Nightbreed
Eigerman cleans his silver-plate Magnum .45, Decker sits beside him holding his briefcase, across from Ashberry, who's frantically paging through an ancient Bible.
EIGERMAN : Ever done an exorcism, Father?
ASHBERRY : No.
EIGERMAN : Ever seen one?
ASHBERRY : No.
EIGERMAN : Well I'd start rehearsin' if I was you. (hands a gun towards Decker) Why don't you hang on to that, Doc?
DECKER : (a little prim) Oh no, I wouldn't know how to use it...
ASHBERRY : (finds something in the book) Listen! "So Moses spoke to the people, saying 'Arm yourselves for war and let them go and take vengeance for the Lord on Midian...' and so they burned with fire all the cities where they dwelt and killed the kings of Midian, both man and beast!"
EIGERMAN : (with a wink) Hey, how 'bout that, Doc? Sounds like we're on a crusade against the Devil himself.
ASHBERRY : (not terribly convincing) I don't believe in the Devil.
DECKER : Oh... you will.
Ashberry looks at Decker; no trace of irony in his expression. Ashberry sorts through the canteens, finds the one that doesn't have a white cross on it, opens it and knocks back two fingers of bourbon.
Second Draft - December 1988
"The lesson I've learned [making 'Nightbreed'] is that a lot of people don't want anything different. They don't want you to have a unique vision. But why make movies anybody else could have done? Well, I've paid the consequences, but I'm unrepentant. Again and again I listened to deprecating comments about low literacy levels. There was supposedly no point showing 'Nightbreed' to critics because the people who see these movies don't read reviews, in brackets, even if they can read at all! Immediately it was disqualified from serious criticism. Therefore it had to be sold to the lowest common denominator. Nobody cares for the product I, and a host of other horror directors, make. One [old] guy at Fox never saw it through because he felt it was morally reprehensible and disgusting - the two very things it's not. Their imaginations are limited and they have a very unadventurous sense of what to do. Someone at Morgan Creek said to me, 'You know, Clive, if you're not careful some people are going to like the monsters.' Talk about completely missing the point! Even the company I was making the film for couldn't comprehend what I was trying to achieve! "
On Nightbreed
How Fox Bungled Nightbreed per Clive Barker
By Alan Jones, Cinefantastique, Vol 21, No 1, July 1990"The Knights Templar brought back from the Holy Land a god called Baphomet and they were burned at the stake for worship of him. The Rosicrucians also had Baphomet in their system, as did the Masons. He's a very ambiguous god - no one really knows where he came from. Some say it was the severed head of John the Baptist that talked brought back by the Knights, others suggested it was some kind of Islamic god... It's weird, but it does have a sort of Biblical feel. I always think the whole thing about the 'lost tribe' is Biblical anyway, as is the idea of a lost tribe being found and led to safety or salvation - or attempting to but failing as in this particular case - but also because, and this is always true in what I write or do in the movies, there's a kind of religious subtext, an iconographic thing going on. It's the flipside of the morality which usually informs this type of movie, in that here the monsters are the good guys, the
creatures are the sympathetic ones. They are humane. And humanity, represented by priests, cops and analysts - the three forces of authority - are absolutely, unreservedly bastards. Here we've made a conscious attempt to make positive forces of various creatures who are usually spat on in life or in the movies. But, particularly, I've tried to get at something which I think is the subtext of an awful lot of horror and fantasy movies - that the forces of darkness, the things that are supposedly morally repugnant - are the things we really like. I think there's more of an overlap between the things we are supposed to find repulsive in the movies, like the vampire - the guy who can pick up girls from across the room with just a glance, who lives forever, who enjoys the night, who is sensual - there's more of an overlap between those qualities and the things we actually enjoy. Normally you're supposed to hate those guys, you're supposed to enjoy the fact that they get killed. I've always thought that's a cheat. I enjoy the monsters and I want them to be as life-affirming as any human beings. What we're asking the audience to do is cheer the monsters. What I'd like to be able to get at is that, although the world of the Breed is a bit intimidating at first, it's a world you'd prefer to see survive at the end of the picture - and when it doesn't survive, your hope is that the re-establishment of that society in the second picture will succeed...[on Cronenberg] For me it couldn't be more perfect casting - it's great genre casting for one thing. I don't think I'd realised how good he actually looks until I saw him on film. He looks very chilling. He offers up these wide, sympathetic grins, then they suddenly vanish off his face... He wrote a little speech for himself, which will be obvious when you see the film - it's absolutely pure, essential Cronenberg!"
