Videodrome

David Cronenberg’s early career saw him create several memorable body horror films that involved the destruction of the body via parasites (Shivers), or disease via surgery (Rabid) or mutation that results in telepathic powers (Scanners). Videodrome (1983) marked the apex of this period with the filmmaker masterfully fusing notions of the body horror genre with his fascination with the blurring of the boundaries between man and technology in very provocative ways. The end result was a rare horror film that incorporated elements of science fiction in ways that were as smart and thought-provoking as they were gory and scary.

Max Renn (James Woods) is the unscrupulous president of a small, cable television station that appeals to the lowest common denominator. He’s fully committed to his job, willing to visit a sleazy dive hotel to meet with Japanese businessmen peddling softcore pornography in order to find programming that will “break through,” and is “something tough.” This leads him to Videodrome, a violent, pirate broadcast of an anonymous woman being tortured. Intrigued, he has his resident technician, Harlan (Peter Dvorsky), use their satellite technology to find and record more of these illicit broadcasts.

While defending the unsavory aspects of his T.V. station on a local talk show, Max meets and shamelessly hits on Nicki (Deborah Harry), a beautiful woman who hosts a self-help radio program. She publicly criticizes his station but when they go out on a date, reveals a kinky side to her personality. While having sex, she has Max perform several sadomasochistic acts on her while watching the Videodrome tape. Nicki ends up being Max’s entry into the world of Videodrome as the boundaries between his reality and what he sees on television begin to blur. Is it live or is it Videodrome?

Max’s search for the origins of Videodrome lead him to seek out Professor Brian O’Blivion (Jack Creley), head of the Cathode Ray Mission, a refuge for homeless people, giving them a safe haven to watch T.V. He believes that T.V. plays an important role in everyone’s lives. O’Blivion never actually meets with anyone, preferring instead to communicate via messages on videotape. He sees Videodrome as the next step in human evolution, the merging of flesh and technology as a revolutionary act (“Long live the new flesh!”) – something that Max eventually experiences first hand. As the film progresses, he peels back the layers to discover more insidious intentions behind Videodrome that have political implications in ways that he could never have imagined.

James Woods has never been afraid to play unlikable characters and the amoral Max is certainly one of them and yet the actor’s natural charisma makes his disreputable broadcaster somewhat sympathetic – especially once his life gets progressively weirder. Max is one of Cronenberg’s trademark protagonists whose inherent curiosity leads them to seek out and uncover secret, underground groups while undergoing a personal transformation in the process. A musician by trade, Deborah Harry is excellent as the mysterious and very uninhibited Nicki whose sadomasochistic tendencies fascinate and horrify Max. She is his guide through the looking glass as it were.

What is most striking about Videodrome is how ahead of its time it was in anticipating people’s fascination and access to the illegal and the forbidden. Max’s obsession with the obtaining and broadcasting of twisted, sexual fantasies has now become even more prevalent with the widespread proliferation of the Internet. Cronenberg’s film also anticipates the notoriety of snuff films like the Faces of Death tapes of the 1980s. Like the Videodrome transmissions, they supposedly showed real deaths and acts of torture (it was later revealed to be staged footage). The program featured in Cronenberg’s film has no story or plot, anticipating the torture porn subgenre by many years.

There is some truly disturbing, uniquely Cronenbergian imagery on display in this film as Max begins hallucinating because of his exposure to Videodrome. At first, he mistakes his personal assistant for Nicki and then sees a videotape pulsate like a living organism. Cronenberg deftly blends reality with Max’s surrealistic hallucinations, culminating in the iconic set piece of a living, breathing T.V. set that threatens to absorb Max. It transforms into a throbbing, sexual object – an extension of Nicki – that seduces him. It is media philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s famous dictum, “The medium is the message,” represented visually.

Videodrome also continues Cronenberg’s pre-occupation with secret organizations that operate beyond the boundaries of what is socially acceptable and permitted. They work towards a greater goal that involves the next step in human evolution. In the case of this film, it is the merging of man and technology as one character, Professor O’Blivion, exists entirely on videotape. In fact, he comes across as quite the McLuhan-esque figure with such proclamations as, “The television screen has become the retina of the mind’s eye.”

