BARKER, USA
A lot has happened since we last spoke to Clive Barker. Nightbreed has opened and closed in this country, and we have seen two large books published, The Great and Secret Show and the more recent Imajica . We caught up with Clive in America where he is hard at work on numerous projects, including the re-decoration of his new LA home.
The last time we spoke to Clive, he was bemoaning the treatment that Nightbreed had received on its American release, so how did he feel about the UK reaction to the film?
“It was good! I also went with the film to Europe and it won several prizes. It seems to have been a picture which has taken time for people to warm to but which has been eventually accepted. It’s clear now that Nightbreed is a difficult picture for people, particularly those involved in marketing, to embrace. The whole concept of monsters being good guys, the dark side being at least partially a force for good: these are not ideas which people find particularly conducive or easy, but those who love the movie love it with a rare passion.
“It’s been reviewed subsequently on video extremely favourably, far more favourably than it was theatrically. Interestingly, Entertainment Weekly ran a feature about four or five issues ago called ‘A Hundred Good Movies You Know Nothing About’, and it listed a whole bunch of good movies, and in the list were some that I love, like Cronenberg’s The Brood , which was almost totally passed over in America, and Nightbreed was in the list as well. It’s interesting that only a year after the movie had been released on video it’s become one which people rent a lot and talk about a lot. I’ve had a huge amount of fan mail about it, there are the comic books as well and finally it’s getting some belated critical plaudits! It was a very difficult movie to bring out, particularly because Hellraiser had been such a success. It’s something about second movies - everyone is watching to see you fall flat on your face.
“Just because we had more money on Nightbreed than Hellraiser doesn’t presuppose that reviewers are going to be more sympathetic, quite the reverse. There’s a sort of critical pleasure which can be taken in watching something which has been made with a very low budget and which comes off, whereas a picture that has more money behind it almost offers a challenge to the reviewer, an ‘okay, let’s see what you can do chum’ attitude.
“I remain firm, though. I’ve not for a moment doubted that it was a movie that should have been made, that I was pleased to have made. You certainly can’t look over your shoulder and think boy, I wish I’d never done that. I’m really pleased to have done the picture.”
Currently Clive is involved in a number of other film projects in the States, one of which is an adaptation of one of his short stories.
“I’m executive producing a picture for Propaganda, from a short story of mine called 'The Forbidden' (from The Books of Blood volume 5), that movie’s called Candyman , and Bernard Rose, who made Paper House , is directing. You’ll be pleased to hear that Bernard has kept the rather bleak and nasty ending intact. Good for him!
“My role on the film was to work with Bernard while he was developing and writing the script. There were creative decisions being made all along the line; how it would be reshaped for an American setting; how the more cinematic moments could be developed and made even more cinematic. Bernard has done a very fine job with the adaptation, it’ll be an eight or nine million dollar picture - not cheap - and Bob Keen is handling the special effects. Filming is in October/November this year. It will definitely be Bernard’s movie but I would like to think that it will be true to the spirit of the Clive Barker movement.
“Other film projects ... The Mummy is on hold at the moment because Mick Garrard who was writing that with me is finishing a picture for Columbia called Sleepwalkers , which is from a Stephen King script; he’s finishing up on that at the moment, so I guess we’ll get back to The Mummy when he’s free, and in the meantime I have just finished the second draft of a science fiction movie for Universal which they are extremely keen on. That’s called Eden, USA , and I’ll be directing.”
With so much film-work going on, I wondered if Clive’s move to the USA had facilitated the work?
“Yes, absolutely. For lots of reasons. Firstly you’re just around the corner from all these people, you can go and visit them in their offices, talk to them, have a drink with them ... you’re not some foreign species which flies in on the red-eye for a bleary meeting over a power breakfast, and then leaves to go back and write a book in London. I think there are certainly psychological advantages from my point of view, just understanding the way the community works, maybe not liking all the elements of its workings but at least understanding them. It puts you in a much weaker frame of mind in relation to the powerbrokers in this town if you’re having conversations with them when your time-frame is eight hours different. Classically, I wouldn’t begin to talk to people in Los Angeles until about nine at night, and by the end of the day you’re kind of weary and washed out, and it’s not a great time to be sitting down and talking detailed plot points. There’s also the fact that the studios are very responsive to people coming in to do a pitch, to be there to explain and hopefully entertain them with a story...”
Was that how the science fiction film project came about?
“No, Universal came to me and said we want to be in business with you. I explained that I didn’t want to go on making horror movies, I wanted to make science fiction ones and they liked the idea.
“The main reason behind that was because I had been moving into areas of fantasy and dark fantasy in my written work and it had met with even greater commercial and critical success than the horror work; I mean The Great and Secret Show outsold Weaveworld, and Weaveworld in turn outsold The Damnation Game. Imajica was published here yesterday and it’s been reprinted already. I wanted to see that fantasy identity, as opposed to the hard-core horror, reflected in the cinematic work as well.”
So what is Eden, USA all about?
“Actually, it’s better if I don’t tell you - Universal would get upset! I would call it a science fiction/fantasy ... It’s an adventure, and it’s very much the kind of movie that I might have wanted to see. I want it to be the kind of movie which makes your pulse rush and stimulates your imagination at the same time. More than that ... you’ll have to wait!”
Moving from the film projects on to the book projects, and the last two novels have been large block-busting sagas. The first, The Great and Secret Show , is also the first in a trilogy, and is set, unlike all of Clive’s other work, in America.
“That was because I’d spent a lot of time there during the filming of Nightbreed and a lot of the strangeness I encountered was ideal material for a novel. There are a lot of weird little towns over there which are exactly alike - like Wimpy or Barratt homes - remember the town in Poltergeist ? They are all built, as The Great and Secret Show's Palomo Grove is, on a system of several little villages with the mall, this shopping centre, in the middle. They are horrible, godless little places and are really eerie. They’ve actually got three Szechuan restaurants and a place which just looks after your nails - one had a karate school for children, purely for children. I think you could only learn karate if you were under ten or something. Surreal.
“They’re entirely designed to be dormitory towns for Los Angeles. They’re all built on the fault line and are full of these banal, grinning, cheery people who have got this fixed smile plastered across their faces. I found them all kind of spooky.
“There were two things I tried to do with the book that were different from my previous work. The first was that the very heavy visceral horror had been replaced by a more fantastical outlook - what the Jaff gets up to is weird but not visceral. I wanted there to be a lightness to the touch of the thing. I did a first draft which was much more in the aphoristic style of Weaveworld and it felt wrong, because the culture that I was describing was so completely in contrast to the language I was describing it in. It felt phoney and fake and so I went back again and changed sentence structures and turns of phrase and tried to approach the book not with an American point of view, because I could never have an American point of view, but using a vocabulary that was slightly less literary.
“Another aspect of writing the book was to concentrate on plot rather than character, rather like the Irwin Allen disaster movies of the seventies. When they did those films they used to put on the poster lots of photographs of the characters, with‘The Architect’ and ‘The Fireman’ under them. It didn’t matter whether these were personalities or not, what mattered was that they had a function in the narrative. In The Great and Secret Show I’ve got ‘The Lovers’ and that’s what they function as. There’s also ‘The Bad Guy’ and so on.
“I have much more of a passion for story than for character. The fact is that in certain places in every project you make a choice to go in one direction or another and each choice is a different book. I don’t have patience with giving paragraphs over to describe everything and everyone. Whether that’s a bad thing or a good thing is neither here nor there, the fact is that I don’t- it’s not my nature. I write a fiction of ideas as much as of narrative and the two things are at their best when pulled together into a single unit. The convolutions of narrative fascinate me more than the convolutions of character.”
This fascination with narrative also spills over into Clive’s newest novel, Imajica , but here the convolutions are rather deeper than in The Great and Secret Show. I wondered what had formed the background to Imajica .
