Lord of Illusions

I’ve always been drawn to the horror noir subgenre – a hybrid of horror and film noir that features downtrodden protagonists immersed in a nightmarish, shadowy underworld fraught with danger at every turn. However, instead of the antagonists being simple criminal underworld figures they are quite often beings infused with supernatural powers. Some memorable examples include Angel Heart (1987), The Ninth Gate (1999) and Constantine (2005). One of my favorites is Lord of Illusions (1995), an adaptation of Clive Barker’s short story, “The Last Illusion” by the author himself. The protagonist in both is Harry D’Amour, a private investigator and occult detective that has appeared in several of Barker’s fiction, most notably, albeit briefly, in The Great and Secret Show, a short story entitled “The Lost Souls, and also the novel Everville.

Lord of Illusions starts almost as if we’ve arrived late for another film, right in the midst of its exciting, action-packed climax. Two vehicles arrive at a rundown compound out in the Mojave Desert circa 1982. Inside the house resides Nix (Daniel von Bargen), a powerful magician and leader of a small cult of dedicated followers. Barker gives us a little taste of the man’s powers by showing him casually juggling a small ball of fire while talking to his people about cleansing the world. An illusionist by the name of Philip Swann (Kevin J. O’Connor) and a small group of ex-followers emerge from the vehicles intent on stopping Nix who has kidnapped a child, keeping her tied up in the bowels of the house with a pet mandrill.

Nix’s house looks like the result of years of neglect with its walls littered with graffiti and gaping holes exposing the infrastructure all the while bathed in atmospheric shadows. The exterior is even worse, the ground littered with the carcasses of dead animals, abandoned toys and other assorted garbage. Swann confronts Nix who proceeds to penetrate the illusionist’s mind, twisting his perception so that his friends look like grotesque aberrations. Despite this, they still manage to get the upper hand on the cult leader. Swann binds Nix’s eyes and mouth through magical means and buries his body out in the desert. However, his creepy assistant Butterfield (Barry Del Sherman) escapes.

It’s 13 years later and we meet private detective Harry D’Amour in New York City, fresh from an exorcism case in Brooklyn. It’s left him burnt out and edgy and so a friend of his gives him another job as a form of vacation – a standard insurance fraud case in Los Angeles. Barker makes sure to contrast the drab, rainy New York with sun-kissed L.A. full of palm trees and beaches. The case seems pretty straight-forward until Harry follows his subject to a fortune teller only to see him quickly run out. Harry investigates and comes across a grisly sight – the fortune teller (Joseph Latimore) has been used as a human pincushion by Butterfield. It turns out that he has been tracking down everyone who helped Swann defeat Nix on that fateful day 13 years ago.

Swann has since gone on to become a popular illusionist in the vein of David Copperfield. His wife Dorothea (Famke Janssen) sees Harry in the local newspaper and hires him to help Swann who she thinks is in danger. Intrigued by Swann and dazzled by Dorothea’s beauty, Harry agrees to take on the case and comes to see the illusionist perform one night where he unveils a new act that goes horribly wrong. The resulting fallout sees Harry and Dorothea try to thwart Butterfield’s plans to resurrect Nix.

I’ve always been fascinated by illusionists and magicians. I like how Lord of Illusions makes a point of explaining the difference as Swann’s assistant Valentin (Joel Swetow) tells Harry, “Illusions are trickery. Magicians do it for real.” Barker’s film goes to great lengths to show the difference between showy, Las Vegas-style theatrics and true magic – in the case of Nix, the darkest kind. This all dovetails rather nice into the horror noir subgenre as Barker mixes and matches from both so that we have the world-weary private detective butting heads with a magic-practicing cult leader. There’s the murder mystery merging with a supernatural evil threatening to take over the world.

What I find intriguing about Lord of Illusions is how it follows Harry’s journey from the hard-boiled detective world, mixed with dabblings in the occult, to full-on immersion in the world of illusions, which is typified by one of my favorite scenes where he visits the famous Magic Castle in Hollywood, a nightclub for magicians and magic aficionados. The establishing shot features the iconic building while “Magic Moments” plays cheekily over the soundtrack. Harry saunters in and bellies up to the bar next to an older gentleman (played by none other than famous magician Billy McComb) practicing card tricks, which prompts the bemused private eye to ask him, “Where did you learn that?” to which he replies with a smile, “Oh, this? At birth.” He takes Harry on a brief tour and offers a glimpse of the inner workings. Later on, Harry audaciously breaks in with the help of another magician.

With the exception of Quantum Leap, I was never a huge fan of Scott Bakula, but he is quite good as the burnt-out private investigator with his share of emotional baggage – a prior case that Barker alludes to in brief flashbacks and fragmented nightmares. Like in many detective stories, Harry takes on a case that immerses him in a strange world he knows little of, but becomes acquainted with the deeper into it he delves. Bakula has just enough of an everyman quality to act as the audience surrogate, our gateway into this fantastical world that Barker has created.

Famke Janssen plays Dorothea as a noirish fatale full of secrets, but not ones normally associated with the genre; rather ones that adhere to horror. She’s a striking beauty and Barker makes sure we know it through a series of revealing outfits that show off her gorgeous figure. Sadly she isn’t given much to do except look great and be the film’s damsel in distress until the film’s final moments. The romance that develops between Harry and Dorothea feels a little rushed, even in the longer director’s cut. The two actors certainly have decent chemistry together, but I don’t buy their jumping into bed so quickly. Janssen made Lord of Illusions at the height of her mainstream popularity (it came out after the James Bond film GoldenEye) and I always wonder if its rather lackluster box office receipts (in comparison to the Bond film) was the reason why she downshifted to B and independent films until X-Men in 2000.