Nightbreed - Preview
By Stefan Jaworzyn, Horrorfan, Vol 1 No 3, Fall 1989 {note interview took place in week 4 of the Nightbreed shoot}"After Nightbreed came out [David Cronenberg] said to me, 'Listen, this is going to happen to again. It's happened to me movie after movie - people not getting it, critics hating it and then two years later they say, Ah, you know, it wasn't so bad. It's better than the new movie he's put out.' In fact, we've seen some interesting reassessments of Nightbreed, even in the recent past. Entertainment Weekly just gave an issue over to the "100 Best Movies You Never Heard Of", and one of them was Nightbreed. It's doing very well on video."
Boundless Imajination
By WC Stroby, (i) Fangoria, No 109, January 1992 (ii) Horror Zone, No1, August 1992 {Note : interview took place in August 1991}
"It's terrible to say it, but I think that a lot of people in these kinds of [Hollywood] systems respect somebody who will yell and scream and be irrational and throw things, more than they will
somebody who will come in and talk quietly, intellectually and deal honourably with them. I didn't have a producer who yelled and screamed and kicked arse. And despite the superfice of sophistication that that community has, it really works at gutter level. People bully, people connive, this is nothing you haven't heard about Hollywood before, but there it is - and they lie. I want to make movies, I don't want to make movies with dishonourable people. I think I'm probably going to have to once in a while. I would prefer to know the systems better. I made 'Hellraiser' here, I made 'Nightbreed' here. I walked over there to finish post-production on the movie and discovered a whole different system of values, almost anti-values. The politics got so Byzantine that I didn't know who was stabbing me in the back, who was stabbing me in the eye - but they all had knives. All those things happen to directors all the time, but because books aren't like that, it came as a real shock to realise that people would just lie straight to your face and there were times when I thought I really don't know what I'm doing this for. I don't know why I'm bothering to deal with these people - they are total bastards.
[after the test screening] I came out of there thinking, 'My God, we've done it. They love it.' Which is one of the mysteries why 20th Century Fox didn't get behind it. If it didn't test well I could understand them dumping it, but the audience had a great time. When I saw the way they were selling the movie, I freaked out and said, 'What are you doing? This isn't the movie,' and was given all kinds of excuses…'Well there isn't time to change it, we have to release now.' And there was a very low awareness of the movie, and they knew it. The recognition of Cronenberg was smaller than I thought. They knew they hadn't prepared the audiences for the existence of the movie, nobody knew the movie was coming, when the movie was advertised it wasn't the movie that we'd made. When the movie was out it was put out with posters that wholly misinterpreted the content, and then of course it was gone.