“Imajica started with my thinking about the images which appear in the great paintings of Christian mythology. Whether or not they’re true, they seemed to me to be extremely potent, powerful and important cyphers of image and meaning, so I considered writing a book which would be a fantasy but which would also be about God, about belief, about a man who discovers that all his life he has been prepared for an act of massive consequence but didn’t realise it. What would happen if you, David Howe, woke up one morning and realised that all your life to this date had been a subtle preparation for a metaphysical journey, and that everything that you had so far believed about the way the world worked was irrelevant and that there was a deeper agenda which had shaped your life without you even realising it? That is the feeling I was aiming for.
“I don’t want to give too much away, but in Imajica we have someone who is like the half-brother of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, but who is completely unaware of the fact. Not only this but he had a massive past responsibility which he has screwed up and forgotten. A lot of this came from the feeling that there is so much more in us than we completely comprehend, that our day today lives with their petty annoyances perhaps shouldn’t distract us from a grander and deeper perception of ourselves. In America and to a lesser extent in England, the notion of the shaman, and the shamanistic journey, has more credence now than it had ten years ago.”
This all sounds a little heavy, so how did Clive turn a fairly difficult subject into a novel?
“I am aware that this is a difficult subject, but I am also aware that over the years my readers have come with me on very strenuous adventures in one way and another, and I have been extremely voluble in my belief that fantasy fiction and horror fiction can carry a weight of meaning which they are very often denied. Now it’s no use my saying that I think fantasy fiction can be very profound unless I actually try it. I believe in the weight of metaphysical, social and philosophical meaning that this genre can carry, and it’s always been part of what I’ve done, but perhaps in Imajica more than ever, it’s the core, the centrepiece of the whole book.”
Clive’s next novel is striking out once more into new territories. This time he is attempting a book for children.
“It’s called Everville and I’m about halfway through at the moment. It comes out of my enthusiasm for C S Lewis’ Narnia books and Ray Bradbury’s work - Something Wicked this Way Comes and The October Country. I still enjoy those kinds of fiction, and I had an idea which I thought I could do something with. A book for and about children. Something Wicked this Way Comes is both for and about, but it’s also for adults. I think that like all great fantasy, Bradbury’s books grow with you and you find more things in them as your life experience accrues. The best children’s fiction speaks to adults and I’m not saying I’ll be able to achieve it without a struggle but it’s certainly a high ambition to go in there with.”
With thanks to Clive, and Laura Jennings at Harper Collins.
David J Howe
1991
Showing posts with label Clive Barker. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Clive Barker. Show all posts
Saturday, 8 June 2013
Weaving New Worlds - Clive Barker
WEAVING NEW WORLDS
CLIVE BARKER ON THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW
There can be few authors alive today to whom the term 'phenomenon' can be readily applied. Clive Barker is one of those few. Not only has he taken the horror genre and turned it on its head with a series of immaculately crafted and superbly realised short stories, but he has also taken the cinema by storm with Hellraiser, his directorial debut of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, and is set to do the same again when Nightbreed, the film version of his novel Cabal, opens this autumn.
He is also the author of two other novels, The Damnation Game and Weaveworld, and his latest novel, The Great and Secret Show is now available in paperback from Fontana books.
I caught up with Barker at a discussion session about the new novel. There were several editors and writers present and the conversation swung wildly from the books to the films and back again.
To start off with, after having set his previous two novels (not including Cabal) in England, we were interested to know why he had set The Great and Secret Show in America.
Clive explained that the main reason was because he had spent a lot of time there recently, because of the films, and that a lot of the strangeness that he had found was ideal material for a novel. "There are a lot of weird little towns over there which are exactly alike - like Wimpy or Barratt homes - remember the town in Poltergeist? They are all built, as Palomo Grove is, on a system of several little villages with the mall, this shopping centre, at the centre. They are horrible, godless little places and are really eerie. They've actually got three Szechuan restaurants and a place which just looks after your nails - one had a karate school for children, purely for children. I think you could only learn karate if you were under ten or something. Surreal.
"They're entirely designed to be dormitory towns for Los Angeles. They're all built on the fault line and are full of these banal, grinning, cheery people who have got this fixed smile plastered across their faces. I found them all kind of spooky."
As well as the actual locations for the novel, Clive had announced that the book was about "Sex, Hollywood and Armageddon". With this in mind, he felt that America was the obvious setting for such a story. "Begin with sex and end with armageddon and I guess Hollywood is somewhere in between." he commented.
"The average American household has two books in it - one of which is the Bible and the other is probably a Stephen King novel. The average American household has the TV on probably more hours than there are in the day and so there are these environments where people are just dreaming away their lives and are probably deeply unhappy. I also liked the idea of William Witt the pornographer in The Great and Secret Show having a view on all this because it is said that the pornography business in America earns more than the music and movie businesses put
together."
Other influences on the novel were the place names, which Clive felt to be really bland until he actually looked up on a real map and discovered that the place names really are as bland as Deerdell and Laureltree.
Despite the switch in setting from England to America, there is another aspect of the novel which sets it apart from most of his other work to date, and that is its vaguely genteel approach. Clive explained some more about this aspect of the novel.
"There were two things I tried to do with the book that were different from my previous work. The first was that the very heavy visceral horror had been replaced by a more fantastical outlook - what the Jaff gets up to is weird but not visceral. I wanted there to be a lightness to the touch of the thing. I did a first draft which was much more in the aphoristic style of Weaveworld and it felt wrong, because the culture that I was describing was so completely in contrast to the language I was describing it in. It felt phony and fake and so I went back again and changed sentence structures and turns of phrase and tried to approach the book not with an American point of view, because I could never have an American point of view, but using a vocabulary that was slightly less literary."
Another aspect of writing the book was to concentrate on plot rather than character. Clive compared this to the Irwin Allen disaster movies of the seventies. "When they used to do those films they used to put on the poster lots of photographs of the characters, with 'The Architect' and 'The Fireman' under them. It didn't matter whether these were personalities or not, what mattered was that they had a function in the narrative. In The Great and Secret Show I've got 'The Lovers' and that's what they function as. There's also 'The Bad Guy' and so on."
It could be said that there is not as much characterisation in the novel as in Clive's previous work but Clive himself is very eloquent in his defence of the book. "I think the worst and the best thing that can happen is that people criticise you for something that was intentional. In Weaveworld and The Damnation Game, I'd given over to narratives that had a lot of characters in but I tended to emphasise some more than others and I decided to do something different this time. In other words, it was a creative decision - whether it was the right creative decision or not is in a sense academic - I did it. I think there's another book with the same plot as this which would be twice as long and contain all those descriptions of minor characters and so on."
"I have much more of a passion for story than with character, I always have had. The fact is that in certain places in every project you make a choice to go in one direction or another and each choice is a different book. There certainly comes a point in every draft when you realise that you're not improving the book, you're just making it different, and the slow realisation of that is rather grim. There comes a point where you simply have to stop tinkering.
"I don't have patience with the Tommyknockers style of giving a paragraph over to describe practically everything and everyone. Whether that's a bad thing or a good thing is neither here nor there, the fact is that I don't; it's not my nature. I write a fiction of ideas as much as of narrative and the two things are at their best when pulled together into a single unit. The convolutions of narrative fascinate me more than the convolutions of character."
The Great and Secret Show is the first of a potential trilogy of books about Quiddity and the monstrous Iad Uroboros that live on its farther shores and Clive explained a little about how the series would proceed.
"The next one will be Harry D'Amour's book, definitely. It will be set in New York and will reveal the complete truth about the Great and Secret Show and the plans of the Iad. I don't know at the moment whether that will resolve the story or whether there will be a third book."
After Clive has finished work on the Nightbreed film, he hopes to start on another large book, not the second Art book, but something more along the lines of Weaveworld. He also hopes to complete a couple of intense horror novels as well, not to mention the continuation of the Cabal/Nightbreed saga. He has a contract with Collins for his next four novels, and is also negotiating for his next movie.
One thing that can be said with some certainty about Clive Barker is that he likes to keep busy.