Barker casts Kevin J. O’Connor and Daniel von Bargen wonderfully against type as a jaded illusionist and an evil cult leader respectively. O’Connor certainly has played all kind of roles in all kinds of films as varied as Steel Magnolias (1989) and The Mummy (1999), but I would have never thought to cast him as a brilliant illusionist. Conversely, von Bargen is often cast as douchey authority figures (see Super Troopers and Seinfeld), but in Barker’s film he’s called upon to play an incarnation of evil magic and is quite convincing as a deranged cult leader – imagine if Charles Manson practiced magic. Barry Del Sherman is quite memorable as Butterfield, an androgynous sadist that talks a little like John Malkovich and dresses like a stereotypical rock star. The actor has an unusual and captivating presence whenever he’s on-screen.

The impetus for making Lord of Illusions came from the fact that Clive Barker hadn’t seen a good scary movie in awhile and this had “truly gotten under my skin,” as he said in an interview. He felt that the world of magic would be a fertile arena for a horror film because, “People have eerie feelings about magic, illusion. And despite the wholesome image of Mr. David Copperfield, illusion is a fruitful area of a horror movie to begin in.” Barker liked magic and had affection for the character of Harry D’Amour, who appeared in several of the author’s books. According to the author, Harry was not “a Van Helsing, defiantly facing off against some implacable evil with faith and holy water. His antecedents are the troubled, weary and often lovelorn heroes of film noir.” He felt that films like Hellraiser (1987), which were dominated by their antagonists, had run their course and decided that if he was going to make another series of films it would focus on a hero.

That being said, Barker still wanted the film to have an interesting antagonist, but one that was identifiable to audiences: “Nix is a villain I think we can relate to; he’s not unlike Charles Manson … The craziness of Waco, the craziness of Jonestown, the Manson stuff – Nix is the embodiment of the charismatic leader who says, ‘Follow me to death,’ which is something that’s part of our culture.”

It had been several years since his last film, Nightbreed (1990), which he had a horrible experience on in terms of dealing with the studio, but decided to try again because of Lord of Illusions was “a modestly scaled project, which gave me the security of not being micromanaged.” Barker went to work on the screenplay as early as August 1991. The budget for Lord of Illusions was a lean $11 million with a short shooting schedule. Barker wanted his film to look double what it cost to make so he storyboarded the entire thing in order to be prepared every day.

When Scott Bakula first met with Barker, the filmmaker told him that Lord of Illusions was influenced by films like The Exorcist (1971) and Chinatown (1974). When filming began, the author was impressed by how much the actor embodied the character he had created: “When he stepped on set, in costume for the first time … I thought, ‘This is wonderful – this is the man I’ve been writing about for 8 years.” Barker has subsequently said that whenever he writes about the character he imagines Bakula.

Barker had no problem casting Bakula as Harry D’Amour, but United Artists balked when he wanted Famke Janssen as Dorothea. The producers saw approximately 40 actresses and were looking for an unknown because of their limited budget. They liked Janssen for the haunted look on her face. She got her start as a model and had only done a few small roles on television shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation and Melrose Place. Barker did a screen test with her and the studio allowed him to cast the actress in the film. Barker’s instincts were validated when, a few weeks into filming, she was cast a Bond girl in the next James Bond film, GoldenEye.

The first test screening for Lord of Illusions did not go well with the audience balking at the explicit nature of the sex depicted in the film. They also complained that the running time was too long and that there was too much talking. Barker cut out a few scenes and toned down the sex and the second screening went much better: “They said it was the scariest movie they’d ever seen,” he recalled in an interview. After this screening, Barker toned down some of the violence.

Predictably, Lord of Illusions received mostly mixed to negative reviews from mainstream critics. However, Roger Ebert gave it three out of four stars and wrote, “What I liked – enough to make me recommend the movie – wasn’t so much the conclusion as the buildup, with D’Amour developing a curious relationship with Dorothea and Valentin, and penetrating into the inner circles of black magic.” In his review for The New York Times, Stephen Holden wrote, “the gore quickly becomes as tiresome as the overheated dialogue in which the characters blather on about the difference between ‘divinity and trickery’.” USA Today gave the film two-and-a-half out of four stars and Mike Clark wrote, “Barker’s visual side dominates its literary equivalent this time out, resulting in a time-killer that may amuse fans until illusion is shattered by the rolling of the end credits.” Entertainment Weekly gave it a “D-“ rating and Owen Gleiberman found it to be “turgid cop-thriller nonsense.” Along with Ebert, the Los Angeles Times’ Kevin Thomas provided one of the rare positive reviews: “Lord of Illusions belongs to Bakula, but he gets staunch support on both sides of the camera.” Finally, in his review for the Washington Post, Richard Harrington felt that Barker was “torn between his great gifts as an author and his aspirations as a moviemaker. Until he figures out how to finesse a convincing transition, Barker is doomed to creative purgatory.”

The title card at the beginning of Lord of Illusions states that death is only an illusion and in the film’s world of magical madmen this is certainly true as both Nix and Swann dabble with this concept. Barker’s film plays with our perception of what is real and what isn’t. After all, what’s a film, but just another illusion? He has certainly improved as a filmmaker with Lord of Illusions. It looks better and tells a more coherent story than his previous effort, Nightbreed, which was marred by studio interference. His direction in this film is more confident and he gets good performances out of his cast, especially Kevin J. O’Connor and Daniel von Bargen, while his script unfortunately shortchanges Famke Janssen. It’s a shame that Lord of Illusions wasn’t more of a commercial success as it could have been the start of many Harry D’Amour films, but alas it wasn’t meant to be, but at least we have this cinematic incarnation and the character continues to live on in Barker’s fiction.

SOURCES

“Bakula Makes Quantum Leap from TV to Films.” Reuters News Agency. September 23, 1995.

Barker, Clive. Lord of Illusions Laser Disc Liner Notes. 1996.

Beeler, Michael. “Lord of Illusions – Filming the Books of Blood.” Cinefantastique. April 1995.

Ferrante, Anthony C. “The Conjuring of Lord of Illusions Part 5 – The Last Interview.” Fangoria. September 1995.

