If there's anyone who deserves to be in both Dark Visions, and its already published companion volume, Dark Dreamers: Conversations with the Masters of Horror, it would have to be Clive Barker.

This multi-talented horror superstar is acclaimed as an award-winning writer of fiction (Books of Blood, Weaveworld, The Damnation Game, The Great and Secret Show, Imagica), screenwriter (Underworld, Rawhead Rex), and director (Hellraiser,Nightbreed). He was also executive producer on Nightbreed and the sequels to Hellraiser, the first being Hellbound: Hellraiser II, with the third film in the series about to go into production. He has a two-picture deal in the works with Universal as writer-director, and has several other film deals in various stages of development, primarily stories from his six-volume Books of Blood.

Like his good friend Stephen King, virtually all of his published work, whether in novel or short story form, is under option. Among the topics not mentioned in this interview are the comic book adaptations of his stories, or the forthcoming books of his fantastic and grotesque artwork.

Clearly, Barker has already sold his soul to the devil to keep all these projects going simultaneously without having his brain explode.

In person, Barker does project himself as a individual of seemingly boundless energy, who just happens to be doing what he loves best: taking us past the borderlands to even stranger worlds just beyond this reality. Born in Liverpool, England, on October 5, 1952, Barker is most revered by his fans because he makes no apologies for being a person consumed with ''dark visions.'' Like many of the great dark dreamers of our time, Barker was enthralled with horror from a very early age, and even built the Aurora kits of the Wolfman and the Mummy.

His enthusiasm on any subject he cares to discuss is infectious, and he clearly enjoys being identified as someone who prefers to making horror films rather than musical comedies.

I interviewed Clive Barker as he was working on the treatment for his next project as writer/director, an original retelling of one his favorite childhood horror themes: the ancient legend of the Mummy.

WIATER: Oliver Stone, who directed two mediocre horror films early in his career, once said that to be a truly successful director of horror you ''have to be a sadist with a camera.''

BARKER: There are two levels in which there's an element of truth in that statement. First, you've got to communicate something intense to an audience who is being pushed beyond the limits of their taste or what they feel is acceptable. I think that's part of your duty as a director; people are coming to horror movies for a very different kind of experience than they would in a thriller or suspense movie. They're there to be terrified.

That's got to be at least part of what their response to the movie is. Maybe the movie is going to make them feel repulsed, distressed, uneasy. Full of dread. If the inducing of those feelings in an audience is ''sadistic,'' then Stone is correct. But to be a true sadist, you've got to be doing this to somebody who really doesn't want to have this done to them.

But the experience is really an act of pseudo-sadism: the audience knows what they're coming to see, they've paid their six bucks. They're saying: ''Okay Mr. Barker...or okay Mr. Cronenberg, okay Mr. Lynch or whoever the director is: horrify me.'' So true sadism may be not horrifying them...!

WIATER: However, for those who regularly attend this kind of movie, it seems that every generation has new heights--or lows--of what it takes to be satisfied as a collective audience. Perhaps there's almost no way to truly scare an audience anymore--they simply want gory special effects brought in as quickly as you can kill the characters off?

BARKER: There is absolutely a problem with the attention-span of today's younger audiences. Which is certainly a consequence of the way television programs and MTV and advertising presents images. Young audiences are much less willing to sit through the conversation and character building scenes. In testing Nightbreed, for instance, if a scene of two people talking went on for more than three minutes, the audience got restless! There really is the constant seeking for the new sensation, the new special effect. And a filmmaker who wants to work in a populist area like a horror movie--rather than making an art house movie--then you've to be aware that you're going to have this problem with an audience. And you've got to find someway around it.

I tried it one way with Hellraiser. I tried it another way with Nightbreed. One of the ways I did it in Hellraiser was presenting some pretty threatening material; it would silence them for the next ten minutes...sort of tamed the audience temporarily. I will continue to find other ways with my next film.

WIATER: One of the most eagerly anticipated films of 1990 was your Nightbreed. Unfortunately, the studio literally dumped the movie on the market, with almost no publicity. Frankly, it was as if they just wanted to throw your effort--and their money--away.

