Clive Barker interview Clive Barker tells great stories. The creator of Hellraiser<>, Candyman<>, The Books of Blood<>, and Sacrament<> seems to have a direct line to another world. His forays into that world, where the rules are different, where, as he says, "up is down,'' are varied, prolific, wildly imaginative, and usually pretty horrific. He moves easily between this other world and the more mundane one he inhabits with the rest of us because he has a keen sense of the connections between them, the ways they mirror and shape each other, the ways that appearances on both sides can be, well, deceptive. Barker has spent a lot of time thinking about these connections and deceptions, mapping them in a variety of forms for his fans, whom, it would be fair to say, are legion. Dedicated and fervent, they're ever eager for the next word from their man, whether it in the form of novels, plays, movies, paintings, comic books, children's books, or internet interviews and chats. And he repays this commitment with what seems like a perpetual overdrive of production and interaction. He publishes regularly, he goes to horror, science fiction, and fantasy conventions (for instance, this year's DragonCon/CliveCon), he's active in the Lost Souls website (officially dedicated to him), he has recently opened his One Flesh art exhibit at an LA gallery, and he oversees projects for Seraphim Pictures, housed at Twentieth-Century Fox in LA, where he now lives. Currently, he's working on God's Monsters<>, starring Ian McKellan as James Whale, the gay director who made Frankenstein<> and Bride of Frankenstein<> back in the 1930s. This week Barker is coming to Philadelphia's Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, to introduce and discuss two of his movies, Hellraiser<> (1987) and Lord of Illusions<> (originally released by United Artists in 1995, though this will be the first theatrical screening of the director's cut, already available on video and laserdisk). Our phone conversation (he was in his Seraphim office out in LA) stretched well past the allotted twenty minutes to over an hour. He's sharp, funny, and exceptionally pleasant, which, given his obvious passion about his work and commitment to his audience, shouldn't be surprising. He laughs easily and often, and freely voices opinions concerning Hollywood business, U.S. politics and culture, and his life as a queer artist. This is Barker's first invitation to speak at a queer film festival. "It is rather wonderful,'' he says, "partly because I'm delighted that I'm showing two very hardcore horror films. I love that. It doesn't feel like I'm preaching to the unconverted, but it also feels like it will be fun for that audience, to see a couple of movies which are pretty tough.'' Pretty tough, yes. Hellraiser<> (which Barker wrote and directed, based on his novella, The Hellbound Heart<>) and its three sequels (a fifth film is in progress, though Barker isn't involved with its production; as he observes, "The last thing they want is the guy who originated the concept'') track the grotesque carousings of the Cenobites, a hellish group of demons led by Pinhead (played with a fierce and unnerving grace by Doug Bradley), one of the more memorable characters to appear in horror imagery. As Barker observes drily, "There's a big SM thing going on in the Hellraiser<> movies.'' Indeed. Even aside from Pinhead's notoriously literal face-wear, the movies feature a frightful array of tortures, bodily fluids, piercings, and twisted and broken limbs. Lord of Illusions<> also presents focuses on a crew of deranged, maimed, and persecuted souls, this time in the form of a cult led by the evil magician Nix and opposed by a another magician, Swann (Kevin J. O'Connor), and a detective, Harry D'Amour (Scott Bakula). According to Barker, the director's cut is very different from the 1995 release. "There's actually twelve minutes reinstated in the director's cut. About a minute of that was [removed] at the MPAA's behest, the other eleven minutes were things that United Artists said were not pure enough for their taste.'' That is, the film was not "bang in the middle of Stephen King territory... a rabid dog story.'' Instead, it mixed genres and themes, it was "a film noir shading into a horror movie, or a horror movie shading into film noir, depending on which corner you came from. The marketing people at studios tend to be very simple-minded, and when they get hybrids like that, they get very sweaty, very clammy.'' UA made a deal with Barker at the time: they released their "pure'' version and agreed to fund the production and distribution of the director's cut on video, laserdisk, and for film festivals. Barker says, "I thought of it as a trade-off. I love the director's cut. It makes a lot more sense, it includes a lot of relationship stuff, people talking to one another... which is, in the cinema, an endangered notion... These were not directorial flourishes [that were cut]. In my estimation they were absolutely central to telling the story... [which] was always this somewhat strange, off-beat kind of hybrid, with this homoerotic thing buried in it.'' Well, only partially buried. The subtexts in horror movies tend to, as Barker puts it, "bubble very richly behind the text.'' He prefers to explore this tension in ways that encourage audiences to rethink generic conventions. He asserts that, "whether you do it from a gender point of view, from a class point of view, or, as Julia Kristeva has, from a view of bodily functions and abjection, however you choose to decode these movies, there is a great richness to be discovered. I try to put that in very consciously.'' Barker notes that even beyond this subtextual layering, horror imagery "enters the culture,'' finding "its way, and I use the term advisedly, under the skin: Pinhead, Candyman, these characters are kind of our general iconographic landscape, which means that people who don't even like the movies know who the characters are... So, the nurse at my doctor's, for instance, puts her children to sleep by threatening to say Candyman five times. She's quite delighted by this, and her children make certain that she never gets beyond number four before they're well tucked up in bed.'' When I suggest that this ritual might be a bit perverse, he laughs. "Well, there's a whole therapeutic future ahead for them, but there's always been the bogeyman, and I'm supplying some measure of that imagery revisited and spruced up for a new audience... When we went to see Halloween<> for the first time, and when I say we I mean all the world, the shape and that damn music made us reimagine this thing, it had been freshened up for us.'' Part of what's revisited is, he thinks, "a warning element. One of the more horrific elements in Candyman<> is the story that's told and retold, by unreliable sources, so one's never quite sure if it's true or not, about the little boy who gets his penis cut off in the public lavatory. I was told that by my grandmother when I was five, in Liverpool, as truth; if I went alone into one of these places I would get my pee-pee cut off... That was her 1950s, Irish, practical woman's equivalent of saying don't take sweets from strangers... It's one of those madeleine-dipped-in-tea kinds of images, in the sense that I can remember my grandmother's voice when she told it to me, I can remember where she was sitting, and I was in mortal fear. I know that I wet my pants several times rather than go into public lavatories for a while afterward. It served its purpose. I lived in a very tough neighborhood in a very tough city, maybe there was reason, maybe there was somebody lurking around at that time, 1957. Maybe if I went back and looked at the Liverpool newspapers, I'd find that she told me that story for a very specific reason.'' At the same time, according to Barker, popular horror imagery is tuned in to the hypocrisy of such "warnings,'' however well-intended, as they deny children's sexuality while drawing attention to it. He says, "It's the notion that the forbidden sexual must erupt, in a form or other, otherwise it will do us terrible, dire damage. However one interprets what goes on in our psyches, the issue is, how<> does it erupt? I would prefer that it erupt in stories over which I have some control as a teller, rather than someone like Jesse Helms saying to me, tell no stories at all. I think that the repressive forces in this country are essentially there not only to stop horror movies or sexual images in photographs, you name it, but also to stop the passing of information in any artistic form. I think finally, that's what's waiting at the end of the slippery slope, a world in which you only tell Disneyfied versions of everything. Disney provides us with this pretty gruesome vision of sexuality, much more twisted than anything I could come up with.'' I ask him if he thinks horror, often dismissed as "trash cinema,'' allows investigations of sexuality in ways that other genres do not. "I think that we, we being the three or four of us left who make horror films anymore, like Wes [Craven] or myself... do get away with stuff, and I have slightly mixed feelings there about the inadequacies of [reviewers who don't pick up on this]. On the one hand I think, jeez, it would be nice for people to realize what they're watching. On the other hand, the fact that they don't [can be liberatory]. They say, 'The effects are good but this is gruesome and Clive Barker's a sick puppy,' the standard, middle-of-the-road reviewing for these movies, two stars out of four and don't do it again. That response allows me to continue to do it.'' In fact, he recalls, "The only time I got strong responses to the homoerotic stuff in Lord of Illusions<> was from people in the Midwest who despised the film. The liberal newspapers on the west coast, not a mutter. But you get some guy in the Midwest who sees queer stuff and he's like, 'Run that man out of the country, he's not even American! He's probably a commie!' You get that response and then you think, well, at least someone noticed it.'' I'm wondering if that kind of response to LOI<>'s queer villains might also reinforce homophobia. Barker calls this "the Sharon Stone-Basic Instinct<> problem,'' and he tries "to be extremely evenhanded. I've published most recently a big novel called Sacrament<>, which has a very strong, upbeat gay hero, who acts upon his sexuality in celebratory ways throughout the book. I've written a lot about gay men and women in positive lights, and every now and then I claim the right to put in a gay villain. "I do get a little queasy sometimes about that problem.,'' he continues. "I don't know how you get around it. This isn't just about gay characters, it's about anything that smacks of counterculture, whether it be fetishism or modern primitivism or something shamanistic; anything that falls into the category of the non-mainstream is much more likely to be accepted if it's characterized as perverse or villainous. I'm not sure that if you step back from the narrative, it actually matters. In other words, I think it only matters to the Jesse Helms of the world, whether it be characterized as good or bad. What happens in the narrative is that you get