David J Howe
1991
CLIVE BARKER ON THE GREAT AND SECRET SHOW
There can be few authors alive today to whom the term 'phenomenon' can be readily applied. Clive Barker is one of those few. Not only has he taken the horror genre and turned it on its head with a series of immaculately crafted and superbly realised short stories, but he has also taken the cinema by storm with Hellraiser, his directorial debut of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, and is set to do the same again when Nightbreed, the film version of his novel Cabal, opens this autumn.
He is also the author of two other novels, The Damnation Game and Weaveworld, and his latest novel, The Great and Secret Show is now available in paperback from Fontana books.
I caught up with Barker at a discussion session about the new novel. There were several editors and writers present and the conversation swung wildly from the books to the films and back again.
To start off with, after having set his previous two novels (not including Cabal) in England, we were interested to know why he had set The Great and Secret Show in America.
Clive explained that the main reason was because he had spent a lot of time there recently, because of the films, and that a lot of the strangeness that he had found was ideal material for a novel. "There are a lot of weird little towns over there which are exactly alike - like Wimpy or Barratt homes - remember the town in Poltergeist? They are all built, as Palomo Grove is, on a system of several little villages with the mall, this shopping centre, at the centre. They are horrible, godless little places and are really eerie. They've actually got three Szechuan restaurants and a place which just looks after your nails - one had a karate school for children, purely for children. I think you could only learn karate if you were under ten or something. Surreal.
"They're entirely designed to be dormitory towns for Los Angeles. They're all built on the fault line and are full of these banal, grinning, cheery people who have got this fixed smile plastered across their faces. I found them all kind of spooky."
As well as the actual locations for the novel, Clive had announced that the book was about "Sex, Hollywood and Armageddon". With this in mind, he felt that America was the obvious setting for such a story. "Begin with sex and end with armageddon and I guess Hollywood is somewhere in between." he commented.
"The average American household has two books in it - one of which is the Bible and the other is probably a Stephen King novel. The average American household has the TV on probably more hours than there are in the day and so there are these environments where people are just dreaming away their lives and are probably deeply unhappy. I also liked the idea of William Witt the pornographer in The Great and Secret Show having a view on all this because it is said that the pornography business in America earns more than the music and movie businesses put
together."
Other influences on the novel were the place names, which Clive felt to be really bland until he actually looked up on a real map and discovered that the place names really are as bland as Deerdell and Laureltree.
Despite the switch in setting from England to America, there is another aspect of the novel which sets it apart from most of his other work to date, and that is its vaguely genteel approach. Clive explained some more about this aspect of the novel.
"There were two things I tried to do with the book that were different from my previous work. The first was that the very heavy visceral horror had been replaced by a more fantastical outlook - what the Jaff gets up to is weird but not visceral. I wanted there to be a lightness to the touch of the thing. I did a first draft which was much more in the aphoristic style of Weaveworld and it felt wrong, because the culture that I was describing was so completely in contrast to the language I was describing it in. It felt phony and fake and so I went back again and changed sentence structures and turns of phrase and tried to approach the book not with an American point of view, because I could never have an American point of view, but using a vocabulary that was slightly less literary."
Another aspect of writing the book was to concentrate on plot rather than character. Clive compared this to the Irwin Allen disaster movies of the seventies. "When they used to do those films they used to put on the poster lots of photographs of the characters, with 'The Architect' and 'The Fireman' under them. It didn't matter whether these were personalities or not, what mattered was that they had a function in the narrative. In The Great and Secret Show I've got 'The Lovers' and that's what they function as. There's also 'The Bad Guy' and so on."
It could be said that there is not as much characterisation in the novel as in Clive's previous work but Clive himself is very eloquent in his defence of the book. "I think the worst and the best thing that can happen is that people criticise you for something that was intentional. In Weaveworld and The Damnation Game, I'd given over to narratives that had a lot of characters in but I tended to emphasise some more than others and I decided to do something different this time. In other words, it was a creative decision - whether it was the right creative decision or not is in a sense academic - I did it. I think there's another book with the same plot as this which would be twice as long and contain all those descriptions of minor characters and so on."
"I have much more of a passion for story than with character, I always have had. The fact is that in certain places in every project you make a choice to go in one direction or another and each choice is a different book. There certainly comes a point in every draft when you realise that you're not improving the book, you're just making it different, and the slow realisation of that is rather grim. There comes a point where you simply have to stop tinkering.
"I don't have patience with the Tommyknockers style of giving a paragraph over to describe practically everything and everyone. Whether that's a bad thing or a good thing is neither here nor there, the fact is that I don't; it's not my nature. I write a fiction of ideas as much as of narrative and the two things are at their best when pulled together into a single unit. The convolutions of narrative fascinate me more than the convolutions of character."
The Great and Secret Show is the first of a potential trilogy of books about Quiddity and the monstrous Iad Uroboros that live on its farther shores and Clive explained a little about how the series would proceed.
"The next one will be Harry D'Amour's book, definitely. It will be set in New York and will reveal the complete truth about the Great and Secret Show and the plans of the Iad. I don't know at the moment whether that will resolve the story or whether there will be a third book."
After Clive has finished work on the Nightbreed film, he hopes to start on another large book, not the second Art book, but something more along the lines of Weaveworld. He also hopes to complete a couple of intense horror novels as well, not to mention the continuation of the Cabal/Nightbreed saga. He has a contract with Collins for his next four novels, and is also negotiating for his next movie.
One thing that can be said with some certainty about Clive Barker is that he likes to keep busy.
David J Howe
1991
Crossing the Thresholds - Clive Barker
Crossing the Thresholds
Clive Barker talks about his new novel Everville.
Clive Barker needs no introduction to readers of this magazine. This year sees a bonanza of Barker-related material coming our way and in development. There is Clive’s own film, Lord of Illusions, which should open in England this Autumn, there are Hellraiser 4, Candyman 2, The Thief of Always is underway as an animated musical and a television adaptation of Weaveworld is planned to start filming later in the year. On top of all this the paperback of his latest novel Everville has just been released.
Everville is presented as the second Book of the Art, a series started in The Great and Secret Show and which will end in a still-to-be-written finale. ‘I know what the end of the book is, and I think it’s a book away,’ explains Clive. ‘I think it’s a third and final book. It was always designed to be that way and unless something surprises me along the way that is where it will end.
‘I had a structure in my head, an idea of roughly where it was going to go and things come along and surprise you. In this particular case what came along and surprised me was a lot of characters. Characters that I really found myself much more intrigued by. Everville is a much more character driven book than the first one.’
Clive explained that he had spoken to Jane Johnson, his editor in England, about the series. One of the problems with a trilogy can be that the first book sets the scene, the second book marks time and the third book resolves everything. ‘I wanted the second book to have a shape, an energy and a dramatic arc which was all its own. I think for me the great pleasure, and I’ve never had this experience before, is that you can hit the ground running because you’ve already established what the vocabulary is, you’ve established the mythology, and you can get straight on with it. I had a really wonderful time writing the book as a consequence. There’s a kind of energy that comes from knowing that you’re off and rolling.’
The Great and Secret Show is a book based more in narrative and story than in the characters, whereas in Everville it is the characters that are the driving force. ‘What I tried to establish in the first book was a very complex mythology and by the time you get to the second book, as I said before, that mythology is in place. I’m assuming that most of the readers of Everville will have a working familiarity with the narrative vocabulary from the first book, and so I don’t have to spend time working on that.
‘The other thing is that I have changed as a person and as a writer. This is five years after the first book. In that time I wrote Imajica, a big character book, and I’m more interested in character as a consequence. I’ve had several years of living in America which I hadn’t had when I wrote The Great and Secret Show and so I’m now writing from the inside of America rather than watching it from the outside.’
Something that helps Everville is that the book stands on its own and you do not have to have read The Great and Secret Show beforehand to appreciate it.
‘For me the toughest part of the project was making the information that was necessary to understand what was going on so organic to the narrative that you didn’t notice that it was the second part of a series. I went up to five, six, seven drafts of the places in the novel that were trying to painlessly give the reader a sense of what back story there was that had brought a character to a certain place.’