BARKER: I remember how the studio executives saw the finished film and said, ''How do we sell this thing--the monsters are the good guys!'' [groans] The problems started to appear then.

WIATER: In other words, you have some taste and talent, why are jumping into the sewer with this unworthy genre?

BARKER: That's exactly right! [angrily] In their eyes, it's one step up from making hardcore porno movies. Their attitude as far as horror movies concerned is much the way the critics' attitudes towards horror and fantasy literature was twenty, twenty-five years ago. Movie companies do not like to risk anything--they want to be the second to do it. They never want to originate. They're fearful of originators--they love people who make wonderful pastiches of something else.

But using your analogy of ''going into the sewer'' in terms of how studio executives feel about horror films, the fact is, if that's where your personal vision takes you, then that's where your personal vision takes you. So you cannot be bothered by the way the world treats you. Any more than Francis Bacon could be bothered about it when he was painting his extraordinary flayed bodies, while the art community thought he was a wretched and disgusting voyeur!

But you get on with it and you paint. You get on with it and you make movies. And you take the consequences, no matter what those consequences are.

WIATER: Speaking of working in a populist arena, you obviously don't object to having sequels made of your work, including the possibility of a Nightbreed II. How can you claim to be offering original visions when doing these sequels?

BARKER: There's a long and not dishonorable tradition of sequels in the movies, and I'm not as ''anti-sequel'' as some people are. For example, I prefer Bride of Frankenstein to Frankenstein, and I prefer The Godfather II to The Godfather. I think John Carpenter's version of The Thing is better than Howard Hawks'. There's a lot to be said for movies which are sequels or follow-ups or remakes--which are actually vast improvements over the originals. David Cronenberg's The Fly is a vast improvement over the original. So I'm not against that in principle.

What I think is important is that new ideas be brought to the project. Now in the case of Hellraiser II, there were some new ideas in there (I didn't quite like the way they'd been dealt with), and I certainly don't think the movie is a complete botch by any means. I'm hoping that Hellraiser III will also move into fresh territory. That's what counts.

WIATER: It's interesting to note that you have such an affection towards monsters, and that your primary monsters in those films, the Cenobites, have since been transformed into a plastic model.

BARKER: I am delighted by the fact that ''Screamin' Products'' has put out the Hellraiser model. And Pinhead is far and away their most successful model. I think Pinhead is a class act. The fact that he holds people's attention, and he doesn't do that with witticisms, and doesn't attack people in showers, makes me hope that in the movies I plan to make in the future, people will find something interesting and poetic and strange in the creatures I create, and will want more than just blood-letting and naked girls in the showers.

WIATER: Of course, everything in the arts goes through cycles.It would appear that the ''slasher'' movies of the past 15 years have finally begun to lose their effectiveness--and their popularity.

BARKER: I tend to agree that it has seen its day. I would like to see ''horror movies'' taking a move toward the fantastical. I have always believed that the whole area of imaginative movie-making, and imaginative fiction on the page, is in fact oneterritory. It isn't divided up neatly into science fiction, and horror fiction, and fantasy fiction. Alien, for example, is very clearly a horror movie. And it's very clearly a science fiction movie. They are not mutually exclusive genres.

I would like to see more cross-fertilization between these areas than we've seen in the eighties, when horror movies had only one thing on their mind: to make people jump and accomplish very little else. Where there was the occasional frisson because the soundtrack went quiet for a while, and then a loud sound came in and a guy with a machete appeared.... I would like to see the movies embrace a more fantastical, and more imaginative attitude to horror fiction. Any genre is the sum of the people who want to work in it; there's always been anaudience for this kind of picture. There always will be.

WIATER: So how is Clive Barker going to make his mark on the cutting edge of the fantastic cinema? How do you stay ahead?

BARKER: Well, part of the problem of course is that you can never know what the enemy is thinking. And by ''enemy'' I mean the corporate mind. You can never know what they're going to get worried about this season. Are they going to be worried about sex? Are they going to be worried about religion? Are they going to be worried about violence? What are they going to try and persuade you not to do in your film?