Lamanna, Dan. “Clive Barker’s Lurid Fascination.” Cinescape. January 1995.

Macklin, William R. “Horrors! Clive Barker Thinks that Getting His Twisted Tales Out in the Open is Therapeutic.” Philadelphia Inquirer. August 24, 1995.

Rya, James. “Ex-Model Janssen Updates ‘Bond Girl’ Image.” BPI Entertainment News Wire. November 3, 1995.

Spelling, Ian. “Barker is Back.” The New York Times. August 22, 1995.

Stroby, W.C. “Boundless Imagination.” Fangoria. January 1992.

“The Making of Lord of Illusions” Sci-Fi Channel documentary. Lord of Illusions Laser Disc. 1996.

Candyman

Based on Clive Barker’s short story, “The Forbidden,” Candyman (1992) is one of the more well-known mainstream horror films to openly acknowledge and use urban legends as the basis for its story. When most people think of such things the first ones that come to mind are alligators in the sewer or razor blades hidden in Halloween candy. The one Candyman uses is much more sinister. A young couple are about to have sex. The girl looks into a mirror and says the word, “Candyman” five times. A tall man with a hook instead of his right hand appears and brutally murders her. Urban legends are, as one character puts it, “modern oral folklore. They are the unselfconscious reflection of the fears of urban society.”

Two graduate students — Helen Lyle (Virginia Madsen) and Bernadette Walsh (Kasi Lemmons) — are doing research on the Candyman urban legend for a thesis paper at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Helen’s husband Trevor (Xander Berkeley) is a professor at the school and teaches a course in urban mythology. Through the course of their research, the two women learn that the residents of a dangerous area in the city known as the Cabrini-Green projects believe that Candyman (Tony Todd) haunts their building. I like that the film shows Helen’s methodical approach to her subject. She interviews several people who have heard of the supposed incidents involving Candyman and she also scans newspaper archives. This all establishes Helen as an intelligent protagonist steeped in the rational. She believes that the Candyman myth is just that.

Helen soon uncovers a news clipping of the mysterious death of one the building’s residents — Ruthie Jean — that may have links to Candyman. She and Bernadette decide to go to Cabrini-Green and check things out for themselves. Helen is driven and has the conviction to brave the dangers of the place to further her research paper so it will have something more than just the same old stories recounted endlessly before. She’s willing to risk potential life and limb to get what she wants. But she’s smart about it. She and Bernadette dress conservatively (they’re even mistaken for plain clothes cops) and are careful not to provoke the gang members that greet them at the building’s entrance. As the film progresses, she becomes obsessed with her work, going back to Cabrini-Green by herself. The deeper Helen investigates the Candyman legend, the more her perception of reality becomes skewed. She starts seeing him in broad daylight. Her life gets more complicated when he frames her for several horrific murders. Helen begins to question her own sanity as her world rapidly unravels before her very eyes.

Candyman opens with a rather apocalyptic image of the Chicago skyline being engulfed by thousands upon thousands of bees and then we hear the ominous deep voice of Candyman saying, “I came for you.” Director Bernard Rose fades to the image of Helen’s face which foreshadows that this horror film is also an interracial love story between her and Candyman, a pretty daring concept back in 1992 which met with some resistance from the studio, according to Rose. The film also touches upon the sexism inherent in the world of academia as one of Trevor’s fellow professors acts condescendingly towards Helen and Bernadette but Helen is defiant and yet also captivated when the professor recounts Candyman’s backstory.

Candyman takes a mainstay of the horror genre — the haunted house — and effectively updates it for a contemporary audience. The Cabrini-Green projects are an imposing structure: an immense concrete monolith covered in graffiti, dirt and trash and crawling with dangerous gangs. This is not a place for a white, upper class academic type to be spending her time and yet Helen makes the perilous journey because she is obsessed by the Candyman legend.

Rose has a strong visual sense. He does not shoot Candyman like a traditional horror film. For example, he uses overhead shots of the city to establish several scenes — it’s a powerful, God’s eye view of the streets and buildings that creates an unsettling mood. Rose presents truly disturbing imagery, from the swarm of bees that engulfs the city in Helen’s dream, to a toilet bowl filled with swarming bees that she finds at Cabrini-Green. This imagery is complemented by Philip Glass’ experimental, elegiac score. It is never overused but instead insinuates itself into the film, lurking in the background.

Candyman stands apart from most other horror films in that Rose spends a lot of time establishing Helen’s character, letting the audience get to know her and thereby empathizing with her when things go horribly wrong. Virginia Madsen is well cast as the smart, strong-willed Helen. She conveys a vulnerability that makes her a sympathetic character and this helps us identify with her. For the film to work, we must be emotionally invested in what happens to her and empathize with her plight. It’s a strong, layered performance that requires her to show a wide range of emotions: the confident grad student to the fearful murder suspect who questions her own sanity. Helen is no damsel in distress but rather a thoughtful, inquisitive person who may be losing touch with reality. Madsen plays a very atypical horror film protagonist and the actress conveys an intelligence and confidence that is refreshing.

The Candyman legend itself is an intriguing one and we are soon as fascinated by it as much as Helen. Its backstory is steeped in cruelty and prejudice, making Candyman a tragic figure and somewhat sympathetic in his own right. He is more than just an anonymous scary monster that must be destroyed. The casting of Tony Todd also helps transform Candyman into a fully realized character. He has the fearsome physical presence with his deep, booming voice and towering figure. Todd manages to convey the tragic nature of his character and this makes Candyman not a conventional monster that must be dispatched outright. He has a clear, understandable motive for why he’s doing what he does in the film.

Xander Berkeley plays another irredeemable jerk. There are early warning signs that Trevor is no good. He flirts with a young female student in his class right in front of Helen and also messes up her research by teaching his urban legends class while she’s gathering data from his students for her thesis. I’m sorry but there is no way a guy like that would cheat on a woman as smart and beautiful as Virginia Madsen. Kasi Lemmons complements Madsen well. They both play smart characters and Bernadette provides a welcome injection of common sense to counterbalance Helen’s obsessive drive.