One of the effective aspects of Everville is the pain and suffering that the characters undergo as the novel progresses. People die who we don’t expect to, and others, who we thought had died in the first book, turn out not to be dead after all. The novel crosses all the thresholds of emotion and allows the reader to experience them along with the characters.
‘I think that one of the things that fantasy does best – and I would categorise the book as fantasy – is that sense of the dynamic between something transcendent and something infernal and terrible. I think that good fantasy isn’t all about unicorns and elves, it’s not cutesy. Good fantasy, whether it be A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest or portions of Chaucer or C. S. Lewis or Tolkien or Mervyn Peake … we could go on, makes you very aware of the dynamics of experience.
‘I’m a forty-two year old man who has watched people die. Not a lot of people, but more people than I thought at the age of forty-two I would see die and I think that does change the way that you write because it changes your own experiences. I think you just have to accept that as a writer you are to large extent shaped by your experience. Since I last saw you I’ve been with people when they’ve died and that changes the way you look at the world. People very dear to me have gone – some of AIDS but not all by any means – and I don’t think I expected that. One of my very dearest friends in all the world who was the theatre critic of Time magazine died of a heart attack last year, and he was two years my senior. He was one of the great good guys of the world. Events like that make you re-evaluate your own life. You look again at the experiences that you had, at what you’re giving and what you’re taking. And I think it’s important that, if you’re honest, then you’re speaking out of your own experience of the world. Writing fantasy is not a form of escapism, it’s a form of discovery. I’ve said that from the very beginning about writing fantasy, science fiction or horror: imaginative fiction is not an escape, it is a form of encoded confrontation.’
Clive had never seemed to me to be a writer who wrote to face his terrors or purge his grief or deal with life by putting it on a page. ‘I think that you’re right. On the other hand, I am, like any writer, any artist, a sum of my experiences.
‘There are a lot of gay characters in my fiction and as a gay man that’s going to be part of what I do. There’s a lot of sexuality in my fiction and as a highly sexed man that’s part of what I am. I’ve never made any apology about any of that, and so to that extent the material that I produce is an outgrowth of who I am as an individual.’
The development in Clive’s fiction is plain to see. From The Great and Secret Show, through Imajica, The Thief of Always and Everville there is development in progress.
‘For me the trick is to keep yourself surprised. When I wrote Imajica I was writing out of a desire to deal with leaving England, which I was just about to do. I finished the book in my empty house in Wimpole Street, and the sense of parting that is so much a part of the end of that book, is my leaving England. There was also the question of dealing with the complexities of sexuality. All you can do on a daily basis is write out of what your heart’s telling you to write out of. I can’t and I don’t – although I suppose some people can – write out of what commerce tells me to.’
This passion is evident in Everville as characters fall in love and manage to retain that love although the lovers themselves may be dimensions apart. In the end, love triumphs.
‘Well I’m a big old softie at heart and the proof is there! I think probably the thing is that however fantastical a book becomes, the feelings that the people have should be things that any reader says, I could feel that. I’ve been parted from somebody I love, I felt that sense of longing for somebody, I’ve felt desire unsatisfied … whatever the circumstances may be. Those feelings are the emotional ground of a book. So however many strange creatures, landscapes or philosophies present themselves, the reader can still see that this is about love, loss, betrayal, ambition … all of those things.’
For the future, despite all the film work he is involved with, Clive is not neglecting his literary audience. ‘I’m writing two books at the moment, side by side. Both short books, one for adults, one for kids. I say kids, I mean the same audience I wrote The Thief of Always for … a fable. I’m doing the two things side by side and having a good time with that. I’ll do two books and then I’ll make another movie and then I’ll write the final Book of the Art. So I probably have another eighteen months of writing and then I’ll get behind the camera again.’
Some people would not consider that the man who brought us the horrors of The Books of Blood and the Hellraiser films with their sado-masochistic pleasures should be writing books for children. It’s a bit of a turnaround. ‘It is a turnaround, on the other hand, I’ve only been writing for ten years and all that’s happening is that I’m doing the things that when I started out I said I wanted to do. I’ve always had a major passion for kids’ stuff. Even when I was writing The Books of Blood I was talking about Peter Pan and the influence it has in my life, and the Alice books and the like. I still read Treasure Island once a year, it’s a great book. Graham Greene once said that he learnt most of his lessons in style from Robert Louis Stevenson. Wind in the Willows: magnificent. There’s a part of my psyche which is very childlike, I think it’s in all of us, and you want to let it out and you want to let it speak. You don’t want to be childish, you want to be childlike, to have a sense of play.’
David J Howe
1995
Clive Barker talks about his new novel Everville.
Clive Barker needs no introduction to readers of this magazine. This year sees a bonanza of Barker-related material coming our way and in development. There is Clive’s own film, Lord of Illusions, which should open in England this Autumn, there are Hellraiser 4, Candyman 2, The Thief of Always is underway as an animated musical and a television adaptation of Weaveworld is planned to start filming later in the year. On top of all this the paperback of his latest novel Everville has just been released.
Everville is presented as the second Book of the Art, a series started in The Great and Secret Show and which will end in a still-to-be-written finale. ‘I know what the end of the book is, and I think it’s a book away,’ explains Clive. ‘I think it’s a third and final book. It was always designed to be that way and unless something surprises me along the way that is where it will end.
‘I had a structure in my head, an idea of roughly where it was going to go and things come along and surprise you. In this particular case what came along and surprised me was a lot of characters. Characters that I really found myself much more intrigued by. Everville is a much more character driven book than the first one.’
Clive explained that he had spoken to Jane Johnson, his editor in England, about the series. One of the problems with a trilogy can be that the first book sets the scene, the second book marks time and the third book resolves everything. ‘I wanted the second book to have a shape, an energy and a dramatic arc which was all its own. I think for me the great pleasure, and I’ve never had this experience before, is that you can hit the ground running because you’ve already established what the vocabulary is, you’ve established the mythology, and you can get straight on with it. I had a really wonderful time writing the book as a consequence. There’s a kind of energy that comes from knowing that you’re off and rolling.’
The Great and Secret Show is a book based more in narrative and story than in the characters, whereas in Everville it is the characters that are the driving force. ‘What I tried to establish in the first book was a very complex mythology and by the time you get to the second book, as I said before, that mythology is in place. I’m assuming that most of the readers of Everville will have a working familiarity with the narrative vocabulary from the first book, and so I don’t have to spend time working on that.
‘The other thing is that I have changed as a person and as a writer. This is five years after the first book. In that time I wrote Imajica, a big character book, and I’m more interested in character as a consequence. I’ve had several years of living in America which I hadn’t had when I wrote The Great and Secret Show and so I’m now writing from the inside of America rather than watching it from the outside.’
Something that helps Everville is that the book stands on its own and you do not have to have read The Great and Secret Show beforehand to appreciate it.
‘For me the toughest part of the project was making the information that was necessary to understand what was going on so organic to the narrative that you didn’t notice that it was the second part of a series. I went up to five, six, seven drafts of the places in the novel that were trying to painlessly give the reader a sense of what back story there was that had brought a character to a certain place.’
One of the effective aspects of Everville is the pain and suffering that the characters undergo as the novel progresses. People die who we don’t expect to, and others, who we thought had died in the first book, turn out not to be dead after all. The novel crosses all the thresholds of emotion and allows the reader to experience them along with the characters.
‘I think that one of the things that fantasy does best – and I would categorise the book as fantasy – is that sense of the dynamic between something transcendent and something infernal and terrible. I think that good fantasy isn’t all about unicorns and elves, it’s not cutesy. Good fantasy, whether it be A Midsummer Night’s Dream or The Tempest or portions of Chaucer or C. S. Lewis or Tolkien or Mervyn Peake … we could go on, makes you very aware of the dynamics of experience.