Videodrome arguably best represents Cronenberg’s obsession with the merging of man and technology, flesh and electricity. In this respect, it was very influential as evident with the same kind of ominous presence and surrealistic effects of electricity as in David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992). The dangerous manipulation of a video image would also be explored in Lynch’s Lost Highway (1997). Videodrome’s influence can also be seen in the music video world with the notorious Broken music video collection (that played with staged snuff film imagery) by Nine Inch Nails as well as Japanese horror films, like the Ringu series, that were released in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Cronenberg’s film was also a game changer in how it commented on the invasive nature of technology in our lives – something that Cronenberg would revisit with Existenz (1999) years later – and has only become more prevalent since, making Videodrome even more relevant today.

Friday the 13th: The Series

In the late 1980’s, Frank Mancuso Jr., then caretaker of the popular and profitable Friday the 13th series of films, decided to branch off into a television series but without the hockey mask-clad killer Jason, much like John Carpenter’s decision for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) to not feature Michael Myers. Of course, we all know how well that went over with fans of that particular franchise so most were expecting history to repeat itself with the Friday the 13th show. After much publicized growing pains, the show hit its stride towards the end of the first season as it followed the adventures of a trio of antique store owners searching for cursed objects. It became the second highest rated first-run syndicated show for the much coveted male 18 to 49-year-old demographic, just behind Star Trek: The Next Generation. The show went on for two more season before being cancelled and now enjoys a dedicated cult following.


After their Uncle Lewis Vendredi (R.G. Armstrong) leaves them his antiques shop, distant cousins Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay) and Micki Foster (Louise Robey) discover that it houses all kinds of supernatural-endowed objects. In the pilot episode, they attempt to sell off all the items in the store, not realizing their otherworldly properties. Pretty soon they meet Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), a friend of their recently deceased uncle and supplier of several of the items in the store. He informs them that the items they sold were cursed and together discover the store manifest. It turns out that Lewis made a pact with the Devil for some of the items in the store. And so, Jack, Micki and Ryan have to locate and retrieve each item before they do too much damage to their new owners.

First on the list is a possessed doll belonging to a spoiled brat of a girl (played by a very young, pre-The Adventures of Baron Munchausen Sarah Polley). Pretty soon the doll turns homicidal a la the killer toys in Stuart Gordon’s Dolls (1987). “The Baron’s Bride” features a cursed cape that transports a newly turned vampire as well as Ryan and Micki to Victorian England for striking sequences that are shot in black and white so as to evoke classic horror films with Bram Stoker featured as a prominent character. This is perhaps my favorite episode of this season and shows how the show’s producers were able to get a surprisingly atmospheric and cinematic look on a low budget.

“Faith Healer” was directed by none other than horror auteur David Cronenberg and features a smoke and mirrors miracle man by the name of Stewart Fishoff (Miguel Fernandez). In the opening scene, he’s exposed as a fraud by Jerry Scott (Cronenberg regular Robert Silverman), a friend of Jack’s. However, Fishoff discovers a magical glove that can transfer someone’s physical ailments to innocent people, killing them. Naturally, he abuses this ability for dubious personal gain, becoming famous on T.V. as a result. Jack happens to catch Fishoff’s theatrics on T.V. and discovers that the glove is a cursed item. Cronenberg’s trademark skepticism for power hungry public figures is channeled through the amoral Fishoff. This episode is anchored by a strong performance from Robert Silverman whose character, as it turns out, has his own agenda. He brings an eccentric style of acting that gives the episode emotional resonance, especially when he comes up against Jack and their friendship is put to the test.

“The Quilt of Hathor” is season one’s magnum opus, a two-parter about a cursed quilt that allows whoever sleeps under it to dream to death their enemies – Satan’s security blanket perhaps? However, it turns out that the quilt was created by Salem witches. Ryan and Micki travel to a village populated by Amish-like people. He even ends up falling in love with the preacher’s daughter in a forbidden romance a la Witness (1985), albeit with a supernatural angle.

Genre veteran Billy Drago stars in “Read My Lips” as Edgar, the owner of a supernatural ventriloquist’s dummy known as Oscar. The dummy forces Edgar to kill and before you can say Child’s Play (1988), their act has become a success. In an intriguing twist, Micki and Ryan discover that the dummy derives its powers from a cursed boutonniere that was actually used by Hitler in occult ceremonies. Edgar manages to break free from Oscar’s influence and the dummy latches onto a new owner, show biz wannabe Travis Plunkette (John Byner). Freed from playing one-note villains, Drago displays a refreshing amount of depth, imbuing Edgar with a twinge of tragedy.