You just have to be prepared to speak to your vision, even if it does not suit certain individuals, and know that when you make movies, you have to work with other people. You have to share your vision with others, and say, ''Listen, come with me on this adventure.'' You hope to find producers sympathetic to that. You hope to find marketing people who will understand that vision. You hope to find actors and special effects people who will give their life's blood to make that happen. Most of the time you're disappointed.

WIATER: But when you write a novel or short story, you have no compromises to make with anyone then, do you?

BARKER: You fight battles in movies in ways you don't in books. There's only one real enemy in writing books, and that is your own entropy. Your own laziness. In movies, there are all kinds of enemies: lawyers, accountants, list-makers, the upper echelon of the studio sometimes, people who don't want to risk their jobs, people who don't want to support an original vision. There are compromises and intellectual mediocrities. There's a lot of these enemies in the studios--but there's a lot of them in every walk of life.

You are also constantly working with people who don't fall into any of those categories; you align yourself with theseimaginative, creative people. That's got to be the way forward for me, to try and do that. Hopefully, I will get lucky and end up working with people who share my vision and want to preserve its purity, and fight a reasonable battle.

WIATER: But more often than not, the corporations who hold the purse strings ultimately decide the fate of your film, as witness Nightbreed.

BARKER: I know I'm going to lose some of those battles. [pauses] I guess if you can't stand the heat, you get out of the kitchen.

WIATER: Whitley Strieber, author of The Wolfen and The Hunger, among his many bestsellers, once told me that he doesn't consider his vision complete unless it's been published and filmed. Do you feel that same way?

BARKER: No--if no other movie was ever made of my work, it would not break my heart. The book is the ultimate statement that I can make; it's the most intimate, the most confessional. Movies are fun because you can remake the story. But the book is not the movie, and the movie is not the book. The book is God--in the beginning was the Word, and the Word means the author. I've been driven more crazy by more people directing two movies than I have writing eleven books.

WIATER: Then why do you claim to enjoy making movies?

BARKER: Because I'm a movie-goer! I love the sensation of movies, and I love to be among audiences experiencing them. I even love movies which date badly. By that I mean there are sections of King Kong that don't look so great anymore, or Bride of Frankenstein. But the fact is, between those creaky performances, there are moments which after nearly 60 years--in spite of technical advances--are still moments of magic that are extraordinary and unsurpassed.

So, for me, my career is a whole mish-mash of possibilities and activities. I'm drawing a lot, I'm painting, I'm making movies, I'm writing books. And at the end of my three score years and ten, I'm hoping people will say, ''He was a good, professional imaginer. He expounded his philosophies and processes of imagination in a variety of media, with care for his craft and respect for his audience.''

WIATER: That's a long epitaph, Clive.

BARKER: I'm planning on a big tomb. [laughs]

WIATER: What advice do you have for someone who wishes to a screenwriter, or is interested in writing horror fiction?

BARKER: For anyone who wants to be a writer, I simply say ''to thy own self be true.'' The major gift that anyone has to give is not a technical gift, but the gift of their own personal vision. We all know authors who are not great stylists, but whose vision is compulsive reading. And we also know great prose stylists who we fall asleep in front of. I've always told young writers to find that part of yourself that is uniquely you--find those visions which everyone else has said you should have nothing to do with, that forbidden part, and write them. Tell the world about the dark stuff, and do it without embarrassment.

WIATER: You make it sound so natural, almost effortless.

BARKER: You've got to want the process of writing more than the achievement. The pleasure has got to be in the business of the writing, not the business of the publishing. If you spend the six months of writing a novel thinking about what it's going to look like on the bookshelves, you're not doing it right.

A lot of fledgling writers that I've spoken to, if there's one pitfall they weren't aware of, is that the writing life was great--except for the bit about actually doing the writing. [laughs] They loved the idea of being published, they loved the idea of going on TV talk shows, but if they could just get over this fucking business of actually doing the writing; if they could just get that bit over...!

