By Keri O’Shea
We humans seem oddly hardwired to believe in the presence of worlds separate to, but overlapping with, our own: this notion forms the bedrock of a whole wealth of folklore and ritual practice throughout history, and it has persisted, although the places and the means of admission have shifted over the centuries. The Celts thought that the Otherworld was accessible via water, with pools, bog and lakes proving fertile space for sacrificial offerings to be made; when the Abrahamic religions bumped the old gods to the back of the queue, a dizzying array of other worlds appeared, particularly in Catholicism, and although these were ostensibly ‘from whose bourn no traveller returns’, Heaven, Hell, Purgatory and Limbo still seemed oddly present. Not only that, but each could be reached from Earth, with those in Heaven aware of life on Earth and the living able to pray to influence the lot of the dead, to give just a couple of examples. The world as we know it swarmed with other worlds, with beings like us yet not us, or even beings that were us, once – worlds we could feasibly influence or even end up inhabiting. Little wonder that popular literature embraced this notion; kids’ books have long cherished their Narnias and their Lands of Do As You Please, and fantasy stories aimed at older readers have exploited the idea for darker, more disturbing fare…because, if hidden worlds can exist, then might not monsters also exist therein?
Clive Barker’s novella, Cabal, formed the basis for Nightbreed (1990) – and developed the idea that, on Earth, there could exist a place sacrosanct for monsters, a city hidden apart and safe from from humanity. This place he called Midian, a home and sanctuary for bizarre beings (the Night Breed alluded to in the title) who have been routinely and aggressively drummed onto the fringes of human society by human cruelty, resentment and fear. It is here that a young man called Aaron Boone finds himself, having long been haunted by dreams of the place and its inmates; Boone is a troubled young man, prone to nightmares, and seeking psychiatric help from possibly the one person least likely to help him: Dr. Decker is a fraud, a man literally and figuratively hiding behind a mask whilst he frames Boone for a spate of murders which he himself has committed. Boone, reduced to a renegade, eventually manages to find his way to the city of Midian. His welcome there is …minimal, at first, and it is only via his death that he can first gain admittance – however his presence in Midian, his relationship with his girlfriend Lori, and the rising power of the daemonic Decker, forces a series of events which lead to a last stand – a war between human and monster.
It’s a powerful and equally, quite a simple story in its barest form, one which Barker was keen to direct himself on the big screen (and it’s a sad thing that Barker has directed so little in latter years): however, the film which we long considered the finished article fell far short of the mark for Barker himself, and has perhaps understandably impacted on his desire to direct. It’s an age-old story of fundamental misunderstandings between director and studio, one which could form the basis of a book all its own, but perhaps (and I freely admit my bias here) it’s particularly galling when Barker’s vision gets so deeply compromised, as was the case – sadly – with Nightbreed. Barker’s imagination is one of a kind; its energy and complexity deserve careful handling, lest the spell, if you like, be broken. With Nightbreed, the studio seems to have decided they wanted a conventional horror yarn and insisted upon the film being shorn by around an hour in length; miserable with the results, the planned trilogy never occurred and the film remained in its clipped condition until 2009, when it began to get pieced together again with the replacement of the removed footage, long presumed lost. The director’s cut is now intact and available – which is a great credit to the work of all concerned, and something of a miracle, all considered.
However, in 1990 I didn’t know any of that. I was ten, perhaps obviously I hadn’t read the novella, and I had no concept of what the film should have been, or shouldn’t have been. All I knew – in common with my earlier and equally influential awareness of a certain film called Hellraiser – was what the video shop posters and covers later told me, aided and abetted by seeing the trailer on something else I probably shouldn’t have been watching. Did I even realise that the director was the same guy? That’s something I can’t say for sure now, but in terms of the style and subject matter, I was equally intrigued. I didn’t know how it had done at the Box Office; I’d been to the cinema maybe twice up until that age, as we didn’t have one in my town and my family didn’t own a car. I was a reasonably switched-on kid, but I’m not confident I even knew what a box office was. But monsters; secret worlds; that was what interested me, with that child’s level of focus and imagination – the loss of which I mourn as an adult and always want to rekindle. I wanted to see Nightbreed. I wanted to know more about Midian. I used to have a recurring dream, as an unhappy kid, that I took a shovel to some waste earth to try and dig for treasure. When I dug down low enough, I didn’t find any gold, but I struck a hole through the ceiling of a hidden community of people – strange people, dressed in ways I’d never seen, playing musical instruments I didn’t recognise – and they welcomed me, helping me climb down to them. Midian was like that dream only more complex, more formidable; it’s not hard to see why the idea appealed to a nascent horror fan with a certain fascination for these ideas. In Nightbreed, it’s okay to empathise with what in many other stories would be the villains – you can’t help but do otherwise, in fact. It’s a war-cry against human cruelty, and kids know cruelty as much as they’re also drawn to fantasy, to horror, to ways of playing that out.