“Scarlet Cinema” is an atmospheric homage to the classic Universal horror films with a geeky film student (Jonathan Wise) obsessed with The Wolf Man (1941), starring Lon Chaney Jr. and Claude Rains. He discovers a cursed movie camera, which allows him to realize his own lycanthropic aspirations and get revenge on some of his classmates. There are even clips from the actual film integrated into this episode in order to show how closely this guy identifies with it. Highlights include the footage that manifests itself within the cursed camera, shot in black and white just like The Wolf Man. The use of noirish lighting during the night time scenes on campus are excellent, enhancing the cinematic feel of this episode. The tense, final showdown between our heroes and the film student are juxtaposed with the actual film for quite an exciting finale.

John D. LeMay plays Ryan as an energetic goofball and a bit of a geek who is eager to believe in the supernatural, while Robey’s red-haired Micki is beautiful and the resident skeptic. In some respects they anticipate the dynamic between Mulder and Scully in The X-Files by a few years. Ryan and Micki’s relationship with Jack, the older wiser mentor and bookish type, also anticipates a similar one in Buffy the Vampire Slayer between Buffy, her friends and Giles, the school’s librarian. The Curious Goods antiques shop with its cursed objects that often fall into the wrong hands with disastrous consequences seems to evoke the one that all the stories revolve around in the classic British horror anthology film From Beyond the Grave (1974).

From its inception, Friday the 13th: The Series was never intended to have ties to the series of films of the same name and was intended to exist in its own world. It was originally called The 13th Hour among other titles but the show’s creators – Frank Mancuso Jr. and Larry B. Williams – soon realized that to survive in first-run syndication they needed a title that created awareness and curiosity. So, they took the title Friday the 13th from the popular horror film series and came up with a whole new idea around it. This was the first time that Mancuso had produced a T.V. show and he admitted that it went through some growing pains during the first season as “it took the first three or four episodes to figure out what we did and did now want to be doing.” He felt that it wasn’t as cinematic looking as he would’ve liked and they didn’t get the right mix of humor either. Mancuso candidly admitted that the show’s three protagonists were not fully developed and were often overshadowed by the flashy FX. However, he did feel that towards the end of the first season the show became more character-driven.

However, there was plenty turmoil behind the scenes as the show had a very rocky start. The budget for the FX was not very large and so screenplays featured 10-60 effects shots with only ten days of pre-production, forcing the crew to work fast and improvise when necessary. In addition, filming in Toronto, Canada forced the production to adhere to regulations of 50% Canadian talent. To make matters worse, a disgruntled former employee claimed that the story editors took control of the show, dictating the amount of special effects used leading to a breakdown in communication. Head of the FX department Michael (The Dead Zone) Lennick left the show after four episodes during the first season because of the long hours he worked for wages that did not reflect the time and energy he put it in. FX artist Al (Brain Damage) Magliochetti also left around the same time for similar reasons and cited the conflict between Mancuso, who wanted an effects-heavy show, versus producer Iain Patterson, who did not, and this resulted in confusion as to the direction the show should take.

Friday the 13th: The Series was the second highest rated syndicated series male 18 to 49-year-old demographic after Star Trek: The Next Generation. For its second season, the show moved from late-night to prime time going up against the likes of Freddy’s Nightmares and yet another incarnation of the Twilight Zone. Friday also enjoyed a significant increase in budget allowing for more elaborate sets and a wider variety of locations.

Despite some cheesy effects (check out the floating monk in “The Poison Pen”), the first season featured episodes directed by notable Canadian filmmakers like Atom Egoyan and the aforementioned Cronenberg. Along with genre shows like War of the Worlds and Freddy’s Nightmares, Friday the 13th: The Series pushed the envelope for what was known at the time as “acceptable content” with its depiction of violence, gore and sexuality on T.V. It was also part of an exciting mini-invasion of Canadian T.V. along with Diamonds, Night Heat and Degrassi Junior High. Its legacy continues on with shows like Warehouse 13, whose premise seems like a thinly-veiled copy of Friday the 13th: The Series with a goofy young man and sexy woman duo seeking cursed items with the help of an older mentor type. Regardless, Friday has endured with many episodes standing the test of time, featuring thought-provoking ideas, clever premises and a striking cinematic look that anticipated shows like Twin Peaks and The X-Files. I think it’s safe to say that the show has finally gotten out from under the shadow of its more famous cinematic namesake and deserves to be regarded among some of the best genre T.V. that the 1980’s had to offer.

Note: Check out this fantastic fansite dedicated to the show.

SOURCES

Bloch-Hansen, Peter. “Friday the 13^th The Series Survives.” Fangoria.

Kimber, Gary. “The Unmaking of Friday the 13^th – The Series.” Cinefantastique. May 1988.

Shapiro, Marc. “What, No Jason?” Fangoria. May 1988.

Shapiro, Marc. “Mancuso’s Shop of Horrors Part Two.” Fangoria. July 1989.

David Cronenberg Blogathon: Naked Lunch

BLOGGER'S NOTE: This post originally appeared over at Tony Dayoub's blog Cinematic Viewfinder as part of his fantastic David Cronenberg Blogathon. If you haven't already, I highly recommend you check out all the wonderful submissions and links that he's posted.

Widely regarded as unfilmable because it defied normal narrative logic and for containing some of the most perverse, often disturbing passages of sex and violence ever committed to the page, William S. Burroughs' seminal novel Naked Lunch was the ideal project for filmmaker David Cronenberg. In many respects, the themes and subject matter the book explores parallel many of the preoccupations of his films: the merging of flesh with machines, human transformation, and secret societies. One only has to look at an early film like Videodrome (1983) to see Burroughs’ influence — the mix of pulpy exploitation with high concept ideas. The characters in Cronenberg’s films, like the characters in Burroughs’ fiction, are morally ambiguous. It is not as easy to identify with them as it is with characters in more mainstream entertainment.

As Cronenberg was the first to admit, a conventional adaptation of Naked Lunch is impossible as it would be banned in every country. So, he wisely merged key elements from the book along with bits and pieces from the author’s early novels, chief among them Junky and Exterminator!, with aspects of Burroughs’ life, tempered with black humor as we are taken to surreal places. The end result is a fascinating collaboration between two like-minded artists and a film that is ultimately about the writing process as it defines the film’s protagonists much as it did Burroughs – writing acts as a catharsis, a way of dealing with guilt.

Ornette Coleman’s freaky, free-form jazz complements Howard Shore’s ominous score to create a film noir vibe right from the start which is in keeping in tone with Burroughs’ early work that often parodied badly written pulp crime novels. When he’s not spraying for bugs at people’s homes to pay the bills, Bill Lee (Peter Weller) hangs out with his friends, and fellow writers, Martin (Michael Zelniker) and Hank (Nicholas Campbell) who are introduced arguing about the writing process. Hank (a thinly-veiled riff on Jack Kerouac) argues that to rewrite is to betray ones own thoughts as it disrupts the flow of words while Martin (a stand-in for Allen Ginsberg) counters by saying that one should rewrite so that they consider everything from every possible angle in order to produce the best work possible. Hank sees this as censorship and a betrayal of one’s own best, honest and most primitive thoughts. When asked for his opinion, Bill simply replies, “exterminate all rational thought.”

Bill is in danger of losing his job because he keeps running out of bug powder. It seems that his wife Joan (Judy Davis) is shooting it up. When he confronts her about it, she deadpans, “It’s a Kafka high. You feel like a bug.” Pretty soon she’s doing so much of it that all she has to do is breathe on a cockroach and it dies. Bill soon starts shooting up bug powder too and begins to imagine giant talking insects that tell him he’s actually a secret agent. He’s instructed to kill his wife who happens to be a rival agent for Interzone Incorporated, a shadowy organization. The boundaries between what are real and what are Bill’s elaborate hallucinations become blurred, leading him into the mysterious realm of Interzone where everyday objects, like his typewriter, transform into mechanized insects that talk to him. The line between what he is writing and what he is living becomes blurred beyond recognition, much like Max and his relationship to television in Videodrome.

In real life, Burroughs accidentally shot his wife in 1951 while they were living in Mexico City and it was this tragic incident that motivated him to become a writer as a way of dealing with the guilt over what he had done. He said, “I am forced to the appalling conclusion that I would never have become a writer but for Joan’s death.” Cronenberg understands what a pivotal part this played in Burroughs’ life and incorporates it into his film. In a nice touch, there is a scene where Bill goes to a pawnshop and trades in the gun he shot Joan with for a typewriter. It’s a symbolic transition from one phase of his life to another.

Bill uses drugs to escape the horror of what he has done and his mind creates an elaborate alternate reality known as Interzone where he is a secret agent that writes reports (a.k.a. his book) about his “mission” on a creepy bug/typewriter hybrid that gets aroused by his forceful typing. He travels through a shadowy world where he is reunited with Joan, this time around a femme fatale type, Yves Cloquet (Julian Sands), a suave businessman that sexually preys on young men, and the notorious Dr. Benway (Roy Scheider), who initially seems to want to help Bill but turns out to be the powerful puppetmaster of Interzone.

Thankfully, Cronenberg retains Burroughs’ dry, sardonic sense of humor as well as touching upon his self-loathing about being homosexual. He’s aided in these endeavors by Peter Weller’s excellent performance as Burroughs surrogate Bill Lee. No stranger to fantastical genre films (see RoboCop and The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai), the actor nails Burroughs’ unique cadence – the lazy drawl and the dry wit. Hearing him recite several amusing stories right out of Naked Lunch, coupled with his tall, gaunt appearance, only reinforces how well cast he was in this role. Weller also does a good job conveying the lonely desperation of a strung-out junkie and the almost zombie-like state he achieves when zonked out of his head on junk. Along with her role in Barton Fink (1991), Judy Davis plays the doomed muse of a writer consumed by his obsessions. As Joan Lee, Davis is quite good as an almost vampiric drug addict complete with sallow complexion and haunted look. As Joan Frost, Bill’s Interzone version of his wife, she’s healthier and more confident but the end result is still the same.

In 1984, producer Jeremy Thomas met David Cronenberg at the Toronto Film Festival where he had bought the rights to Stephen Frears’ film The Hit (1984). Thomas had heard that Cronenberg wanted to do a film adaptation of Naked Lunch and he wanted to produce it. This wasn’t the first time someone expressed an interest in turning the book into a film. In 1971, long-time friend of William S. Burroughs and painter and writer, Brion Gysin wrote a screenplay. Antony Balch was going to direct and Mick Jagger was going to star in it but the project never got past the planning stages. Burroughs said of this version that the script was “long burlesque and includes a series of music-hall comedy songs.” In 1972, television producer Chuck Barris, of all people, gave it a go with writer Terry Southern as the proposed screenwriter but it too went nowhere (the mind boggles at what those two would’ve come up with!). In 1979, Frank Zappa approached Burroughs with the notion of doing Naked Lunch as an off-Broadway musical but again this never materialized.

After Cronenberg and Thomas met, the producer optioned Burroughs’ novel. That same year, Cronenberg met the legendary author at his 70th birthday party at the Limelight Night Club in New York City. He had seen and admired several of Cronenberg’s films and also had an affinity for many of the themes they explored. Burroughs said, “when I heard that David was interested in doing the film I thought … he’s the one that can do it if anyone can.” The next year, Cronenberg, Burroughs and Thomas traveled to Tangier, the city where the book was written, in order to retrace its creation.

Cronenberg and Thomas began the process of adapting the book into a film in 1985. Not surprisingly, they had a difficult time getting financing for the film because of the book’s notorious reputation of being unfilmable. Cronenberg said, “a literal translation just wouldn’t work. It would cost $400 million to make and would be banned in every country in the world.” During the five years of the film’s development, Cronenberg kept in contact with Burroughs and explained that the film would be about the act of writing Naked Lunch. He finished the first draft of the script in 1989 while on location in England, acting in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (1990).

He gave the book’s fragmented collection of set pieces a more traditional narrative structure. While the Mugwump creatures are a Burroughs invention from the book, the insect typewriters were created by Cronenberg to bring to “the screen things that can’t be shown in a mainstream movie.” In addition to drawing from Naked Lunch, he also incorporated elements from other books by Burroughs, like Exterminator!, Queer and Letters to Allen Ginsberg. Burroughs read the script around the Christmas of 1989. He called Cronenberg and told him how much he liked it. The filmmaker finished the script in June 1990 and then scouted locations in Tangier with Thomas, production designer Carol Spier and director of photography Peter Suschitzky.

While working on the script, Cronenberg received a letter from actor Peter Weller. He had heard about the project while making RoboCop 2 (1990). Weller was a big fan of both Burroughs’ books and Cronenberg’s films. In his letter, he inquired about any involvement with the project. The two men met in New York City nine months later and the actor landed the lead role. To prepare for the film, Weller met Burroughs several times in the fall of 1990. When Judy Davis read the script she was so horrified by it that she threw it against the wall. She ended up reading it eight times and talked to Cronenberg on the phone before she agreed to do the film. She said, “I felt there was something I could learn as an actress through doing it, through facing my fears.” She did not read the novel but did read a lot about expatriate American writers and perfected an American accent.