‘I’m a forty-two year old man who has watched people die. Not a lot of people, but more people than I thought at the age of forty-two I would see die and I think that does change the way that you write because it changes your own experiences. I think you just have to accept that as a writer you are to large extent shaped by your experience. Since I last saw you I’ve been with people when they’ve died and that changes the way you look at the world. People very dear to me have gone – some of AIDS but not all by any means – and I don’t think I expected that. One of my very dearest friends in all the world who was the theatre critic of Time magazine died of a heart attack last year, and he was two years my senior. He was one of the great good guys of the world. Events like that make you re-evaluate your own life. You look again at the experiences that you had, at what you’re giving and what you’re taking. And I think it’s important that, if you’re honest, then you’re speaking out of your own experience of the world. Writing fantasy is not a form of escapism, it’s a form of discovery. I’ve said that from the very beginning about writing fantasy, science fiction or horror: imaginative fiction is not an escape, it is a form of encoded confrontation.’
Clive had never seemed to me to be a writer who wrote to face his terrors or purge his grief or deal with life by putting it on a page. ‘I think that you’re right. On the other hand, I am, like any writer, any artist, a sum of my experiences.
‘There are a lot of gay characters in my fiction and as a gay man that’s going to be part of what I do. There’s a lot of sexuality in my fiction and as a highly sexed man that’s part of what I am. I’ve never made any apology about any of that, and so to that extent the material that I produce is an outgrowth of who I am as an individual.’
The development in Clive’s fiction is plain to see. From The Great and Secret Show, through Imajica, The Thief of Always and Everville there is development in progress.
‘For me the trick is to keep yourself surprised. When I wrote Imajica I was writing out of a desire to deal with leaving England, which I was just about to do. I finished the book in my empty house in Wimpole Street, and the sense of parting that is so much a part of the end of that book, is my leaving England. There was also the question of dealing with the complexities of sexuality. All you can do on a daily basis is write out of what your heart’s telling you to write out of. I can’t and I don’t – although I suppose some people can – write out of what commerce tells me to.’
This passion is evident in Everville as characters fall in love and manage to retain that love although the lovers themselves may be dimensions apart. In the end, love triumphs.
‘Well I’m a big old softie at heart and the proof is there! I think probably the thing is that however fantastical a book becomes, the feelings that the people have should be things that any reader says, I could feel that. I’ve been parted from somebody I love, I felt that sense of longing for somebody, I’ve felt desire unsatisfied … whatever the circumstances may be. Those feelings are the emotional ground of a book. So however many strange creatures, landscapes or philosophies present themselves, the reader can still see that this is about love, loss, betrayal, ambition … all of those things.’
For the future, despite all the film work he is involved with, Clive is not neglecting his literary audience. ‘I’m writing two books at the moment, side by side. Both short books, one for adults, one for kids. I say kids, I mean the same audience I wrote The Thief of Always for … a fable. I’m doing the two things side by side and having a good time with that. I’ll do two books and then I’ll make another movie and then I’ll write the final Book of the Art. So I probably have another eighteen months of writing and then I’ll get behind the camera again.’
Some people would not consider that the man who brought us the horrors of The Books of Blood and the Hellraiser films with their sado-masochistic pleasures should be writing books for children. It’s a bit of a turnaround. ‘It is a turnaround, on the other hand, I’ve only been writing for ten years and all that’s happening is that I’m doing the things that when I started out I said I wanted to do. I’ve always had a major passion for kids’ stuff. Even when I was writing The Books of Blood I was talking about Peter Pan and the influence it has in my life, and the Alice books and the like. I still read Treasure Island once a year, it’s a great book. Graham Greene once said that he learnt most of his lessons in style from Robert Louis Stevenson. Wind in the Willows: magnificent. There’s a part of my psyche which is very childlike, I think it’s in all of us, and you want to let it out and you want to let it speak. You don’t want to be childish, you want to be childlike, to have a sense of play.’
David J Howe
1995
Sunday, 12 May 2013
Sex, Death and Pinhead
SEX, DEATH AND PINHEAD
The Effects of Hellraiser IV: Bloodline
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline is the latest chapter in the ongoing saga spawned by Clive Barker back in 1987. Earlier this year David J. Howe found out what lies in store for all those fascinated by Barker’s vision of hell.
As with the first three Hellraiser films, the effects were devised and created by Image Animation, a specialist visual effects group based at Pinewood Studios. Work on Hellraiser IV: Bloodline was carried out by a secondary workshop in Los Angeles, headed by Gary Tunnicliffe.
Gary came out to Los Angeles specifically to set up an Image Animation shop in Hollywood. ‘Basically what happened was that myself and Bob Keen were jointly running the company in England. We were taking on more and more projects and a lot of work was coming from America. We therefore decided to set up a US shop and I ended up coming out here to run it.’
In charge of the directorial duties for Hellraiser IV: Bloodline is Kevin Yagher who is himself an accomplished effects artist with numerous films to his name. Perhaps the most famous cinema monster he has worked with is the burned and scarred Freddie Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street series.
‘Image Animation had been heavily involved in the first three Hellraiser films,’ said Gary, ‘and we were obviously hopeful of working on the fourth as well. The initial worry came when we heard that Kevin Yagher was going to be directing the film and because he is such a strong force in visual effects in his own right, initially we thought this is it, we’re going to lose touch with the series now because Kevin’s going to take over and do all the effects, and rightly so because he’s a great effects artist. He handled Freddy in the third and fourth Nightmare films, he created Chucky the doll for the infamous Child’s Play series and he also created the Cryptkeeper for the Tales from the Crypt TV series, so we’re talking about a guy here with a wealth of experience.
‘So I wrote to the company funding the film, saying that we understood the position with Kevin but we’d like to be involved with the film. That we could bring along a little bit more than just make-up and effects and gore. We could hopefully bring along some of the mythos.
‘The next thing was that Kevin rang us up and basically said, “Hey I want you to be involved, you’re the only people who’ve been around doing all of the films, can we meet?” The only thing that was odd about us meeting was that he wanted me to bring along my own personal portfolio rather than the company one. He wanted to see what I could do as a person, which was quite nice. So we went along and since then we’ve been extremely good friends.’
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline was again scripted by Peter Atkins, who had previously worked on the second and third films in the series. ‘We got a copy of Pete’s script,’ explained Gary. ‘Pete’s usually pretty vague about his descriptions of the Cenobites, he just writes “Cenobite”. I think Pete knows the situation with us and gives us free rein with the designs and concepts which is very kind of him. It’s so much easier than with a writer who specifies and then insists on every nuance being faithfully carried onto the screen. So Pete writes “Cenobite” and off we go!’
Following the initial meetings with Yagher, Gary Tunnicliffe and his team worked closely with the director during the five weeks prior to the start of principal photography, initially as consultants to ensure that the back-story of the box as presented in the previous films, was adhered to. ‘Kevin wanted me pretty close to him to give him a good idea of what the situation was with the puzzle box because he didn’t know quite how it worked, what positions it was supposed to be in. Initially I was like a Hellraiser consultant.’
The film takes a slightly different approach to the first three films in the series in that the main plot theme revolves around the origins of the puzzle box used to summon the creatures from hell, the Lemarchand Configuration.
‘We see the box being created in the seventeenth century, we see it in modern day LA picking up from where the third film finished with the modern glass building at the end which had the panels of the box incorporated into its design and we end up going into the future and meet Pinhead in a space station, which, I must admit, is a very bizarre place to see him.’
It had been established that, when manipulated in the correct fashion, the box would open up and change shape, becoming elongated and star-shaped as well as a basic cube. Each of the shapes and manipulations caused different demons to manifest from hell, and, with the correct handling, the box could also be used to send the demons back again.
One of the principal make-up tasks in all the Hellraiser films has been the creation of the lead Cenobite, Pinhead, played, as before, by Doug Bradley. The make-up for this character has changed for each film he has appeared in.
‘We redesigned the Pinhead make-up again for the fourth film,’ confirmed Gary. ‘The reason being that in the third film it was designed to be quick to apply and was therefore taken down to a two piece make-up. I felt that the pins in that make-up were a little bit too long, heavy and cumbersome. I have strong feelings about how Pinhead should look and I really wanted to take him back to the way he appeared in the first film.