WIATER: How differently do you approach writing screenplays as from writing prose fiction? Is there a different mind-set?

BARKER: For me, totally. You know how movies are rewritten, and rewritten, and rewritten. Everything in a screenplay is conditional. Anything you write down is subject to almost inactivity--that activity will happen on the floor when you actually start to shoot the picture. At that point, another set of voices--quite different from the producers and the executive producers' voices you've already heard--enters the scenario.

There's the actor who feels a line could be improved or turned, the cameraman who has a different view of how the scene should be shot..it's a long list. Then, when the shooting is done, the voice of the editor, who can literally reorder the lines you've written on the page, and can make completely new sense of them. Or make complete nonsense of them. So a screenplay is a very tentative article.

With Hellraiser II, for example, when Peter Atkins and I had originally beaten the story out, it made sense. But by the time it went through all those voices, by the time it actually reached the screen, it didn't make anything like as much sense as it should have done.

WIATER: How about the two motion pictures that first brought your work to the screen: Underworld and Rawhead Rex. You've pretty much disowned the films; do you have any good memories of the original screenplays?

BARKER: Oh, sure! They're primitive work compared with some of my later scripts, but I like the screenplays a lot. One of these days, I wouldn't mind seeing the screenplays published. Because it would in someway validate that while the movies are not great, what was on the page in the first instance--while not Citizen Kane--certainly made more sense than the movies which emerged from them! Particularly in the case with Underworld, which potentially could have made a very nice picture--just didn't come off.

WIATER: Do you ever restrict your vision for the screen, simply because of the economics of movie-making?

BARKER: I'm pretty much aware that movies cost a lot of money. [laughs] I love special effects movies. I love big, fantastic pictures. But I have to continue to earn the right to make them. I think the way I earn the right to make them is by making movies that work, by spending other people's money intelligently. I admit there's a big ego satisfaction from directing movies. I get a big high from it; there's no two ways about it. You write something on the page, or you describe something in a sketch, and the next thing you know, money is being spent to make that idea flesh--or at least latex.

But somewhere within this incredible high of having this happen, you've got to be aware that this is a large amount of money, and it has to be used intelligently. I was also the executive producer on Nightbreed, so it was like looking at the production from both sides of the fence, as it were. Movie-making is not a cheap art form.

WIATER: But in terms of censorship, do you ever ''pre-censor'' your cinematic vision, figuring that the Motion Picture Ratings board may brand you with an ''X'' rating if you don't?

BARKER: Well, you certainly can't shoot a film thinking about the censors. That's no way to run any creative endeavor. But, it's equally no use for me to spend a day shooting a piece of special effects, if I know full well it's not going to find its way onto the screen. So what I try to do is find ways of making the material work so that the MPAA will look at the material and realize that all the material is dramatically justified.

WIATER: But because you do make horror films, won't the MPAA will be looking at your film closer than they would, say, a cop movie?

BARKER: Of course they're going to find some tough material in my pictures, and in my choice of subject matter. There's no way that they're not going to find stuff they're going to choke over! What I'm saying is that when I go on the floor in the morning to shoot a scene, I'm not thinking of the MPAA--it's a useless endeavor. What they may be believing in today, they may disbelieve tomorrow. As I stated previously, certain areas of censorship come in and out of vogue. There are all kinds of areas which are subject to change, and I think they are a reflection of social pressures, and to some extent, political pressures.

WIATER: To go right back to the very beginning as we end our conversation, why do you think people have always been fascinated by horror in the arts, no matter what the medium?

BARKER: I don't think there's a simple answer, Stanley. We both know there's been an enthusiasm for this kind of material since a group of higher primates sat around a fire together, and told each other ghost stories.

WIATER: As if it's always been human nature to look at the dark side, no matter how safe and secure your life may apparently seem?

BARKER: Right. I can imagine that the first conversation was something like, ''Gee, I'm glad we've got fire. But doesn't it make the darkness even darker?'' [laughs] I think we've answered the question right there.

 

[Complete interview can be read in DARK VISIONS.]