why not put them together for us?' It seemed like too good an invitation to pass up...
"The concept isn't even George [Romero]'s, the idea of zombies is like folklore. So you're not dealing with any real rules, you're just taking an idea which is widely echoed in all kinds of tales. What can I do with this? What can I bring to the party? Why does the image of zombies - the walking dead - mean something to me? A different thing to me than to the person down the block? One of the interesting things about working in horror is that you have access to this pool of images: vampires, werewolves, zombies; you know, whatever else there is, and you say, 'Well, OK, how many of these ideas make sense to me and how can I reinterpret them?' There are no new ideas there are just new interpretations." Clive In Person
By John Martin, The Dark Side, No 31, April 1993
"The term 'fabulist' was first used about me by the New York Times, and I liked the association. Fabulist means liar for one thing, which I like. It's better than a 'fantasist', because fantasy is associated in most people's minds with sword-and-sorcery, which is not what I do. It's a pity it's that way, but it is.
"'Horror writer' doesn't fit the bill any longer, though it seemed like a piece of vocabulary that was useful, in the same way that I use the term 'fantastique' as a means to mark out a whole territory of endeavour. The vocabulary has become, I think, an albatross around our necks. I think the term 'horror novel' is a millstone, and we've got to find a new vocabulary, because as long as people use those kind of words, with them come a whole bunch of dumb associations. It plays into the hands of the hopelessly middle-of-the-road, empty-headed critics, you know, the Barry Norman's or their literary equivalents - the people who represent the smug, complacent, middle-class end of the market. One of the reasons why I'm so voluble, and it gets me into a lot of trouble, is because I care to speak out about not just my own work, but this whole body of work, which seems to me to be so interesting and is so underrated."Meet Pinhead's Daddy
By Carlo McCormick, Paper, April 1993
"There's a particular kind of artist who doesn't try to scrutinise and perfectly reproduce reality but says fuck reality, what I want to do is soften reality in my hands and reconfigure it so that it is my reality, unlike anything you have seen before. A casual wander through the cathedrals of Europe shows you just how long this dark side has festered in the imagination - there are gargoyles everywhere. What we're seeing now is the eruption of the marginalised in the imagination. In actual fact it was there all the time, but very few painters had the wit to bypass the over-weaving theological system to find a way of expressing that. It's almost as if the gargoyles of Chartres Cathedral are there as reminders of the marginalised, the Dionysian, the panic instinct, that have been shoved to the edges. The primal urge to create forms that are half-animal, half-man, which is central to the idea of the fantastique - the blurring of the human role - is anti-Christian. There's a very good reason why horror movies are looked upon so disparagingly. Despite the fact that the vox populi is essentially in support of this kind of material, it remains a covert, private pleasure for most."Interview With Clive Barker
By [ ], Previews, Vol III No 5, May 1993
"Storytelling can never be without some political dimension. If you tell a story about the rich, that's one point of view. If you tell a story about the homeless, that's another. Fred Burke is very political, but there are those things that Marvel always brings to Super Heroes. It's the modern super hero. Marvel said it's not just about people who wear their underwear on the outside, they're part of a world too. Comic storytelling can also deliver those little nuggets about the way the world works, like Anne Nocenti's work on Daredevil." Horror's Roots - Writer Clive Barker On Good And Evil In The Modern World
By Sid Smith, Chicago Tribune, 23 May 1993
"The truth is, I write religious fiction, though the phrase causes people to pale around the gills. Clearly fantasy and horror are often about the fundamental problems of existence. Horror itself is very often religious in its roots.
"Where else can you credibly deal with the absolutes of good and evil or probe life beyond the grave? Where else can characters converse with the dead? Those are the same tools of the metaphysician...
"But we live in a highly secular culture. At age 15 we cease to ask certain metaphysical questions, but we don't cease to think about them. We're shamed into silence, or we have to let them erupt at the death of a friend or the birth of a baby or see them subsumed by triviality, rendered crude and coarse by the vocabulary of the television evangelist. He takes the honest vocabulary of the metaphysician and turns it into dishonesty...
But what's maddening about the modern evangelist is that he assumes he's the only one who has God whispering in his ear. God also whispers in my ear."
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