Bernard Rose got his start directing music videos for Propaganda Films and short films for the Playboy Channel. He shared an agent with author Clive Barker and through him Barker found out that Rose liked several of his short stories, in particular, “The Forbidden.” Barker saw Rose’s film, Paperhouse (1988), enjoyed it and felt that the director could translate his story into a film with “style and believability.” After making Chicago Joe and the Showgirl (1990), Rose met Barker in London, England to talk about adapting the story into a film. They agreed that it should be relocated from Liverpool to the United States because an American studio was planning to back it financially and it would make the film more commercially viable. According to Barker, Rose “took the thematic material in the story and expanded it and turned it into something that was very much his own.”

Rose took the project to Steve Golin, the head of Propaganda Films. Unaware that Rose had not written any screenplays, Golin hired him to write and direct Candyman. The filmmaker wrote the script and only then did Golin find out that he had never written one before. He was angry at Rose and was going to replace him as writer. However, Golin read Rose’s script, liked it and agreed to produce the film. Rose worked on the script for years with Barker supervising the various drafts. Rose actually wrote the part of Helen for his wife Alexandra Pigg to play and Virginia Madsen was going to play Bernadette. However, Pigg got pregnant and was unable to do the film and so Rose asked Madsen to play Helen instead. Casting Candyman was a challenge for the filmmaker who met with resistance from the studio when he wanted to Tony Todd to play the titular character. The actor recalled in an interview:

“I had to do what they call a ‘Personality Test,’ where I had to go to the studio at literally 8 in the morning, in front of a bunch of suits, and display whether I had a personality. So I did my best not to spill the coffee or insult them, and at the end of it, I heard they didn’t think I had a personality. They said, ‘Well, we don’t know if he has personality, but if you believe that he can do the film… Okay… Are you sure?’ He said, ‘Yeah. That’s the guy.’ And then the last hurdle was meeting Virginia Madsen, who’s from the Chicago area, and she just had it in her contract that she had to sign off on me. Then we met, went to lunch, and she said ‘Yes,’ and that was it.”

While working on the script, Rose combined Barker’s short story with two urban legends – the Hook, about a serial killer who murdered people with a hook and Bloody Mary, whose name is to be said in the mirror. Rose decided to set Candyman in Chicago because he had been there once for a film festival and became fascinated with its architecture. Before filming started, he went to the city and did a significant amount of research, talking to people there and learning how they spoke. He felt that it was important not to write “generic-sounding dialogue.” Much of the film was shot in and around the notorious Cabrini-Green, a gang-infested housing project. Rose navigated the gang problem there by hiring many members to play themselves in the film. Madsen had grown up in Chicago but did not want to drive past Cabrini-Green because of its scary reputation. Once she began filming on location there, she found out that most of its inhabitants lived in good homes. However, the place was not without its dangerous moments. Tony Todd recalled, “I tried to come there with no expectations, but I still felt fear. Anybody who didn’t belong there was subject to danger.” At one point, the police told him to watch the rooftops for snipers! For Rose, it was important that they shot on location and included it in the film as an element of social criticism. He said, “how people can be expected to live in squalor, because the housing authority has allowed Cabrini Green to rot instead of trying to maintain it.”

The filmmakers were faced with a dilemma when it came to shoot the scene where Helen is covered with bees. Madsen was extremely allergic to bee venom and the filmmakers had to lie to their insurance company by telling them that the bees being used were so young that they were incapable of stinging her. To avoid being stung, Tony Todd and Madsen were covered with queen bee pheromones so that the insects would be infatuated with them rather than angry. In addition, Rose cleared the set and spent ten minutes putting the actress in a trance! She did the sequence without incident.

Rose consciously wanted to slow the pace of the film down because the “slower and quieter the film became, the more intense it would become.” He also did not want music that would telegraph what would happen next but instead, “just strip the track down to very simple sounds.” He also wanted to “get away from the rape fantasies that one associates with slasher movies. Helen deals with her desires when she summons the Candyman. She’s like a priest who’s always asking for God. But what would happen if God appeared and said, ‘Here I am’? That might be what the priest wants, but it would also drive him mad.”

Candyman had its world premiere at the 1992 Toronto Film Festival, playing on its Midnight Madness line-up. The film went on to enjoy generally positive reviews from film critics. Roger Ebert gave the film three out of four stars and wrote, “Rose has been clever in his use of locations. Just as urban legends are based on the real fears of those who believe in them, so are certain urban locations able to embody fear. Empty apartments in the upper floors of public housing projects are, it is widely believed, occupied by gangs. We perceive a real threat to the women, at the same time they're searching for what they think is an imaginary one.” In his review for the Washington Post, Richard Harrington wrote, “Rose invests the film with plenty of frightful atmosphere (aided by a Philip Glass score), allowing Madsen to descend into madness at a pace that drags the viewer along, somewhat unwillingly … Madsen is a much better actress than is usually found in such a role.” The New York Times’ Janet Maslin wrote, “Ms. Madsen's performance is a lot more enterprising than what the material requires; the same can be said for Mr. Rose's direction.” Empire magazine gave the film its top rating and wrote, “Rose's movie is a triumph on many levels. Not only does it deliver a plethora of visually imaginative, shocking scenes … there's the score by American minimalist composer Philip Glass, which moves from a nursery rhyme tinkle to melancholic, melodic choral histrionics as the true grand guignol erupts.”

However, in his review for the Chicago Reader, Jonathan Rosenbaum felt that the film, “starts out promisingly while the plot is mainly a matter of suggestion, but gradually turns gross and obvious as the meanings become literal and unambiguous.” In her review for USA Today, Susan Wloszczyna wrote, “Too bad the premise is spoiled by some racially condescending overtones – Madsen comes off as the tenement's great white hope. And once she is drawn into Candyman's world, the story loses some of its edge. But Rose wisely concentrates on scares, not sociology.”

