Introduction
Biography
Clive Barker (Liverpool, 1952-)
A visionary, fantasist, poet and painter, Clive Barker has expanded the reaches of human imagination as a novelist, director, screenwriter and dramatist. An inveterate seeker who traverses between myriad styles with ease, Clive has left his indelible artistic mark on a range of projects that reflect his creative grasp of contemporary media — from familiar literary terrain to the progressive vision of his Seraphim production company. The 1998 movie, Gods and Monsters, which he executive produced, garnered three Academy Award® nominations and an Oscar® for Best Adapted Screenplay. The following year, Clive joined the ranks of such illustrious authors as Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Annie Dillard and Aldous Huxley when his collection of literary works was inducted into the Perennial line at HarperCollins, which then published The Essential Clive Barker, a 700-page anthology with an introduction by Armistead Maupin.
Clive began his odyssey in the theatres of Liverpool and London, scripting original plays for his group The Dog Company, including The History of the Devil, Frankenstein in Love and Crazyface. Soon, Clive began publishing his The Books of Blood short fiction collections; but it was his debut novel, The Damnation Game that widened his already growing international audience.
Clive shifted gears in 1986 when he directed Hellraiser, based on his novella The Hellbound Heart, which became a veritable cult classic on its release the following year, spawning a slew of sequels, several lines of comic books, and an array of merchandising. In 1990, he adapted and directed Nightbreed from his short story Cabal. Two years later, Clive executive produced the housing-project story Candyman, as well as its 1995 sequel, Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh. Also that year, he directed Scott Bakula and Famke Janssen in the noir-esque detective tale, Lord of Illusions.
Clive’s literary works include such best-selling fantasies as Weaveworld, Imajica, The Great and Secret Show, Everville, Sacrament, Galilee and Coldheart Canyon and the children’s fable, The Thief of Always. The first of his quintet of children’s books, Abarat, was published in 2002 to resounding critical acclaim, followed by Abarat II: Days of Magic, Nights of War and Abarat III: Absolute Midnight; Clive is currently completing the fourth in the series.
His latest book is The Scarlet Gospels which sees two of his most famous literary creations – Pinhead and Harry D’Amour – pitted against each other both on Earth and in Hell.
Clive has been an accomplished artist and photographer for as long as he has been a wordsmith. His canvases have been shown in solo exhibitions in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles and his artwork is celebrated in the continuing series of Imaginer volumes.
In 2012 Clive was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Horror Writer’s Association, for his outstanding contribution to the genre.
Literature Review
Originally published in 1985 in Volume Five of the Books of Blood, Clive was inspired by cautionary tales told to him as a child by his grandmother.
Marrying common elements and fears – the hook-handed man, castration, the uncatchable killer and urban brutality – the story explores not only the narrative of an urban myth but the very nature of mythology, playing on the fame of a whispered myth as it spreads:
‘I am rumour,’ he sang in her ear. ‘It’s a blessed condition, believe me. To live in people’s dreams; to be whispered at street corners, but not have to be.’
“I was writing about the experience of horror,” says Clive. “This was about why we write those tales, why we hear those tales. The story was about story itself.”
The character of the Candyman draws upon a motif Clive had long been developing since writing his 1973 play, Hunters in the Snow – that of the calmly spoken gentleman-villain – who seduces Helen with the poetry of Shakespeare and the measured rhythms of a lover. Hellraiser’s Pinhead would later share some of these characteristics and be all the more terrifying for it.
The character of the Candyman draws upon a motif Clive had long been developing since writing his 1973 play, Hunters in the Snow – that of the calmly spoken gentleman-villain – who seduces Helen with the poetry of Shakespeare and the measured rhythms of a lover. Hellraiser’s Pinhead would later share some of these characteristics and be all the more terrifying for it.
“I use a quote from Hamlet in the story: Sweets to the sweet,” he notes. The earlier origin of the quote is Biblical:
Judges 14: 14: “And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”
“In England, we have golden syrup. The makers of this syrup put on their can a picture of the partially rotted corpse of a lion with bees flying around it, and the Biblical quote…”
The makers of the golden syrup were Tate and Lyle. Clive had named his heroine Helen Buchanan (but Bernard Rose later renamed her Helen Lyle) and the bees and the sweetness coalesced into the story elements.
