Elizabeth Reuter's Blog - Posts Tagged "clive-barker"

Who'd guess a movie with this title would be so awesome?

Aspiring art photographer Leon (Bradley Cooper) shows his portfolio to gallery owner Susan (Brooke Shields), only to be told his photos are too restrained. Hoping to catch something more intense, Leon goes down into the subway and spies a mugging. Success: he gets some brilliant shots and scares off the attackers, saving the victim’s life.

…Except the next day, she’s reported missing.

Leon last saw her boarding a midnight train, and begins riding it himself. The things he sees there grow steadily nastier, and his obsession with capturing every bit of filth on film drives him deep into secrets he’ll wish he didn’t know.

Midnight Meat Train is Clive Barker, and there are characters easily associated with Clive Barker (which isn't a criticism; no prolific author I've read doesn't have recognizable characters). Most prominent is the regular person who grows obsessed with something (gambling in Damnation Game, sex and murder in Hellraiser, fear in Dread, ghosts in Book of Blood) and becomes more and more twisted by their addiction as the story goes on. Leon is one of these, and Cooper shows his transformation brilliantly. The man is a hell of an actor; I never had trouble doubting Leon's obsession with capturing horrific images.

Vinnie Jones is terrifying as silent murderer Mahogany. With almost as much screen time as Cooper but no dialogue, Jones worked with his huge frame and expressive face. He scared the crap out of me. Mahogany had a lot of personality, and I really, really want another movie with him.

Not surprisingly, Midnight Meat Train also features blood. Lots and lots of blood and twitching limbs and eyeballs popping out of people’s heads and the occasional beheading. Personally, I found it kind of silly (there’s a great DVD featurette where Jones makes fun of all the gore), but that’s personal preference; if you like blood and guts, you’ll love it.

More interesting to me, it features dark, gritty sets that left me on edge wondering what would emerge from the shadows, great acting, and a twist ending that I can guarantee you won’t see coming. Barker might write similar characters in many stories, but no one has an imagination like him when it comes to creating creatures and shadows of the deep.

Midnight Meat Train did not get a wide theater release for some unfathomable reason, but it’s found new life on DVD. I recommend it to fans of any kind of horror.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive

I have trouble writing a review about Hellraiser because I have so many thoughts about it; about the characters and the story, about the subtle unease it creates vs. the huge, bloody light show at the end. Clive Barker described it as “uneven,” and I agree, but not just in terms of quality; also, you can look at it and see...well, anything. Hellraiser can mean anything or nothing when you look at it, depending on your point of view.

Basic story: the search for constantly escalating sexual stimulation leads asshole Frank to first seduce his brother’s wife Julia, then buy a box that releases demons which drag him down to S&M hell. He escapes and with Julia’s help, begins putting his body together through murder-powered magic. Julia’s stepdaughter, Kirsty, suspects something is up and investigates as Julia and Frank’s body count piles up. Meanwhile, the demons, unhappy Frank escaped, are looking for him...

The audio commentary mentions the lack of traditional shock moments; rather, Hellraiser relies on the unease its amoral characters’ actions provoke in the beginning, and the fear/excitement the cenobites (hi thar, Pinhead!) provoke at the end. Rather than outright scary, Hellraiser is creepy in the same way watching Clarice and Hannibal discuss Buffalo Bill gives viewers the willies. Watching the truly deranged is unsettling, even if the activity they’re performing is normal, and Hellraiser completely convinced me that its characters were deranged.

I could go on for pages about other little details: costumes that grabbed my eyes, scenes impossible to forget. About Pinhead, the most interesting of all horror-movie monsters to me. He’s bored with carnage and doles it out just because it’s what he does. What dulled him to the experience? What does he want? The glimpses of him we see in each successive movie reveal a complex character that can be sadistic or detached, disdainful or emotionally involved, that can even fall in love, and the result is terrifying. The moment Freddy shows up you know he’s going to chase teenagers down the street and try to kill them. But Pinhead? You can watch all of his movies and read everything Clive Barker wrote on him and never have a clue of what he’s thinking, let alone planning to do.