involved in the psyche of this character or you don't... None of these characters are particularly morally perfect, and the villains are often far more interesting than the ostensible good guy. My audience comes to these things with a little perverse smile on its collective face, and says, 'Let's have some fun with these things.' The genre invites the audience to have that kind of fun, to suspend moral judgment.'' And he extends the analysis. "On one level, the idea of the gay villain doesn't seem any more relevant than wondering whether Hellraiser<> is anti-sadomasochistic or sadomasochistic. I suppose if you were to look at it straight, in the fullest sense of the word, and say, are these things being characterized as bad in the narrative? I suppose superficially they are. But then you have Skin 2 Magazine<> saying, the cool thing about this movie is that it will give you great ideas about your dungeon scenes. So it's all point of view. Black audiences love Candyman<>, SM audiences love the Hellraiser<> movies, gay audiences love Lord of Illusions<>.'' For Barker, the genre of the fantastique speaks directly to his queer audiences. "I think that the removal via the imagination into a place where the rules of the dominant culture do not apply, whether that be the world of the Cenobites in Hellraiser<>, or Oz, or Narnia, or any of the worlds that I create in my novels, is absolutely pertinent to a queer need. And I don't think I would be the kind of artist that I am if I were not queer and I think I would be a much less interesting artist... I've written books in which creatures change sex, where gay marriage was the norm rather than the exception, where all kinds of physical manifestations of internal states were acceptable.'' He sees Nightbreed<>, for example, as a "queer boy's movie, because its inversion, where the "monstrous and the strange and the offbeat and the unlikely were celebrated'' offers a glimpse into this other world. "But I think,'' he continues, "there's a paradoxical quality in our response to the monstrous. The reason we're in the movie house is that the monster is seductive, transgressive, and exciting, but we also are going to watch a ritual expulsion of the monster. Nightbreed<> does not deliver that. I think audiences didn't really forgive me for that. The same audience that loves Candyman also wants to see him destroyed.'' Until the sequel, of course. Barker understands this paradox intimately. "Part of it is also the tension between what we're taught and what we really believe. We're taught that the bad guy has to be offed. The satanic figure, however nobly he may brood, must be staked or expelled. I think there might be a queer-straight thing here as well. I know this queer boy always wanted to be in the arms of Dracula, and that meant preserving him, so the last reel of the film was always a bummer as far as I was concerned. I felt this even more strongly with werewolves, they've always had an immense romantic appeal. I suppose they're the ultimate rough trade [laughing]. The idea of being in the arms of something that is part man, part beast, is incredibly attractive, but the drama needed to play out. So part of me was a good boy, speeding the silver bullet on its way, and the other part of me said, 'Please don't do this.''' Such attraction to dangerous chaos is not "just about horror movies, this is also about fantasy more generally. Wonderland is perhaps the strongest example in children's literature in which there is ecstatic disorder, which appeals to what I would argue is divine and spiritual in us, the desire to express our imaginations in defiance of order, in defiance of the very thing that we cling to, to get through our days. There's a little corner of us that says, I want to be in a world of munchkins.'' And you might want to be in a world where it's all right to be narcissistic, because you're the only person around who can appreciate your distinctiveness. Barker breaks it down. "I think there are two kinds of monsters who exist in the general pantheon. One is the narcissistic monster and into that category goes Dracula, who is clearly the monster of beauty in some way, seductive. Werewolves curiously, I think, also fall into this category, though they shouldn't.'' I add that they're usually transfixed by their own transformations. Barker agrees. "And they invariably end up being better groomed than they are as their human selves. I'm not sure what that's about [laughing]. And then there's the monster as thug, as brute. Frankenstein<>, or any movie in which the monster is characterized as 'thing' falls into the brutish camp. But there has always been a kind of monster which is elegant and rather fine of nature, despite his unlikely appetites. Dracula falls most powerfully into this category. The narrative energy that comes out of Dracula lies, I think, in the dynamic between the fact that this is a blood-sucking, foul-breathed thing that also has finer appetites and looks exquisite. "I think that sort of self-regard, that sort of am-I-immaculately-backlit? self-conception is part of what a certain kind of monster brings. I needn't point up the queer applicability of this, but these monsters are self-invented, they're tribes of one. Very often they're the last of their kind, or if they're not the last, they're separated from their kind, or they don't understand where they fit in the culture in which they find themselves, all of these things are queer-applicable. When a thing is self-invented, maybe it takes a little bit more time before it goes out in the world, maybe it checks its hair a second time [laughing].''