[a head of Morgan Creek comments: 'If you're not careful, some people are going to like the monsters'] I was crazy as a loon at that point. I didn't know what to do, but the thing is it's no use yelling, 'You stupid fucker,' you have to sit down and say, 'Listen, this is the movie we've made, this is why we've made the movie…' Part of the problem is that people think so generically, they think 'horror movie': that anything that's ugly or monstrous is bad. Rex Reed said on TV: 'I like my monsters to be evil. So I don't like this movie because I like my monsters to be evil.' So no room for ambiguity, no room for Quasimodo, no room, apparently, for Frankenstein's monster, no room for all those wonderful creatures for whom we feel ambiguity, like King Kong. He liked his monsters evil, so fuck this movie. If you are dealing with a movie that's a little bit quirky, a little bit strange, then people have to make creative decisions, and the trouble with making creative decisions, if you're a person who wants to keep their
Flesh And Furyjob, is you could be wrong. Our little 'Nightbreed' comes along and it's a one-weekend job, which is going to work, or it isn't, and if it doesn't, who cares? It's a movie made by someone who made this other quirky S&M horror movie, who isn't one of the community, who's made this faintly European Hammer-horrorish sort of movie, and it's got Cronenberg in it and they're not that sure about Cronenberg either for a whole bunch of other reasons. And it's got all these weird creatures, and we're supposed to like them, and no stars and it's violent and it's weird and it inverts the moralities. The head of marketing at Morgan Creek never even saw the movie all the way through, and he was the guy publicising the movie! He could never make it through the film; it disgusted and distressed him. He said to me at one point, 'You're an intelligent man, why do you make these movies? They're disgusting and horrible.' And this guy was selling the movie! They were just incredibly confused as to how to market the picture. It's a monster movie and they were slightly ashamed of it being a monster movie. They were uneasy with the whole thing. And there is no way of articulating to people who just don't get it, what the pleasures of a monster movie are. It's more of a rollercoaster ride than originally intended. I was surprised at how little time the US audience wanted to spend with dialogue when I tested the movie. The longer cut frankly didn't work for them. They wanted sensation after sensation after sensation. But it's roundabouts and swings in a way, because there's an element of excitement now in the movie. What happens now is the movie gets running and just never stops. I don't think it bores anybody, it moves way too fast to bore. But I've made my second Hammer movie, and it's a very different kind of movie to 'Hellraiser', but it was nevertheless in an essentially English tradition, indoor sets and the whole thing being a little strange and quirky, rather than it all being super slick - gothic, if you like. It has a delirious quality; it begins with a dream and it never stops being a dream all the way through, it has the tone of an opium dream movie and I like that a lot. Its weirdness quotient is high, which does tend to delight me. [Re. likelihood of sequel to 'Nightbreed'] Yes, partially because the video company are very interested, but if it does well on video then there'll clearly be an audience for it…[as with 'Hellraiser III] as long as these movies are made for a modest budget there's no reason why they shouldn't continue, so yeah, I think there's a good chance there'll be a sequel. I'd be involved in it but I've just signed a two-picture deal with Universal so that'll keep me out of the running for a while. [a sci-fi film & The Mummy re-make] If I wasn't writing books I'd feel very distressed by all of this. But I'm still learning, this is not my prime profession, and I do need to educate myself."
By Mark Salisbury, Fear, No 22, October 1990"I think that Miramax would have dealt better with promoting and selling a movie like 'Nightbreed' than Fox, who are very good with things like 'White Men Can't Jump' but not so good at selling the quirky stuff."
Barker Looks Back
By Anthony C Ferrante, (i) Bloody Best of Fangoria, No 12, September 1993 (ii) Fangoria : Masters of the Dark (slightly updated as " Clive Barker 's Horror Hat Trick")
"I think the film will be a fair reflection of what's in the book ['Cabal'], though it's not the fantasy world of 'Weaveworld' and it's not straight horror either. The fantastical elements in the book…are
rather impressionistic. But you can't do that in a movie, people need to see what these guys actually look like, what do their kids look like, and how do they have a bath. I've always liked the idea of the creature as domestic animals; it's another way of humanizing the monstrous, which is something I've always tried to do anyway. Whether that takes off its horrific edge is, to some extent in the eye of the beholder. For me, strictly speaking, these things aren't horrific in the first place. I think the audience will come out of this movie believing that what they would normally have thought of as the monsters are actually the good guys. This movie is, like a lot of fantastical art, a hymn to variegation…I think of it as being, however perverse the moral structure may seem to conventionally thinking people, a fiction of celebration, in which the monstrous is infinitely more interesting than the banality from which the heroes and heroines of the fiction have stepped. They have dull eyes, and into that dullness something erupts. And they have to choose to turn their backs on it, or embrace it, and invariably they embrace it. The climaxes here are emotional rather than sick imagery climaxes; they're climaxes of heroism and romance. Admittedly, the romance is sometimes very perverse; I mean, what's going on between Boone and Lori is extremely perverse - they fall more and more deeply in love the deader they get."
Frights Of Fancy
By Nigel Floyd, (i) 20/20, No 2, May 1989 (ii) Clive Barker's Shadows in Eden (EDITED)"Time does give you a better perspective on things. I saw it again the other day and liked the movie a lot. But its intensity of strangeness makes it a rather more difficult picture for a viewer than I had thought. The movie doesn't give you any relief from its strangeness… the movie has a delirious quality: the kind of sense that it is something you might see (or have made) when you were high - which I hasten to add I wasn't!"
Clive Barker's Letter From America
By Allan Bryce, The Dark Side, No 10, July 1991"There's an important distinction between Hellraiser and Nightbreed. Hellraiser was an intelligent low-budget horror movie, but we didn't really have much visual sweep. We had a house in Cricklewood and limited sets. For Nightbreed, we have three soundstages at Pinewood Studios, Canadian locations, 60 monsters and David Cronenberg in a major role. It's a big canvas. I'm excited. We have the possibility to make a horror picture with the visual richness of a Hieronymous Bosch painting. The preplanning has been meticulous. It's going to be fun. We have some extraordinary creatures, many of whom are extremely violent and require several elaborate effects gags. We're contractually obliged to deliver an R-rated picture, so it won't be as gory as the Hellraiser movies, but there's lots of visceral material. I think it'll be more exciting since the kind of imagination that created the Cenobites has been given free reign. Although we had limited money on the Hellraiser films, we created images that touched people; here those images are times 10, some of the weirdest monsters ever seen. Cabal will be in three parts and Nightbreed will follow that pattern. On Hellraiser, we didn't know until almost the end of
shooting that we'd be doing a sequel. With this one I specifically wanted to create a horror mythology from the ground up, developing characters that will have continuity throughout the series."
Nightbreed
By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 83, June 1989"I'm not interested in just telling a story. I want to explore the theme of monstrousness, to create a mythos that goes beyond anything we've ever seen in this type of movie."
Birth Of The Nightbreed
By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 86, September 1989"The movie has never been in better shape. It is now a bigger and better project than was envisioned. Nightbreed now has an $11 million budget. For me the jump from a $2 million movie [Hellraiser] to an $11 million movie is a big one. What we have here is a big, complicated project. The Star Wars of horror movies is what we promised and that is what we are trying - I emphasise trying - to achieve. We haven't finished shooting yet. All the principal photography is in the can, but we're currently doing additional work - special effects, makeup, model work. A whole bunch of other material has yet to be included in the picture... There are several ways in which the movie diverges from the book, particularly the way Ashbury deals with Eigerman. A subtle thing in one way, though it's mammoth in another, is that in the book the Breed are represented very impressionalistically. You only get two or three paragraphs about them in a 200 page book. In the movie they have to be realised in great detail. My first job was to go to Bob Keen and his boys and tell them 'My vision of the Breed is this.' They had to translate those notions into concrete forms, make them into prosthetic reality. Then there's the fact that a movie is a two hour experience, whereas a book, even a short one, is a longer experience containing psychological materials that you can't put into a movie because film is essentially visual. That subtext has to be translated into visual terms. [Cronenberg] was tremendously responsive to the movie, both as a director and as an actor. He gave me some advice, not so much on a technical level, but indications of where he felt the particular strengths of a scene lay, little dramatic details. My attitude as a director is that there's only one thing to be served in the process and that's the final movie. When advice is offered I listen. What was especially nice was that David's attitude to directing is similar to mine. He pointed this out within the first couple of weeks and said he was pleased to find the same atmosphere on the set of Nightbreed as there was on Dead Ringers and The Fly. The climax of the film, the battle between Eigerman's troops and the Breed, took place on F Stage, which is a moderately large soundstage at Pinewood. Every shot required fire, smoke, debris, destruction, explosions, guns and all of that, but within the relatively limited confines of a set. Trying to convey a state of open warfare over a two-and-a-half week period was a nightmare. This was a very tough shoot, I can't stress that enough. Some of the crew had worked on the last Indiana Jones movie and they said that Nightbreed was the more demanding of the two."
Bring On The Monsters !
By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 87, October 1989 {Note : Interview took place in June 1989}
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