There is, unfortunately, a scene near the end with a horrible, horrible special effect featuring the Engineer (even if you don’t know who the Engineer is, the moment you see the scene, you’ll know what I mean). I know the film was done on a super-limited budget, but when the effect created is so silly it destroys the tension/fear being built up for the last hour in half a second, it would have been better to just leave it out. -_-

It’s the only bit that’s memorable for the wrong reasons. Everything else about Hellraiser burrows under the skin in all the right ways.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive

Just discovered Clive Barker.

In Japanese.

Aww yeah.

I’m trying to decide if Shame, a movie about sexual addiction, counts as a horror movie.

Basically it’s the story of two siblings, Brandon (Michael Fassbender) and Sissy (Carey Mulligan) who are successful, glamorous, and have a lot of problems. Brandon is a sex addict, sleeping with anyone and everyone--unless he actually likes them, at which point he can’t maintain an erection even with drugs. Sissy is desperate for affection, and keeps throwing herself at men who hurt and eventually abandon her.

Neither has any idea how to help themselves or each other, and so we the audience watch them spiral into a black hole. It’s a numbing, depressing, horrifying experience.

It’s also titillating, and there’s no way that wasn’t deliberate. Michael Fassbender is so hot he’ll melt your TV screen, and the size of his penis is still causing a stir two years later (links: TMZ and George Clooney making fun, Charlize Theron soliciting). Director Steve McQueen also said the actresses had to meet “certain physical requirements” if the Wikipedia page is correct, and since they’re all babes, it seems they met all the physical requirements that exist.

A lot of horror deals with sex in this way. Clive Barker has written of demons “as likely to fuck you as kill you”; Nina’s awakening sexuality in Black Swan both frees and destroys her; Dren in Splice sleeps with its father, then later rapes its mother; in Stephen King’s novel Desperation, trucker Steve and his hitchiker Cynthia find an evil object that influences people to act in destructive ways. Their first act is to fuck, violently.

Such sex is rarely shown in a completely negative way, designed purely to disgust. The idea is rather to arouse and disgust at the same time. The best horror, by its nature, makes you want to look away, and yet hooks you so you can’t. Repulsive, arousing sex scenes are one part of that.

I don’t know if McQueen meant to shoot Shame in that tradition. But he did so, and the result was a narrative a lot of horror fans can recognize.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive

In the last couple of days, I've found sudden inspiration for some nasty horror stories from two places I never expected.

1) The video game Clive Barker's Jericho. I don't even play video games. They're awesome, I'm just not into them. But watching youtube clips of "witches with guns" shooting their way through things like undead children's crusaders who strangle victims with their dangling entrails is more entertaining than a lot of movies I've seen lately. The sets are beautiful, detailed visions of desert bunkers and stone labrynths, and as is usual for Barker, the monsters are creative and amazing.

2) The MSNBC documentary series Lockup. An integral part of horror or action stories is writing people under pressure. Prison counts, I think. >< The obligatory grain of salt must be taken, since you've got a team of editors working to turn real life into dramatic TV, but still.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive

The Hellraiser series' monster, Pinhead,—creator Clive Barker hates that name, but we still don't know what else to call him—played by Doug Bradley, is the shining example of what horror movie monsters can be. He is fascinating, multidimensional, mysterious, and all the more terrifying because as a viewer I have no idea what he’s going to do next. In each of his appearances he gives us another glimpse at his character, where he gives viewers a little bit of who/what he is, but there’s obviously more we’re not seeing, much of which is horrifying and dark, some of which may not be. Many viewers complain that he tends to show up for a fairly short time in his own movies, but I think that adds to him. Seeing a monster too much makes it less frightening, less interesting.

