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This book explores the diverse literary, film and visionary creations of the polymathic and influential British artist Clive Barker. It presents groundbreaking essays that critically reevaluate Barker's oeuvre. These include in-depth analyses of his celebrated and lesser known novels, short stories, theme park designs, screen and comic book adaptations, film direction and production, sketches and book illustrations, as well as responses to his material from critics and fan communities. The book examines Barker's earlier fiction and its place within British horror fiction and socio-cultural contexts. Selected tales from the Books of Blood are exemplary in their response to the frustrations and political radicalism of the 1980s British cultural anxieties. Aiming to rally those who stand defiant of Thatcher's polarising vision of neoliberal British conservatism, Weaveworld is revealed to be a savage indictment of 1980s British politics. The book explores Barker's transition from author to filmmaker, and how his vision was translated, captured, and occasionally compromised in its adaptation from page to the screen. Barker's work contains features which can be potentially read as feminine and queer, positioning them within traditions of the Gothic, the melodrama and the fantastic. The book examines Barker's works, especially Hellraiser, Nightbreed, and Lord of Illusions, through the critical lenses of queer culture, desire, and brand recognition. It considers Barker's complex and multi-layered marks in the field, exploring and re-evaluating his works, focusing on Tortured Souls and Mister B. Gone's new myths of the flesh'.
seem to grow more tenuous, for each age will want the tale told as if it were of its own making. (Clive Barker) 1 Faustus is gone: regard his hellish fall, Whose fiendful fortune may exhort the wise Only to wonder at unlawful things Whose deepness doth
finding the world sexy. (Clive Barker) 1 Inspired by the failure of two previous adaptations of his work, 2 Clive Barker endeavoured to direct his own interpretation of his novella The Hellbound Heart . Adapted as Hellraiser (1987), Barker's debut featured images of sadomasochism, deconstructed bodies, and
Clive Barker once explained that, for him, ‘Horror is over and again about the body.’ 1 It should be obvious, even to the casual reader, that his back catalogue as a writer, director, and illustrator more than corroborates this statement. From the extreme landscapes of his directorial debut Hellraiser (1987), where corporeal pleasure
shadows. An audience is led by the leering figure of General Santiago through a maze, before being deposited back out onto the crowded lot of the Universal Studios theme park. The audience had just experienced Clive Barker's Freakz , a maze that was part of Universal Studios’ Los Angeles Halloween Horror Nights in 1998. Over the following two years, visitors to Universal's annual
1 Clive Barker, ‘Cenobite’, 1986. In one of his more in-depth television interviews, while promoting his newly published novel Weaveworld in 1987 , Clive Barker was introduced by host John
And what do I do, surrounded by such wonders? I dream banalities. (Clive Barker) 1 It is perhaps the defining conundrum of Clive Barker's career that his powers as a non-realist writer have been so overvalued and his powers as a realist
–20. Clive Barker's writing has been indelibly marked by Stephen King's enthusiastic endorsement calling him ‘the future of horror’. While there is much in the various stories that comprise the Books of Blood to suggest this, it is a rather misleading term, and has been confounded repeatedly by his exploration of the fantastic and imaginative over a focus on the gory
Clive Barker found joy in painting at the age of 45, two years after the release of Lord of Illusions ( 1995 ), his third and last feature as a film director. 1 Speaking in the documentary Clive Barker: The Man Behind the Myth ( 2007 ), the artist described his encounter with the medium in a wistful voice: ‘It was like opening a door
Be it through words, lines, colours, performance on stage, or live-action on celluloid, Clive Barker remains first and foremost a dark imaginer , an artist in the fullest sense of the term, creating dark and mesmerising images. The distinctive style that defines his work certainly comes from his initial inspirations. As Russell Cherrington, specialist of