Candyman is a horror film that plays it straight. It refuses to resort to irony and self-reflexivity which would dominate the rest of the 1990s with the rise in popularity of the Scream trilogy and its offspring, like I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) and Urban Legends (1998), which knowingly wink at its audience and lets them in on the joke. Candyman is grounded in realism and this makes the more fantastical elements so unsettling. It is also a rare horror film that wrestles with weighty themes such as academic sexism, urban decay, racial tensions and even interracial romance.

SOURCES

Pearlman, Cindy. “Going Behind the Screams with the Candyman Clan.” Chicago Sun-Times. October 20, 1992.

Ryan, James. “Virginia Madsen Graduates from Sultry Vixen to Brainy Blonde.” BPI Entertainment News Wire. October 15, 1992.

Strickler, Jeff. “Candyman Star Found Movie’s Site Haunted by Real Terror of Gangs.” Star Tribune. October 18, 1992.

Wilner, Norman. “A Candy-Coated Urban Legend for the 1990s.” Toronto Star. October 16, 1992.

Nightbreed

“Someone at Morgan Creek said to me, ‘You know, Clive, if you’re not careful some people are going to like the monsters.’ Talk about completely missing the point! Even the company I was making the film for couldn’t comprehend what I was trying to achieve!” – Clive Barker

As children we are scared of the things that go bump in the night or the monster that lurks under the bed. When we grow up we are taught to no longer fear these things but this didn’t seem to happen to novelist Clive Barker. He went on fearing and even identifying with the monsters, celebrating them in his art. After the success of Hellraiser (1987), his directorial debut, anticipation was high for his follow-up Nightbreed (1990), based on his novella Cabal about a secret society of monsters and the troubled young man who seeks them out. While his first film was made independently, this one was backed by a major Hollywood studio – 20th Century Fox – but made under its chairman’s production company Morgan Creek. The end result is a fascinatingly flawed film botched by indifferent handlers with little to no respect for or understanding of Barker’s vision. Despite the studio interference and compromises that he was forced to make, there is a sense that a good film is fighting to get out. Over the years, Nightbreed has developed a small but dedicated following who continue to speculate about the film that could have been and might still be if Barker can ever wrestle the excised footage away from Fox and assemble the film he originally envisioned.

Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) is a young man plagued by troubling dreams of a nightmarish place called Midian populated by monsters but that he believes is where all of his sins will be forgiven. He’s seeing a psychiatrist named Dr. Decker (David Cronenberg), who, in his spare time, moonlights as a serial killer that slaughters entire families. He proceeds to pin these murders on Boone and convinces his patient that he is the killer. Decker drugs Boone who leaves his office and gets into an accident. In the hospital, Boone meets a fellow patient who speaks of Midian as a place “where the monsters go.” He tells Boone where it is in exchange for accompanying him there. However, the guy also happens to be as crazy as a loon and proceeds to scalp himself in Barker’s first show-stopping gore effect.

Boone finds Midian and meets its denizens and this is where the film really takes off as Barker introduces all kinds of fantastic looking monsters, chief among them Peloquin (Oliver Parker), a fiend that looks like he just came out of the Cantina in Star Wars (1977), only much more evil-looking than anything in George Lucas’ film. Peloquin is Boone’s introduction to Midian and he also gets to speak most of the film’s memorable lines with that great deep voice and cocky attitude that is reminiscent of Bill Paxton’s scene-stealing vampire in Near Dark (1987). In pursuit of Boone are his girlfriend Lori (Anne Bobby) and Decker – she out of love and the good doctor – well, he wants to find the Nightbreed and kill them all because they are freakish aberrations that must be completely wiped out.

The most fascinating bits of Nightbreed are Boone’s initiation into the Breed and the glimpses that Barker gives us of life in Midian, an underworld populated by all kinds of creatures. They used computer-controlled animatronics but only where necessary. Bob Keen and his crew had two months to play around with ideas before doing any modeling work. There are all kinds of levels to Midian, complete with nooks and cranies – places where these creatures live. At one point, Lori looks for Boone in Midian and we are introduced to various members of the Breed. The deeper she goes, the more interesting looking the creatures are that she encounters.

It goes without saying that David Cronenberg is perfectly cast as Decker. It was Barker’s idea to cast him in the role after seeing the Canadian filmmaker in a documentary. There has always been something slightly ominous about the man, even in interviews. He looks like a psychiatrist as opposed to a legendary filmmaker and Barker taps into that, creating a truly unsettling psychopath who is a more horrific monster than anything that lives in Midian. Cronenberg brings just the right mix of mundane creepiness and subtle menace to the role. Decker is the pure incarnation of evil, driven by his own trivial power fantasies, or, as he puts it at one point, “I’m death, plain and simple.”

When I first saw Nightbreed I can remember not being too thrilled with Craig Sheffer’s performance. I found him to be stiff and miscast in the role of Boone. He wasn’t how I pictured the character when I read Barker’s novella. Many years later and his performance has grown on me. He seems credible as a confused young man who puts his trust in a psychiatrist that is clearly bad news from get-go. Maybe it is because of the footage that the studio removed, but his motivation for wanting to seek out Midian and join the Breed is not established very well. All we get is him dreaming of the place and his desire to seek it out when he meets with Decker. I get that Boone’s desire is to find refuge in a place where all of what he perceives to be his sins will be absolved. The cruel irony is that he’s an innocent only to be brought over to the other side by one of the Breed. But this is not really the strongest foundation for him to go to the lengths that he does in the film.

Sadly, the weakest performance in the film is Anne Bobby as Lori, Boone’s girlfriend. She does little in the film but act as a damsel in distress and I don’t know if it is the script or Bobby’s performance but she comes across as quite bland. One wonders why Boone goes to lengths that he does to save her from Decker. Maybe it is Bobby as she gave a bland performance in Beautiful Girls (1996) as well. Of course, up against a formidable ensemble cast like the one in that film, it’s no wonder, but in Nightbreed she adds little to the film except serve as a plot device.

As Barker finished writing Cabal, he realized that it would make a good film that he would direct himself. He always loved monsters and felt that “there’s a corner of all of us that envies their powers and would love to live forever, or to fly, or to change shape at will. So, when I came to make a movie about monsters, I wanted to create a world we’d feel strangely at home in.” He was interested in creating a “horror mythology from the ground up” and developing characters that would live on in sequels. His goal was to make the Star Wars of horror films. The monsters in the novel are represented impressionistically over two or three paragraphs and Barker had to visualize them in much greater detail for the film.

Nightbreed was the first of a planned three-picture deal with Morgan Creek that included an adaptation of Son of Celluloid and a sequel to Nightbreed. Hellraiser had a budget of $2 million while Nightbreed had one of $11 million, a considerable difference which allowed Barker to realize his ambitious project. The first compromise Barker made was to change the title to Nightbreed because Morgan Creek insisted on a more commercial title and told the filmmaker that they thought Cabal didn’t mean anything. He used three soundstages at Pinewood Studios and shot on location in Canada. For example, the final confrontation between Eigerman’s (Charles Haid) troops and the Breed was shot over a two-and-a-half week period at Pinewood. Towards the end of principal photography, Barker brought Star Wars concept artist Ralph McQuarrie into paint mattes for the Necropolis sequences and to design the history of the Breed in a symbolic way painted on an enormous mural across a 60-foot space on the set at Pinewood, which was subsequently used in the opening credits.

In late July 1989, the studio announced that the release date for Nightbreed was being pushed back from its original autumn 1989 date to early February 1990 instead. The press release cited “the complex demands of the film’s ground-breaking post-production optical effects,” but also included McQuarrie’s mural and matte paintings, and a week of additional shooting in late August that would see key parts of the narrative re-shot. Barker shot extra scenes over three days in Los Angeles in late 1989 which included additional scenes with Cronenberg that expanded and clarified his character. Barker was also contractually obligated to deliver an R-rated picture and couldn’t make it as a gory as he had done with Hellraiser. Doug Bradley (Pinhead in Hellraiser) was cast as Lylesberg, the Breed's self-elected lawmaker, but in post-production they dubbed over his voice with someone sporting a German accent, much to his chagrin.

Barker previewed his first cut with a temporary soundtrack that did not go well because people were confused by the characters’ motives. He made some changes and a second test screening took place. According to Barker, it was much more successful. However, the ending with Decker’s death was not well-received and Barker changed it. The final director’s cut ran two-and-a-half hours and Fox asked for almost an hour to be cut, prompting editor Richard Marden to resign in protest. The film was cut to two hours and then to a 102 minutes.

The head of marketing at Morgan Creek never watched Nightbreed all the way through because it “disgusted and distressed” him, according to Barker. The studio didn’t understand it, because it had no movie stars, it was violent, and played around with genre conventions too much for their liking. The marketing department found the film difficult to classify because it had elements of both fantasy and horror which they saw as a weakness but which Barker, of course, saw as a strength. So, the studio marketed Nightbreed as a slasher film with television teaser trailers that were confused and did represent it well. It didn’t help that the T.V. trailer that was sent to the MPAA was rejected 12 times. They forbid any monster footage and so it was cut down to someone being terrorized by a razor – representing only five minutes of Barker’s film. They did not promote it well with posters that misinterpreted the content. When Barker saw the way they were selling the film, he “freaked out and said, ‘What are you doing? This isn’t the movie,’ and was given all kinds of excuses... ‘Well, there isn’t time to change it, we have to release it now.’” Looking back, Barker realized that the studio was better at promoting films like White Men Can’t Jump (1992) but “not so good at selling the quirky stuff.” Barker should commiserate with Mike Judge who ran into all kinds of interference with two of his films, Office Space (1999) and Idiocracy (2006) that the same studio had no idea how to sell it and also treated indifferently.

According to Barker, the studio argued that there was no point in showing Nightbreed to film critics because the people who see horror films don’t read reviews. Therefore, the film had to be sold to the lowest common denominator. The studio refused to preview it for critics which only angered them. They were not kind to Barker’s film to say the least. In his review for the Washington Post, Richard Harrington wrote, “Unfortunately, Cronenberg is in front of the camera, leaving Barker in the director's chair. And though Barker is one of the genre's great talents, he lacks the tools to translate his stories from print to celluloid.” In her review for The New York Times, Caryn James wrote, “But surrounded by Mr. Barker's visual clutter and lack of narrative energy, Mr. Cronenberg's presence only highlights the difference between a gruesome but first-rate psychological horror story like Dead Ringers and a mediocrity like Nightbreed.”

The Toronto Star’s Henry Mietkiewicz wrote, “Nightbreed might have been a monster movie milestone, if Clive Barker's directorial abilities had kept pace with his skill as a master of British horror fiction. Unfortunately, Nightbreed probably will be remembered as much for its haphazard plotting and underdeveloped characters as its delightfully daring concept.” The Guardian’s Derek Malcolm wrote, “It is neither direct nor subtle enough as a piece of film-making. It is difficult to suggest that evil is human and monsters have souls within the context of a mountain of special effects. The result is patchy in the extreme and not always capable of transcending a genre that has become less and less intriguing as less and less is left to the imagination.” Entertainment Weekly magazine’s Owen Gleiberman gave the film a “C+” rating and wrote, “Barker spins grisly fantasy out of sexual obsession, yet his style here couldn't be less obsessive. It's cluttered and rather incoherent, as though the trailers to four different horror movies had been spliced together.”

