Roots and Beginnings: Nightbreed (dir. Clive Barker)

Behold: Baby’s first real horror movie. I say “real” in order to draw a distinction between the classics (Universal, Godzilla), the stuff for teenagers (The Monster Squad, The Lost Boys), and genre-unto-himself Stanley Kubrick (The Shining) and the hard stuff, the gross stuff, the stuff that would make me feel queasy and uneasy just seeing the boxes at the video store. But one late night during my sophomore year, flipping around the channels in my parents’ living room and landing on Cinemax (no doubt looking for something else entirely), I came across the striking opening visuals of Ralph McQuarrie and music of Danny Elfman that marked the opening sequence of Nightbreed, directed by splatterpunk/dark-fantasy visionary Clive Barker in a quixotic attempt to create a contemporary horror film in which the monsters were the good guys, and everything changed.

I knew what I was in for, I could tell right away. The monsters had that grotesque, rubbery, overripe, insides-on-the-outsides look that was the hallmark of prosthetic makeup and practical effects at the time. People were screaming, undergoing mutilation, dying in horrible ways. A man in a mask with buttons for eyes stabbed a child to death within the film’s first five minutes. There was going to be no out here, no way to look at this as a fun time at the movies or a historical artifact or a milestone in cinematic history. This movie existed for one purpose and one purpose only: to horrify. (David Cronenberg was an actor in this thing, for chrissakes!) And though I knew him only by reputation at the time, Clive Barker had an imagination uniquely suited to the task — a mind dedicated to devising new monsters, and new ways of interacting with the monstrous. Whatever this was, it was going to be fresh; not even the conventions of genre could save me here. I had to look away. I couldn’t look away. It took my hard-R, mega-gore virginity, and I’ve been a slut for the stuff ever since.