One week before principal photography was to begin, the Persian Gulf War started and the three-week shoot in Tangier was canceled. Cronenberg rewrote the script over the weekend and decided to shoot the film entirely in Toronto over three months in 1991. According to the director, the film became “more internalized and hallucinatory, so that one understands by the end of the film that Lee never really leaves New York City.”

For the film’s special effects, Cronenberg reunited with Chris Walas and his company, responsible for the gruesome effects on the remake of The Fly (1986). Cronenberg met with Walas nine months before principal photography to discuss his ideas for the film. Three months later, Walas and his team submitted their designs to the director. When Peter Suschitzky first read the script, he felt that it should have an expressionistic look reminiscent of The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) but Cronenberg wanted his film to look normal because the “craziness is interior.” To reflect the film’s dark subject matter, Suschitzky suffused the film with shadows and gave it a “sense of romanticism … a slight sickness that you find in late Romanticism in German literature and art between 1900 and 1930.”

Before the film came out, Cronenberg was misquoted in The Advocate as saying that Burroughs was not a homosexual and the magazine told its readers not to expect much from the film. The director tried unsuccessfully to contact the article’s author. Naked Lunch received predictably mixed reviews from critics. Newsweek magazine’s David Ansen wrote, “Obviously this is not everybody's cup of weird tea: you must have a taste for the esthetics of disgust. For those up to the dare, it's one clammily compelling movie.” Entertainment Weekly gave the film a “B+” rating and Owen Gleiberman praised Peter Weller’s performance: “Peter Weller, the poker-faced star of Robocop, greets all of the hallucinogenic weirdness with a doleful, matter-of-fact deadpan that grows more likable as the movie goes on. The actor's steely robostare has never been more compelling. By the end, he has turned Burroughs' stone-cold protagonist — a man with no feelings — into a mordantly touching hero.” In his review for the Village Voice, J. Hoberman wrote, “Cronenberg has done a remarkable thing. He hasn't just created a mainstream Burroughs on something approximating Burroughs's terms, he's made a portrait of an American writer.” The Chicago Reader’s Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote, “David Cronenberg’s highly transgressive and subjective film adaptation of Naked Lunch ... may well be the most troubling and ravishing head movie since Eraserhead. It is also fundamentally a film about writing — even the film about writing.”

However, Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote, "While I admired it in an abstract way, I felt repelled by the material on a visceral level. There is so much dryness, death and despair here, in a life spinning itself out with no joy". In her review for The New York Times, Janet Maslin wrote, “for the most part this is a coolly riveting film and even a darkly entertaining one, at least for audiences with steel nerves, a predisposition toward Mr. Burroughs and a willingness to meet Mr. Cronenberg halfway", but she did praise Peter Weller's performance: "The gaunt, unsmiling Mr. Weller looks exactly right and brings a perfect offhandedness to his disarming dialogue.” Time magazine’s Richard Corliss called the film, “tame compared with its source.” In his review for the Washington Post, Desson Howe criticized what he felt to be a “lack of conviction.”

Burroughs saw the film and liked it, saying, “of course, it’s a Cronenberg film. I think he’s done a great job. Nothing at all what I would’ve done, but that’s as it should be.”

Ultimately, Naked Lunch is a hallucinatory nightmare with no escape for its protagonist. Try as he might, Bill cannot escape what he did to his wife as much as he can escape who he is – a junkie and a homosexual. There is some sense that by the film’s conclusion he has come to terms with what he’s done and who he is. Everything else – Interzone, etc. – is just window-dressing or, rather, Bill trying to work things out. Writing provides a way for him to come to terms with the guilt he feels. Think of it as writing as a form of catharsis and finishing Naked Lunch offered some kind of closure on a painful part of his life. Cronenberg’s film, along with Barton Fink, are two of the most fascinating films about writers and writing as they explore what motivates one to write. In those two cases it comes out of a great pain and an inner turmoil that, at least in Burroughs’ case, leads to some kind of redemption.

SOURCES

Indiana, Gary. “The Naked Lunch Report.” Village Voice. December 31, 1991.

Snowden, Lynn. “Which Is the Fly and Which is the Human?” Esquire. February 1992.

Weinrich, Regina. “Naked Lunch: Behind the Scenes.” Entertainment Weekly. January 17, 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.