‘In the first and second films there were small metal plates underneath the make-up that the pins were attached to. These were discarded in the third film for speed. I think another aspect concerning the make-up is that in the first film Pinhead is only on screen for about six minutes, he doesn’t do a great deal and the audience doesn’t get very long to look at him. In the second film he does a little bit more and in the third film he’s very much taking centre stage.
‘What we came up with for the new film was another two piece make-up. The first piece, if you can imagine, finished underneath his brow-line and went all the way back over his head, a little like a bald cap. Then the second piece is the face.
‘When I originally designed the make-up I was hoping for a one and a half hour application at which Bob Keen and Doug Bradley and everybody else were scoffing. They said that I’d never do it. But to this day I have a twenty dollar bill on my desk signed by Doug Bradley which is to commemorate the one hour, twenty-nine minute and fifty-seven second application of the Pinhead make-up. So we were really pleased about that as the quicker the make-up can be applied, the longer the director has the artiste on set to shoot the scenes.
‘The pins are very lightweight and we make them individually ourselves. There are 108 pins studding Pinhead’s head and they are put on by hand each time we apply the make-up. We superglue each round-headed pin into the prosthetic, what we call “pinning the piece”, and then we put the make-up onto it and finally we place the completed piece onto Doug. There is one make-up per application and each is only used once. For this film we did eighteen applications of Pinhead.’
As well as the mythology of the box and creation of Pinhead, another of the early subjects of discussion were the Cenobites – the demons – that would be featured in the film.
‘I have a very strong feeling about how Cenobites should look,’ asserted Gary, ‘and we tried to come up with something horrific and yet amusing, something that was obviously inspired by the Hellraiser mythos. The new female Cenobite that we came up with fitted the bill superbly. I’m really, really pleased with her, she’s the one that I think has come out the best.
‘I actually got the idea for her design when I was watching Sister Act, the comedy film starring Whoopi Goldberg. It’s true, honestly! I was watching these singing nuns and seeing the way their cowls fall down and I thought it would be interesting to do something with flesh rather than material and create a sort of nun from hell. So that’s where the idea came from. I thought we’ll split her head down the middle and we’ll pull the skin out to the sides and attach it to her shoulders. And that’s what we did.’
As well as being quite horrific, the female Cenobite, named Angelique in the script and played by Valentina Vargas, is both sexy and erotic. This is something that Gary is pleased with. ‘We pushed all the bits that women have as high up as they would go and she’s very sexy. I did some original concept drawings and usually you lose something when translating the drawing to the screen but it was really pleasing to see that we didn’t lose anything and the drawing is virtually identical to the way she ended up.’
The female Cenobite in the third film was also darkly erotic, and, not surprisingly, Gary also played a part in her design. ‘I’ve got this thing about sexy female Cenobites,’ he smiles. ‘Mark Coulier created the make-up but I designed the costume, and the peeled-back-skin opera gloves were one of my ideas. Unfortunately you don’t see a lot of her on camera but anyone who looks at the Terri Cenobite from the third film and Angelique from the fourth will notice that there is a resonance going on. The female Cenobite in the first film, although a brilliant make-up, looks a bit dowdy and we couldn’t see much of her body. I wanted to see more flesh really.
‘When I designed the costume for Terri, I remember a couple of people commenting that this was very sexist and unnecessary, that we shouldn’t do this kind of thing. Luckily the fans took her to heart and, at the end of the day, an attractive girl wearing a tight-fitting leather outfit is a sensual idea in itself. I know Clive tends to favour the sensual in his ideas so I thought it was true to the Hellraiser mythos.
‘The idea that we tried to use in this film, especially for Angelique, was that I had always felt that the Cenobites configured their appearance to be beautiful but at the same time giving them constant pain. That was always the idea. If you were a sado-masochist, then you wanted to have a costume that was constantly feeding you pain, like a drip feeding you plasma. You’ve therefore got hooks in your flesh and pins hammered in your head so that you’re feeling this deep pain with every movement. That’s what I wanted for Angelique. I wanted to create something that you looked at and thought that she’s very beautiful and then you realise that … oh my god … her head’s split open.’
The techniques used by Gary to realise Angelique were, as he described, pretty traditional. ‘She’s wearing a three piece appliance in foam latex and basically the old methods still apply. We took a cast of the actress’ head and on to that I sculpted the three pieces of the appliance. These were then moulded and we made the final pieces in foam latex. The pieces were then painted and finally applied to the actress’ head. The make-up had its own problems because it involves a lot of what we call undercut, where the prosthetic appliance has convex and concave curves, so it’s very difficult to mould in the foam latex.
‘Perhaps the hardest part was actually attaching the wires to the shoulder and this was done in two ways. First of all the raised pinches of “skin” on her shoulders were actually made out of a silicon rubber which is a lot stronger than latex. Then underneath the folded back flap of skin on her head there was a metal plate which went all the way underneath around her head. It took all the pressure. Then the wires weren’t actually wire at all. They were lengths of silver elastic. We found this amazing chromed elastic stuff which was superb. We were able to stretch it to a really high tension so it looked like it was really pulling tight all the time no matter how she moved her head. Never once did we have a wire pop out or anything. It was always a worry that halfway through a shot one of the wires was going to spring loose and suddenly shoot up over her head like some sort of wild bungee jump. But it never happened.
‘The make-up took quite a while to apply in the morning. It took about an hour to attach all the wires and make sure they’re nice and safe and a liberal coating of superglue seemed to do the trick! Overall the make-up worked fine and Valentina never complained about having neck ache or anything because although the wires look as though they’re under a lot of tension, they’re not really.’
‘The original concept for the rest of the costume was to have kind of woman’s teddy made out of flesh. We’d got this wild design where she’d got the skin round her stomach pinned up onto her chest, but they thought that was a little too gross so we adapted the design to a sort of leather basque which hooked into her flesh just under her collarbone and that worked really well.
‘She’s got a little bit of a bare midriff, not too much, and then she’s wearing a very long figure hugging leather skirt, a kind of Morticia Addams type of thing. That was made from a stretchy plastic leather material. She’s wearing two elbow length opera gloves which are attached to her little finger and thumb leaving the rest of her fingers free.
‘Everyone who’s seen the completed costume seems to have liked it and the fans especially seem to have taken her to heart. She was even on the cover of Femme Fatale magazine, which usually runs photographs of bikini-clad women from horror films, and I’m really pleased about that.’
As has been established throughout the Hellraiser films, the Cenobites all started out as humans who became corrupted and ultimately transformed into the minions of hell. In the fourth film, Angelique starts out as a human but becomes transformed as the film progresses.
‘Angelique is actually the arch nemesis of the film,’ explains Gary. ‘She’s in all three acts and she’s a really nasty person, so her becoming a Cenobite is no real surprise.’
Alongside Angelique are some other Cenobite characters, include a bizarre Siamese twin. ‘Those two characters were probably the most difficult I’ve ever done,’ Gary reveals. ‘Pete had actually written in the script “Siamese twin Cenobites”. The reason it is always difficult to do something like this is because we’ve seen it done before, and I’m afraid it always either looks like someone wearing a rubber head on their shoulder or two people standing together. I opted to have two people standing together.
‘We looked at how we were going to join them together. Were we going to join their heads? Their bodies? Or some other combination. We eventually decided on joining their cheeks, and what I went for in the end was the idea that their heads had kind of been drawn together by a cog placed between their heads which sort of twisted them into one. We ended up with this very strange pulled look.
‘A friend called Steve Norrington sculpted their faces for me. If you pull somebody’s face very tight from the top, it makes them look like they’re grinning and smiling; if you pull somebody’s face down from below it makes them look sad and unhappy. So I decided to go completely over the top with this and make one a tragedy mask and the other comedy. So one of the twins has this – as Kevin Yagher’s crew called it – shit-eating grin and the other has a very sallow, miserable expression. To play the twin parts we hired two guys who are actually twins, Mark and Mike Polish. They were great to work with and a lot of fun. They were skinny guys and they shaved their heads and everything. They really threw themselves into the part. We had them standing very close to each other in a big costume that joined them together and then we pulled their heads together in the middle with this metallic cog. There’s also this later scene where they split apart and we see them as individuals and what they do is reconfigure themselves around somebody to kill them.