What’s interesting about Nightbreed is how Barker reverses the stereotype perpetuated by many horror films. In this one, it is the monsters who are the sympathetic protagonists that we root for and it is the priests, police and analysts – what Barker calls “the three forces of authority” – that represent the film’s antagonists. In this respect, Nightbreed harkens back to classic horror films of the 1930s, like King Kong (1933), Frankenstein (1931), and its sequel, Bride of Frankenstein (1935), that all feature sympathetic monsters we end up caring about. With Nightbreed, Barker tried to “get at something which I think is the subtext of an awful lot of horror and fantasy movies – that the forces of darkness, the things that are supposedly morally repugnant – are the things we really like.” His film is successful in the sense that we root for the monsters and hope that their society survives while we want to see Decker destroyed.

SOURCES

Barker, Clive. “Chains of Love.” Fear. December 1988.

Ferrante, Anthony C. “Barker Looks Back.” Bloody Best of Fangoria. September 1993.

Gilbert, John.”The Breed: The Source of the Soul.” Fear. October 1989.

Jones, Alan. “Clive Barker's Nightbreed.” Cinefantastique. November 1989.

Jones, Alan. “Nightbreed: The Trials and Tribulations of Clive Barker.” Starburst. September 1990.

Nightbreed Presskit. Morgan Creek. 1990.

Salisbury, Mark. “Chains of Love.” Fear. December 1988.

Salisbury, Mark. “Flesh and Fury.” Fear. October 1990.

Timpone, Anthony. “Barker Bites Back.” Fangoria Horror Spectacular. 1990.

Clive Barker's The Plague

There’s an old saying about the road paved with the best of intentions. Writer/director Hal Masonberg and his screenwriting partner Teal Minton tried to cross this road only to be run over both ways. You would assume that they were screwed over by a big Hollywood studio, and that does happen, but they’re first screwed over by a fellow filmmaker. All Masonberg and Minton wanted to do was make a horror film for adults with rich characters and that did not focus on quick scares. Instead, their film The Plague (2006) was taken away from them and tampered with by would-be filmmakers. The result is a sobering cautionary tale that is still awaiting a satisfying conclusion.

All children under the age of nine around the world have unexpectedly lapsed into an eerie comatose state. Ten years later and there is still no change and no answers as to what caused it or a solution. To make matters worse, every child that is born is also in a coma. Fresh out of prison, Tom Russell (James Van Der Beek) returns home to a small town in New Hampshire to reconnect with his brother Dave (Arne MacPherson) and his ex-wife Jean (Ivana Milocevic).

The children are housed in the local high school. There is an effective, unsettling shot of a school gymnasium filled with hospital beds of comatose teenagers. If that wasn’t creepy enough, at two specific times a day, they all experience brief violent seizures. One night, all the children wake up and become violent killers – a sort of Children of the Damned (1963) if the kids had hit puberty.

Tom teams up with Sam (Brad Hunt), Jean’s brother and they fight to stay alive while trying to figure out how to deal with these homicidal teenagers. The producer’s cut of The Plague proceeds to play out in predictable run-and-fight fashion aping, at times, George Romero’s first two zombie films while reducing genre veteran Dee Wallace into a screaming, ineffectual damsel in distress. Notably absent are any attempts at character development and instead we have a clumsily edited horror film with an emphasis on violence and gore.

The Plague originated from Masonberg and Minton’s decision to channel their love of horror films from their youth because they were dissatisfied with the direction the genre had taken in the last 15 to 20 years. They admired horror films that, according to Masonberg, “dealt with existing social fears.” With their screenplay, they wanted to examine the theme of children and violence in society. According to Minton, their intention was to take “a genre B-movie concept and finding the human story in it, giving it some depth and meaning, while still making something that is scary and exciting.” The two men also wanted to subvert expectations and pose questions that the audience would be left to answer. They were not interested in making a predictable slasher film but instead have most of the physical violence happen off-screen. Masonberg and Minton wrote a story about children and fear in society and how we react to it via the horror genre.

Masonberg and Minton spent five years shopping their script around to various studios but after the Columbine massacre and 9/11 happened, the material became too relevant for studio executives who liked it but wanted to play it safe. Finally, Clive Barker’s production company not only liked the script but wanted to make it into a film. Masonberg and Minton decided to go with Barker’s company because they were told that the company wanted to make smart, adult horror films, like the critically acclaimed Gods and Monsters (1998). Masonberg spent three years developing his film with Barker’s company, fine-tuning the script. According to the director, he was upfront and honest with them from the get-go about the kind of film he wanted to make.

Barker’s company hooked up with another production company called Armada Pictures who put together the financing to get it made. Despite being called Clive Barker’s The Plague, the film is not actually based on any of the man’s work and he never showed up on the set. Masonberg did meet with him before principal photography and found him always friendly and engaging but they never talked about the script. He got the sense that Barker didn’t know what was going on outside of his own personal projects. Masonberg was only given 20 days to shoot his film, ten days less than he was told was needed. He went to Winnipeg, Manitoba in Canada to shoot the film and found out that it had been pre-sold to Sony Screen Gems for domestic distribution. No one told him, however, if the studio wanted to make the same film that he wanted to but at that point there was a few scant weeks from shooting and he was in the middle of pre-production.

Before Masonberg started editing his film, one of the producer’s confided in him that a high-level executive in the production company wanted a very different film than the one that was shot. From what the director has since put together, the production company’s producers told him one thing and told Sony something else entirely. According to Masonberg, Barker’s producers told him that they weren’t going after a domestic distributor until after putting The Plague through the film festival circuit. He was also told that the film’s financing had come from foreign pre-sales which was not true. Sony had financed it from the beginning.

Masonberg was given six weeks to assemble a rough cut of his film, which was a very short period of time. He chose to have one of Barker’s producers with him in order to preserve the artist’s interests in the project. Masonberg actually started editing a week early and put together what he felt was the best cut he could with the time available. During this time he also incorporated the notes from 14 producers (?!) attached to the project. It was in Masonberg’s contract that after he delivered his cut, the producers would get their turn. According to Masonberg, Barker’s people promised that they would all work together and that The Plague did not have to be completed in six weeks. Halfway through the editing process, Masonberg sensed that something wasn’t right. According to the director, one of Barker’s producers became cold and distant. Masonberg conveyed his concern to his agent who told him not to worry.