As Clive notes today, the figure of the Candyman in The Forbidden wears a motley, his appearance is multi-coloured, standing for every kind of ‘other’ – making his universal story adaptable to resonate widely with all who are outsiders or marginalised.
He was bright to the point of gaudiness: his flesh a waxy yellow, his thin lips pale blue, his wild eyes glittering as if their irises were set with rubies. His jacket was a patchwork, his trousers the same. He looked, she thought, almost ridiculous, with his blood-stained motley, and the hint of rouge on his jaundiced cheeks…
And she was almost enchanted. By his voice, by his colours, by the buzz from his body.
The short story is set in Clive’s hometown, Liverpool, and the re-location to Chicago can be credited to Bernard Rose, as he and Clive discussed its adaptation for the cinema. Bernard also added the Bloody Mary element of invoking the titular presence by repeating his name in a mirror and the Candyman, played by Tony Todd, reflected the racial and urban setting of Chicago’s Cabrini Green estate.
[Candyman] was Bernard Rose’s baby from the beginning. We shared an agent at CAA and I’d enjoyed Paperhouse – I thought it was tremendous, a smashing picture. Adam [Krentzman] said, “you know, Bernard really likes your short stories and there are two or three he’s interested in and would like to get going…”
Anyway, his favourite story was The Forbidden, because he wanted to deal with the social stuff. He liked the idea of taking a horror story with some social undertones and making a movie of it. This was while I was still living in London, and we sat down several times and talked it through. We agreed that it needed to be relocated to the United States because it was American money and they weren’t going to be interested in a story set in Liverpool. But the Cabrini Green setting I think worked perfectly well. He took the thematic material in the story and expanded it and turned it into something that was very much his own. I watched over the thing and worked with him and story-conferenced with him and did all those things, but at the end of the day it’s Bernard’s movie and I think he did a tremendous piece of work.
As Clive noted on the soundtrack liner notes, Philip Glass’ work had an extraordinary impact on the movie:
Philip elevates horror and suspense to an epic plateau. Moving between the gentle toy piano touches of a child’s grim fairy tale and the sinister pipe organ of the most fearsome of fire and brimstone sermons, Philip Glass has found a way to evoke the web of the collective fears woven across the span of a human lifetime and lay it like a shroud across an hour and a half of our lives. To this very day, this music still sends chills down my spine.
Shown below and in the Archive Gallery are two pages from Clive’s handwritten draft, this same sequence in Clive’s final hand-amended typescript for the Books of Blood, the artwork (by John Stewart) that accompanies The Forbidden’s first stand-alone publication in Fantasy Tales in the summer of 1985, a 1987 Literary Guild advert for the US publication of Volume Five as In The Flesh, a Manifesto Film Sales brochure from 1992, the cover and title page of Bernard Rose’s film script, signed by Virginia Madsen, and the review and listing of Candyman’s screening at the 1992 London Film Festival.
Significance of the Study
The protagonist has come to the Spector Street (wink – wink) housing development hunting for a thesis, and for material to defend a thesis.
….More startling still was the graffiti. That was what she had come here to see, encouraged by Archie’s talk of the place, and she was not disappointed. It was difficult to believe, staring at the multiple layers of designs, names, obscenities, and dogmas that were scrawled and sprayed on every available brick, that Spector Street was barely three and a half years old. The walls, so recently virgin, were now so profoundly defaced that the Council Cleaning Department could never hope to return them to their former condition. A layer of whitewash to cancel this visual cacophony would only offer the scribes a fresh and yet more tempting surface on which to make their mark.
Helen was in seventh heaven. Every corner she turned offered some fresh material for her thesis: ‘Graffiti: the semiotics of urban despair’. It was a subject which married her two favourite disciplines – sociology and aesthetics – and as she wandered around the estate she began to wonder if there wasn’t a book, in addition to her thesis, in the subject. She walked from courtyard to courtyard, copying down a large number of the more interesting scrawlings, and noting their location. Then she went back to the car to collect her camera and tripod and returned to the most fertile of the areas, to make a thorough visual record of the walls….
Like Betjeman’s “Slough,” Spector Street isn’t fit for humans now. Helen meets a woman named Anne-Marie, with a little boy.
….She glanced down at the child, who was sharpening his lollipop on the ground.
This is probably Barker’s finest single sentence, epitomizing the precarious tenancy of workers in an anti-working class environment succumbing to lumpen blight.
Helen [i.e. the kidnapped bride?] ultimately comes upon a maisonette with a cloacal/portal graffiti.
….Outside, the sun found its way between the clouds, and two or three shafts of sunlight slipped between the boards nailed across the bedroom window and pierced the room like annunciations, scoring the opposite wall with bright lines. Here, the graffitists had been busy once more: the usual clamour of love-letters and threats. She scanned the wall quickly, and as she did so her eye was led by the beams of light across the room to the wall which contained the door she had stepped through.
Here, the artists had also been at work, but had produced an image the like of which she had not seen anywhere else. Using the door, which was centrally placed in the wall, as a mouth, the artists had sprayed a single, vast head on to the stripped plaster. The painting was more adroit than most she had seen, rife with detail that lent the image an unsettling veracity. The cheekbones jutting through skin the colour of buttermilk; the teeth – sharpened to irregular points – all converging on the door. The sitter’s eyes were, owing to the room’s low ceiling, set mere inches above the upper lip, but this physical adjustment only lent force to the image, giving the impression that he had thrown his head back. Knotted strands of his hair snaked from his scalp across the ceiling.
Was it a portrait? There was something naggingly specific in the details of the brows and the lines around the wide mouth; in the careful picturing of those vicious teeth. A nightmare certainly: a facsimile, perhaps, of something from a heroin fugue. Whatever its origins, it was potent. Even the illusion of door-as-mouth worked. The short passageway between living-room and bedroom offered a passable throat, with a tattered lamp in lieu of tonsils. Beyond the gullet, the day burned white in the nightmare’s belly. The whole effect brought to mind a ghost train painting. The same heroic deformity, the same unashamed intention to scare. And it worked; she stood in the bedroom almost stupified by the picture, its red-rimmed eyes fixing her mercilessly. Tomorrow, she determined, she would come here again, this time with high-speed film and a flash to illuminate the masterwork.
As she prepared to leave the sun went in, and the bands of light faded. She glanced over her shoulder at the boarded windows, and saw for the first time that one four-word slogan had been sprayed on the wall beneath them.
‘Sweets to the sweet’ it read. She was familiar with the quote, but not with its source. Was it a profession of love? If so, it was an odd location for such an avowal. Despite the mattress in the corner, and the relative privacy of this room, she could not imagine the intended reader of such words ever stepping in here to receive her bouquet. No adolescent lovers, however heated, would lie down here to play at mothers and fathers; not under the gaze of the terror on the wall. She crossed to examine the writing. The paint looked to be the same shade of pink as had been used to colour the gums of the screaming man; perhaps the same hand?
Helen becomes increasingly dissatisfied with the academic gloss her colleagues and boyfriend use to rationalize the graffiti and the lore Helen has unearthed. She returns with better film and flash equipment to Spector Street, attempting to fully document the face/doorway already discovered.
Ultimately, Helen merges with the “sweets to the sweet” avatar whose image she sought to place at the center of her academic study.
Helen finds herself entombed at the pyramidal center of a Butts Court community bonfire, transformed into – perhaps – a singular book of blood.
….Perhaps they would remember her, as he had said they might, finding her cracked skull in tomorrow’s ashes. Perhaps she might become, in time, a story with which to frighten children. She had lied, saying she preferred death to such questionable fame; she did not. As to her seducer, he laughed as the conflagration sniffed them out. There was no permanence for him in this night’s death. His deeds were on a hundred walls and a ten thousand lips, and should he be doubted again his congregation could summon him with sweetness. He had reason to laugh. So, as the flames crept upon them, did she, as through the fire she caught sight of a familiar face moving between the on-lookers. It was Trevor. He had forsaken his meal at Appollinaires and come looking for her.
She watched him questioning this fire-watcher and that, but they shook their heads, all the while staring at the pyre with smiles buried in their eyes. Poor dupe, she thought, following his antics. She willed him to look past the flames in the hope that he might see her burning. Not so that he could save her from death – she was long past hope of that – but because she pitied him in his bewilderment and wanted to give him, though he would not have thanked her for it, something to be haunted by. That, and a story to tell.