‘If you look carefully at the cog that the twins have got between their heads you’ll notice that it features the same pattern as the disc on the centre of the puzzle box.’
Other work for Hellraiser IV: Bloodline included several Cenobite gamblers which feature in scenes set in the seventeenth century. ‘One has got his mouth and lips torn back into a kind of rictus grin, one has his eyelids and his mouth sewn down, one has had his face pulled forward and sewn together like a football in the middle of his face, and one who’s had his cheeks pierced, giving him a kind of vicious snarl. I don’t know if they are going to survive until the final cut at the moment because I know the first act’s been changed around.
‘There were also all the puzzle boxes to create which involved a lot of work because they needed to do so much more in this film. Apart from that I was on set as a kind of chain and hook wrangler. Hooking all the chains into flesh. And I killed a few people here and there, you know, just general Hellraiser stuff.’
Gary Tunnicliffe and his team were kept very busy during the time they spent working on Hellraiser IV: Bloodline, not least because there were another three films in production at the same time that required their services. ‘The longest day was for the Hellraiser film when at one point I worked ninety hours in one shift. Welcome to the world of effects! It was just hard work and at the end of the day you tend to run on adrenaline anyway, and any time you see Pinhead or a Cenobite that you have created walk on set you get such a huge buzz.
‘One of the most memorable days was walking out on set with Pinhead, and Kevin – who, you will remember has done make-up and effects for years – walked up and was transformed into a fan. He just stood there looking at it muttering about the great design and that Clive Barker has got such a clear vision, and he just took it all in, the costume and everything. He just loved it. I think everybody does. If Doug Bradley charged a dollar for everyone who wanted their photograph taken with Pinhead then he’d be a very rich man!
‘The nicest thing I’d like to hear about Pinhead is that he looks just like he did in the first film. And maybe people will like Angelique a little bit, that would be nice too.’
Ultimately fans are going to have to wait until Hellraiser IV: Bloodline is finally released to appreciate the work and skill that Gary Tunnicliffe and his team at Image Animation have put into the film. This is always assuming that their work survives the rocky path through the censors and the film distributors.
Interview conducted and written by David J. Howe. With thanks to Gary Tunnicliffe at Image Animation in Los Angeles.
1995
The Effects of Hellraiser IV: Bloodline
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline is the latest chapter in the ongoing saga spawned by Clive Barker back in 1987. Earlier this year David J. Howe found out what lies in store for all those fascinated by Barker’s vision of hell.
As with the first three Hellraiser films, the effects were devised and created by Image Animation, a specialist visual effects group based at Pinewood Studios. Work on Hellraiser IV: Bloodline was carried out by a secondary workshop in Los Angeles, headed by Gary Tunnicliffe.
Gary came out to Los Angeles specifically to set up an Image Animation shop in Hollywood. ‘Basically what happened was that myself and Bob Keen were jointly running the company in England. We were taking on more and more projects and a lot of work was coming from America. We therefore decided to set up a US shop and I ended up coming out here to run it.’
In charge of the directorial duties for Hellraiser IV: Bloodline is Kevin Yagher who is himself an accomplished effects artist with numerous films to his name. Perhaps the most famous cinema monster he has worked with is the burned and scarred Freddie Krueger from the Nightmare on Elm Street series.
‘Image Animation had been heavily involved in the first three Hellraiser films,’ said Gary, ‘and we were obviously hopeful of working on the fourth as well. The initial worry came when we heard that Kevin Yagher was going to be directing the film and because he is such a strong force in visual effects in his own right, initially we thought this is it, we’re going to lose touch with the series now because Kevin’s going to take over and do all the effects, and rightly so because he’s a great effects artist. He handled Freddy in the third and fourth Nightmare films, he created Chucky the doll for the infamous Child’s Play series and he also created the Cryptkeeper for the Tales from the Crypt TV series, so we’re talking about a guy here with a wealth of experience.
‘So I wrote to the company funding the film, saying that we understood the position with Kevin but we’d like to be involved with the film. That we could bring along a little bit more than just make-up and effects and gore. We could hopefully bring along some of the mythos.
‘The next thing was that Kevin rang us up and basically said, “Hey I want you to be involved, you’re the only people who’ve been around doing all of the films, can we meet?” The only thing that was odd about us meeting was that he wanted me to bring along my own personal portfolio rather than the company one. He wanted to see what I could do as a person, which was quite nice. So we went along and since then we’ve been extremely good friends.’
Hellraiser IV: Bloodline was again scripted by Peter Atkins, who had previously worked on the second and third films in the series. ‘We got a copy of Pete’s script,’ explained Gary. ‘Pete’s usually pretty vague about his descriptions of the Cenobites, he just writes “Cenobite”. I think Pete knows the situation with us and gives us free rein with the designs and concepts which is very kind of him. It’s so much easier than with a writer who specifies and then insists on every nuance being faithfully carried onto the screen. So Pete writes “Cenobite” and off we go!’
Following the initial meetings with Yagher, Gary Tunnicliffe and his team worked closely with the director during the five weeks prior to the start of principal photography, initially as consultants to ensure that the back-story of the box as presented in the previous films, was adhered to. ‘Kevin wanted me pretty close to him to give him a good idea of what the situation was with the puzzle box because he didn’t know quite how it worked, what positions it was supposed to be in. Initially I was like a Hellraiser consultant.’
The film takes a slightly different approach to the first three films in the series in that the main plot theme revolves around the origins of the puzzle box used to summon the creatures from hell, the Lemarchand Configuration.
‘We see the box being created in the seventeenth century, we see it in modern day LA picking up from where the third film finished with the modern glass building at the end which had the panels of the box incorporated into its design and we end up going into the future and meet Pinhead in a space station, which, I must admit, is a very bizarre place to see him.’
It had been established that, when manipulated in the correct fashion, the box would open up and change shape, becoming elongated and star-shaped as well as a basic cube. Each of the shapes and manipulations caused different demons to manifest from hell, and, with the correct handling, the box could also be used to send the demons back again.
One of the principal make-up tasks in all the Hellraiser films has been the creation of the lead Cenobite, Pinhead, played, as before, by Doug Bradley. The make-up for this character has changed for each film he has appeared in.
‘We redesigned the Pinhead make-up again for the fourth film,’ confirmed Gary. ‘The reason being that in the third film it was designed to be quick to apply and was therefore taken down to a two piece make-up. I felt that the pins in that make-up were a little bit too long, heavy and cumbersome. I have strong feelings about how Pinhead should look and I really wanted to take him back to the way he appeared in the first film.
‘In the first and second films there were small metal plates underneath the make-up that the pins were attached to. These were discarded in the third film for speed. I think another aspect concerning the make-up is that in the first film Pinhead is only on screen for about six minutes, he doesn’t do a great deal and the audience doesn’t get very long to look at him. In the second film he does a little bit more and in the third film he’s very much taking centre stage.
‘What we came up with for the new film was another two piece make-up. The first piece, if you can imagine, finished underneath his brow-line and went all the way back over his head, a little like a bald cap. Then the second piece is the face.
‘When I originally designed the make-up I was hoping for a one and a half hour application at which Bob Keen and Doug Bradley and everybody else were scoffing. They said that I’d never do it. But to this day I have a twenty dollar bill on my desk signed by Doug Bradley which is to commemorate the one hour, twenty-nine minute and fifty-seven second application of the Pinhead make-up. So we were really pleased about that as the quicker the make-up can be applied, the longer the director has the artiste on set to shoot the scenes.
‘The pins are very lightweight and we make them individually ourselves. There are 108 pins studding Pinhead’s head and they are put on by hand each time we apply the make-up. We superglue each round-headed pin into the prosthetic, what we call “pinning the piece”, and then we put the make-up onto it and finally we place the completed piece onto Doug. There is one make-up per application and each is only used once. For this film we did eighteen applications of Pinhead.’