In the first Hellraiser, we’re introduced to Pinhead as the leader of a group of Cenobites, Hell’s priests dedicated to “exploring the limits of sensation,” demons of torture and sex. Pinhead is erudite and intelligent, and has literally seen it all, so now everything bores him; he’s got a duty to drag humans down to Hell and do unspeakable things to them, but he never shows us if he thinks or feels anything while he does it.

The second Hellraiser tells us a different side of Pinhead’s story. He, like the three Cenobites that follow him, was once human, but lost his humanity through his immoral life (a key component of the Hellraiser mythology in general). He was reborn in Hell as a priest of pain and pleasure, dedicated to the experience of sensation without morality or empathy to temper it. Yet his humanity remains, and can be reached, something that terrifies him, but that he doesn’t seem to regret when it happens.

The third movie shows us Pinhead split in two. After his humanity was touched in the second movie, it split from the demonic side of his nature, leaving Demon Pinhead all about ripping humans apart and making them his Cenobite slaves, while his human side works to stop the demonic. Demon Pinhead has more of a temper than he did in the first two movies, with moments of snarling fury and joy at carnage. Still, through much of the action he retains his detached nature, barely batting a chalky eye as he forces a priest to eat bits of his brain. Human Pinhead seems sad by contrast, burdened by his responsibility to stop his evil self.

The fourth and fifth movies are, again, Pinhead detached and “deliciously empty.” In the fourth he fights for his life against a hero bent on destroying him; in the fifth he calls himself “the Engineer” and guides a twisted and immoral human man to recognize his sins, acting as judge and counselor. The scenarios are different, but neither is anything that inspires feeling or even interest in Pinhead.

The sixth movie, however, reminds Pinhead and we the viewers that even he is emotionally invested in someone: Kirsty Cotton, the heroine from the first two movies. Though many years have passed, not only has he never forgotten her, he has apparently stalked her. What kind of woman, viewers wonder, can captivate an immortal demon who has experienced everything to the point of boredom?

A survivor, apparently. Kirsty breaks horror conventions right away by having sex with her boyfriend in the first movie and not dying in response, and she just keeps refusing to die. When faced with Cenobites in the first movie, she swears in their faces and makes a deal for the release of her soul. When faced with evil men in the sixth, she gives them to the Cenobites in her place. When faced with an innocent person in the second, however, she rescues them, giving her a complexity unusual to horror heroines, and making her a match for an unusually complex monster. I’ve never seen anything like her in a horror movie, and it seems Pinhead hasn’t either.

Though she appears to be a good guy in the first couple movies, the sixth movie shows Kirsty taking a darker path and sacrificing, not just evil men, but people she’s angry at, to save herself from Pinhead. He is surprised—pleasantly—at her darkness, praising her by saying he underestimated her. Did he underestimate her capacity for evil or her will to survive? Either way she’s a character in her own right rather than just Pinhead’s foil, and Clive was right to make her a major character in the current Hellraiser comic book series. She’s interesting enough to carry a story of her own, and deserves the chance.

Pinhead himself seems conflicted when around Kirsty, insisting he wants her, but always letting her go. It’s not because he wants to preserve any innocence on her part, because in movie six she shows she doesn’t have any, and he’s okay with that. Is the human in him repulsed by what the demon wants to do to her? Or does he desire for Kirsty to come to him willingly? Or maybe he’s fascinated watching Kirsty’s fall into darkness, and doesn’t want to end their game yet. Or, like most people, perhaps Pinhead doesn’t know what he wants, and when he wants something too much, he grows afraid of it. It’s hard to say for sure getting only glimpses at his character, which makes it that much more interesting to speculate.

Clive Barker has written what he calls the last chapter of the Hellraiser mythos, The Scarlet Gospels, in which he has promised to show us Pinhead’s thoughts (and his real name), and then kill him in a way befitting one of horror’s greatest monsters. I’m eager to read it, but also don’t want to, because Pinhead has been so much fun for so many years as an enigma. Well done, Clive and Doug.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive