Welcome to a special guest edition of Spooktober: 2 Spook, 2 Tober. Mary is filling in for Emily this week to talk about one of her favorite horror franchises, and its latest installment. Don’t worry, Emily will be back next week with another installment all her own!
Hellraiser is a special film, dancing the line between the Gothic grotesque and the strangely sentimental. A lot of Clive Barker’s work feels like that for me, torn between genres and worlds, but always horrific, always devilishly pleasurable and campy.
Since many of the Hellraiser films (including my favorite, the fourth installment that takes the franchise into space) were made in the 80s and 90s, the lowbrow camp that dominated horror films of that time has since gone out of style. Sure, a terrifically cheesy film sometimes makes it into the limelight (like Sharknado, or, well, lots of Nic Cage movies), but the weird techno-goth crowd just doesn’t have the representation that they used to. Maybe that’s a good thing. I’m not the leading culture critic of our generation. I’m just a person who unashamedly loves the weirdness of Clive Barker. (Some spoilers for Books of Blood to follow).
Clive Barker is an interesting figure on his own. He once worked as a prostitute while struggling to build his writing career. He’s been out in Hollywood for his entire career, winning GLAAD awards and representing all that queer horror has to offer. Horror (and Barker’s brand of horror specifically) explores queerness through the abject, the pull between pleasure and pain, disgust and desire. Monsters show us a version of ourselves that could be, full of power, but also frighteningly bent towards destruction.
Barker wrote the Books of Blood stories in the 80s, eventually publishing six books of spooky, gross stories. While I haven’t read the original stories, I couldn’t wait to see the 2020 adaptation of the same name. It’s been a while since I’ve seen any good Barker material, and Hulu has been on a roll with horror films lately. However, imagine my shock when I read the AV Club’s review of the film. OK, maybe not shock. Sigh of disappointment. Would this new installment into Barker’s repertoire really suck? Would it be lacking the campy fun and the whips and chains that I’m used to?
Hulu originally greenlit Books of Blood as a TV series, which makes a lot more sense for the connected anthology nature of the original books. I can envision how this would have worked as something like Castle Rock, a sequence of connected stories that all interconnect vaguely, building to some insidious, horrible conclusion. However, somewhere in the production pipeline, Books of Blood turned into a made-for-TV movie, and it feels like it. The acting is...fine. The writing is questionable. I found myself initially confused by how each story would connect with each other, then disappointed when they converged in the last third of the film.
This is fine.
But messiness is kind of what makes Clive Barker films fun. Horror can be clean and precise, like the stylized dread of It Follows, or it can be rustic and horrifying like Midsommar. Clive Barker isn’t that, though. The work of digging through issues of identity and hidden passions, through revenge and misdirected generosity—that’s not easy stuff.
There are a lot of transgressions in Books of Blood. A young woman runs away from home after a traumatic incident at college forces her to drop out. She doesn’t get far because traveling with misophonia is hard, but luckily she discovers a kind couple who host visitors in their cozy home. Ultimately, the woman discovers that the couple is “helping” people transgress the boundary between life and death by removing their eyes and tongues, then burying them behind the walls and floorboards of their home. They refer to these people as their “garden,” and insist that keeping them this way helps them live without having to suffer the disappointments of life. This is messed up to be sure, but it makes a weird sort of sense in a way. Sure, these people don’t have to deal with life anymore, and they’re left alone to their own thoughts. Time probably seems like a long lost memory, but it continues on all the same.
The second story follows a professor who falls in love with a psychic who allegedly transgresses the line between life and death by communicating (or convocating) with spirits from the beyond. After the psychic comes to the professor with messages from her son (who recently died of leukemia), she begins to assist him in his rise to fame. By the time she realizes he’s faking it, it’s too late to let the issue go. She ends up calling on actual spirits to use the psychic as a living book of their deaths, their names scrawled into his skin. Needless to say, he’s not okay after that.
A third story—which frames the entire film—focuses on a criminal (who knows what he is—an assassin? A mobster? A conman?) who’s searching for the book of blood, which he can supposedly sell for a lot of money, allowing him to retire with his girlfriend. The classic “one last job” story ends just as you’d think it would. All the stories come together brutally, and bloodily, as all Clive Barker films must. It’s not a particularly well-crafted ending, but I’m not prepared to say that this film isn’t fun. I’m torn on it. Is being fun enough to make a movie good?
Hellraiser initially caught my interest because of the stunning practical effects, funny dialogue (“Come to deddy” was repeated in my house for a while), and over the top gore. I eventually came to appreciate it because of the twisted sense of joy the Cenobites, like Pinhead, take in pain, morphing it into something pleasurable. They think nothing is more beautiful than being torn limb from limb, and that’s weird. The aesthetic of these films goes a long way as well, all the belts and chains and latex. It all manages to be creepy but also perfectly in place in some goth nightclub. Again, it transgresses boundaries, blending the abject and the mundane, the gore flick and the psychological thriller. Movies like The Cell (another favorite of mine) owe a lot to the work of Clive Barker. Horror in general does.
Name a more iconic squad.
But should you see Books of Blood? I don’t know, I guess so. It’s campy and poorly acted and fun, but it doesn’t live up to some of the other films based on Barker’s work. As adaptations of Barker’s horror writing move farther and farther away from his original vision (after all, Hellraiser was written and directed by Barker himself), it’s normal for the style of these films to change, but that doesn’t mean that I’m happy about it.
Perhaps instead of taking my mixed word for it, you should watch Books of Blood and decide for yourself, then write me and let me know what you think! It’s available on Hulu now.
And this guy’s there for some reason.