Masonberg heard through Barker’s people that the artist did not like his cut of The Plague and felt that it was too slow and not gory enough. According to Barker's official site, here is what the man himself had to say:

“Plague was a screw-up. I trusted the director and I wasn’t going to do to Hal what had been done to me by interfering producers over the years; I had pretty much decided I would let him have his way and if we had to have an argument it would be in the cutting-room about the way the picture was cut - so he shoots the picture and then is absent from the cutting-room most of the time. He did a tough job on a very tough schedule but there were things that I begged for at the end, for the producers to throw in some extra money towards Hal so that he could go back and do a couple of extra days’ shooting but they shook their heads and that was the end of that. It is not a movie I am pleased with or proud of - it feels compromised and Hal got in his car and drove away before the picture was even locked... There were some great scenes, there really are some great scenes and the central notion is wonderfully perverse and apocalyptic but I don’t think Hal served his script how Hal-the-screenwriter imagined it, it was not the movie I read and that Hal pitched to us, a real shame as the script was just so damn good.”

Masonberg was unable to contact Barker because his producers did their best to keep them apart. According to Masonberg, he was then kicked off his own film in the “most abusive and unprofessional way,” when Barker’s production company didn’t like his cut of the film. They ended up editing it from scratch and he remembers them telling him, “We’re cutting down the characters and turning this into a killer-kid film.” In addition, they did not want the director present at any screenings of the film. Masonberg was understandably devastated by this betrayal.

Things only got worse. Masonberg’s manager talked with an executive at Sony in charge of the film and was told that the studio owned it and did not see the need to have the writer or the director involved any longer. Masonberg was shocked at this reaction considering that he had not talked to anyone at Sony since the production began and had nothing but good relations with them on previous projects.

Getting kicked off his own film, a project that Masonberg had lived with for years, made him deeply depressed, angry, bitter, and sad. Fortunately, he had kept the film’s dailies on DVD and began to put together the version he originally intended before the whole post-production nightmare. He spent the winter up in Canada with his girlfriend editing The Plague on his Macintosh laptop using Final Cut Pro. He then came back to Los Angeles and created his own post-production facility in his living room. Masonberg spent eight more months editing the film and then taught himself sound design, visual effects, and how to create a temporary score.

Masonberg’s version sets itself apart from the producer’s cut right from the start with a quote from Ezekiel 5:17 that speaks of a plague that will rob people of their children. Masonberg’s cut opens the film up and lets it breathe like a fine wine. We spend more time with Tom and his brother Dave early on which gives more dramatic impact to what happens to Dave because we’ve become invested in the story and these characters, which was missing from the producer’s cut. Masonberg takes his time and lets us get to know the characters and the world they inhabit, slowly building the tension and dread.

One notices that the temporary soundtrack on the director’s cut is much more understated and less shrill and annoying than the producer’s cut. In a nod to George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Masonberg’s version lingers on the television newscasts that appear sporadically throughout the film instead of relegating them to background noise as in the producer’s cut. The director’s approach gives us some perspective so that we know the plague is definitely a global phenomenon and as a result there is more at stake.

More problematic are nagging questions like why didn’t our heroes just leave town when they had the chance? Another dumb move sees the protagonists leave the only functioning vehicle unattended, after finding out that the killer teens have deactivated all the others, while they go retrieve two other survivors. In the last third of the film, our heroes take total leave of their senses and make a bunch of stupid decisions that is frustrating to watch. This isn’t entirely cleared up in the director’s cut.

There is a haunting shot early on of a deserted playground as Tom comes back home. Masonberg’s cut lingers longer on Tom’s arrival and establishes much more effectively a tragic atmosphere as his hometown has been rendered a ghost town because of the plague. There are also plenty of chilling images, including one of a little boy emotionlessly breaking a clergyman’s neck.

After the mainstream success of Dawson’s Creek, James Van Der Beek has been trying to shed his squeaky clean image from that show with edgy fare like the adaptation of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel Rules of Attraction (2002). In The Plague, he plays a man wracked with guilt and looking for some kind of redemption. Tom carries around a well-thumbed copy of The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck that the producer’s cut clumsily tries to suggest that we should equate Tom with the book’s troubled protagonist Tom Joad. In Masonberg’s version, Tom comes across as more thoughtful than simply a stereotypical stoic man of action as he is presented in the producer’s cut.

The difference between Masonberg’s version and the producer’s cut is like night and day. For example, Sam is no longer a one-note sidekick and source of comic relief and Dee Wallace no longer has a shrill, pointless cameo. More of Bill Butler’s atmospheric cinematography is preserved and the transitions between scenes make more sense and are smoother in nature. It’s amazing what a difference editing makes and how Masonberg delivered a much more thoughtful, coherent version when given the opportunity to do so.

The Plague was released straight-to-DVD in September 2006 to generally negative reviews. According to Masonberg, his film was completely restructured and stock footage and new dialogue was added. Eight months later, Masonberg started his campaign to get his version of The Plague released because, legally, he can’t show his version of the film. He has created a website, made a mini-documentary called Spreading The Plague chronicling his ordeal, and gotten the word out on radio show, interviews with movie web sites, and pretty much to anybody who would listen.

It is rather ironic that Masonberg and Minton had no desire to make a mainstream horror film but rather something that would be more personal and character-driven and the one that was officially released was exactly the kind of film they didn’t want to make. Hopefully, word will get out about what happened to The Plague and people who care about preserving an artist’s original vision will let Sony know that Masonberg and Minton’s version should be given the chance to be seen.

SOURCES

Masonberg, Hal. “Spreading The Plague: The Perfect Hollywood Ending.”

Murphy, Carrie. “An Interview with Hal Masonberg.”

Thurber, Anthony. “10 Questions with Hal Masonberg.” FilmArcade.net. July 10, 2008.