The film itself, although the studio cramped its style somewhat and the challenges of bringing to the screen that which is quite abstract on the novella’s page proved difficult, is a nonetheless striking piece of work. On re-watching Nightbreed, I was struck by just how differently it looks compared to Hellraiser – only three years apart, and with the same writer, director and some of the cast, yet Nightbreed is warm and colourful in many places, almost like a picture book. Midian is located in a dilapidated cemetery reminiscent of old-school Gothic paintings, but its inmates are gloriously lurid and its spaces are well-lit as often as they are dank and fearsome – this is a horror film unafraid to play with its aesthetics, and it has other revolutionary aspects too. Getting into Midian may be a gruesome process (say ‘I have to show you my true face’ to any Nightbreed fan and they’ll immediately think of a key scene which does this very, very literally) but it’s not just some far-flung cesspit; it’s a functional community which operates by rules and traditions. Whilst the film looks very different to Hellraiser, they have in common the fact that it is human interference with the monsters’ rules which causes unrest, whether it’s preordained (as in this case) or otherwise. Here, it’s Lori’s – and Decker’s – attempts to infiltrate Midian which initiate a series of events threatening to its very survival. Decker is of course utterly emblematic of human callousness and cruelty: played with softly-spoken menace by none other than David Cronenberg, he’s a man who abuses his trusted – even venerated – position in society in order to murder without purpose, and his methodically cruel treatment of Boone surely resembles the doctor/patient relationship between Hannibal Lecter and Will Graham in the series Hannibal; as the later doctor explains, he ‘just wanted to see what would happen’. There’s some parity there with Decker, and again we’re made to reconsider exactly what it means to be monstrous.
Humans are dangerous; humans are flawed and thrall to their own petty ambitions; humans are also finite, and another idea which provides Nightbreed with much of its power is in its exploration of mortality. To again return to the often childlike conception of hidden places and secret worlds, for many children – and a fair few adults – the concept of death is best explained as being a distant place, a destination, just somewhere …different, rather than a lack of being altogether. Children talk about ‘heaven’ and they often think of a geographical location – you have to ‘die’ to get there, but to get there, you take a trip. Midian plays with this idea and takes it to a more grisly conclusion, where you get your passport via the morgue – and then you live on forever, agelessly. Aaron Boone has joined the ranks of the Night Breed but he had to die, and violently, to take his particular trip. Lori and Decker’s quest to find out what happened to Boone is tinged with incredulity but also, they seem to crave what he has. Boone is now forever. Covetousness and intrigue pursue him, however, until even the creatures of Midian are not safe. Monsters may not exist under our rules, but human intervention can exorcise them anyway.
Or can it? Ultimately, Nightbreed is a film in which our heroes and our villains are inverted, giving us a film which is compelling and horrific. In true Barker style, we are shown human cruelty refracted through a grotesque, fantastical and lurid mirror; a persecution epic, a crime thriller, a fairy story, Nightbreed touches upon all of these distinct elements, but bundles them up in a new set of ways, making them recognisable and original all at once. Whilst it wouldn’t be the first or the last time audiences would be invited to sympathise with monsters, it had certainly never been done like this before, and Nightbreed remains a deeply influential piece of film – for all of its flaws or issues upon its initial release. Midian has exercised a hold on Nightbreed audiences ever since, a hidden other world to rival all others, and more evocative in its way than anything which has followed.