As well as the mythology of the box and creation of Pinhead, another of the early subjects of discussion were the Cenobites – the demons – that would be featured in the film.
‘I have a very strong feeling about how Cenobites should look,’ asserted Gary, ‘and we tried to come up with something horrific and yet amusing, something that was obviously inspired by the Hellraiser mythos. The new female Cenobite that we came up with fitted the bill superbly. I’m really, really pleased with her, she’s the one that I think has come out the best.
‘I actually got the idea for her design when I was watching Sister Act, the comedy film starring Whoopi Goldberg. It’s true, honestly! I was watching these singing nuns and seeing the way their cowls fall down and I thought it would be interesting to do something with flesh rather than material and create a sort of nun from hell. So that’s where the idea came from. I thought we’ll split her head down the middle and we’ll pull the skin out to the sides and attach it to her shoulders. And that’s what we did.’
As well as being quite horrific, the female Cenobite, named Angelique in the script and played by Valentina Vargas, is both sexy and erotic. This is something that Gary is pleased with. ‘We pushed all the bits that women have as high up as they would go and she’s very sexy. I did some original concept drawings and usually you lose something when translating the drawing to the screen but it was really pleasing to see that we didn’t lose anything and the drawing is virtually identical to the way she ended up.’
The female Cenobite in the third film was also darkly erotic, and, not surprisingly, Gary also played a part in her design. ‘I’ve got this thing about sexy female Cenobites,’ he smiles. ‘Mark Coulier created the make-up but I designed the costume, and the peeled-back-skin opera gloves were one of my ideas. Unfortunately you don’t see a lot of her on camera but anyone who looks at the Terri Cenobite from the third film and Angelique from the fourth will notice that there is a resonance going on. The female Cenobite in the first film, although a brilliant make-up, looks a bit dowdy and we couldn’t see much of her body. I wanted to see more flesh really.
‘When I designed the costume for Terri, I remember a couple of people commenting that this was very sexist and unnecessary, that we shouldn’t do this kind of thing. Luckily the fans took her to heart and, at the end of the day, an attractive girl wearing a tight-fitting leather outfit is a sensual idea in itself. I know Clive tends to favour the sensual in his ideas so I thought it was true to the Hellraiser mythos.
‘The idea that we tried to use in this film, especially for Angelique, was that I had always felt that the Cenobites configured their appearance to be beautiful but at the same time giving them constant pain. That was always the idea. If you were a sado-masochist, then you wanted to have a costume that was constantly feeding you pain, like a drip feeding you plasma. You’ve therefore got hooks in your flesh and pins hammered in your head so that you’re feeling this deep pain with every movement. That’s what I wanted for Angelique. I wanted to create something that you looked at and thought that she’s very beautiful and then you realise that … oh my god … her head’s split open.’
The techniques used by Gary to realise Angelique were, as he described, pretty traditional. ‘She’s wearing a three piece appliance in foam latex and basically the old methods still apply. We took a cast of the actress’ head and on to that I sculpted the three pieces of the appliance. These were then moulded and we made the final pieces in foam latex. The pieces were then painted and finally applied to the actress’ head. The make-up had its own problems because it involves a lot of what we call undercut, where the prosthetic appliance has convex and concave curves, so it’s very difficult to mould in the foam latex.
‘Perhaps the hardest part was actually attaching the wires to the shoulder and this was done in two ways. First of all the raised pinches of “skin” on her shoulders were actually made out of a silicon rubber which is a lot stronger than latex. Then underneath the folded back flap of skin on her head there was a metal plate which went all the way underneath around her head. It took all the pressure. Then the wires weren’t actually wire at all. They were lengths of silver elastic. We found this amazing chromed elastic stuff which was superb. We were able to stretch it to a really high tension so it looked like it was really pulling tight all the time no matter how she moved her head. Never once did we have a wire pop out or anything. It was always a worry that halfway through a shot one of the wires was going to spring loose and suddenly shoot up over her head like some sort of wild bungee jump. But it never happened.
‘The make-up took quite a while to apply in the morning. It took about an hour to attach all the wires and make sure they’re nice and safe and a liberal coating of superglue seemed to do the trick! Overall the make-up worked fine and Valentina never complained about having neck ache or anything because although the wires look as though they’re under a lot of tension, they’re not really.’
‘The original concept for the rest of the costume was to have kind of woman’s teddy made out of flesh. We’d got this wild design where she’d got the skin round her stomach pinned up onto her chest, but they thought that was a little too gross so we adapted the design to a sort of leather basque which hooked into her flesh just under her collarbone and that worked really well.
‘She’s got a little bit of a bare midriff, not too much, and then she’s wearing a very long figure hugging leather skirt, a kind of Morticia Addams type of thing. That was made from a stretchy plastic leather material. She’s wearing two elbow length opera gloves which are attached to her little finger and thumb leaving the rest of her fingers free.
‘Everyone who’s seen the completed costume seems to have liked it and the fans especially seem to have taken her to heart. She was even on the cover of Femme Fatale magazine, which usually runs photographs of bikini-clad women from horror films, and I’m really pleased about that.’
As has been established throughout the Hellraiser films, the Cenobites all started out as humans who became corrupted and ultimately transformed into the minions of hell. In the fourth film, Angelique starts out as a human but becomes transformed as the film progresses.
‘Angelique is actually the arch nemesis of the film,’ explains Gary. ‘She’s in all three acts and she’s a really nasty person, so her becoming a Cenobite is no real surprise.’
Alongside Angelique are some other Cenobite characters, include a bizarre Siamese twin. ‘Those two characters were probably the most difficult I’ve ever done,’ Gary reveals. ‘Pete had actually written in the script “Siamese twin Cenobites”. The reason it is always difficult to do something like this is because we’ve seen it done before, and I’m afraid it always either looks like someone wearing a rubber head on their shoulder or two people standing together. I opted to have two people standing together.
‘We looked at how we were going to join them together. Were we going to join their heads? Their bodies? Or some other combination. We eventually decided on joining their cheeks, and what I went for in the end was the idea that their heads had kind of been drawn together by a cog placed between their heads which sort of twisted them into one. We ended up with this very strange pulled look.
‘A friend called Steve Norrington sculpted their faces for me. If you pull somebody’s face very tight from the top, it makes them look like they’re grinning and smiling; if you pull somebody’s face down from below it makes them look sad and unhappy. So I decided to go completely over the top with this and make one a tragedy mask and the other comedy. So one of the twins has this – as Kevin Yagher’s crew called it – shit-eating grin and the other has a very sallow, miserable expression. To play the twin parts we hired two guys who are actually twins, Mark and Mike Polish. They were great to work with and a lot of fun. They were skinny guys and they shaved their heads and everything. They really threw themselves into the part. We had them standing very close to each other in a big costume that joined them together and then we pulled their heads together in the middle with this metallic cog. There’s also this later scene where they split apart and we see them as individuals and what they do is reconfigure themselves around somebody to kill them.
‘If you look carefully at the cog that the twins have got between their heads you’ll notice that it features the same pattern as the disc on the centre of the puzzle box.’
Other work for Hellraiser IV: Bloodline included several Cenobite gamblers which feature in scenes set in the seventeenth century. ‘One has got his mouth and lips torn back into a kind of rictus grin, one has his eyelids and his mouth sewn down, one has had his face pulled forward and sewn together like a football in the middle of his face, and one who’s had his cheeks pierced, giving him a kind of vicious snarl. I don’t know if they are going to survive until the final cut at the moment because I know the first act’s been changed around.
‘There were also all the puzzle boxes to create which involved a lot of work because they needed to do so much more in this film. Apart from that I was on set as a kind of chain and hook wrangler. Hooking all the chains into flesh. And I killed a few people here and there, you know, just general Hellraiser stuff.’
Gary Tunnicliffe and his team were kept very busy during the time they spent working on Hellraiser IV: Bloodline, not least because there were another three films in production at the same time that required their services. ‘The longest day was for the Hellraiser film when at one point I worked ninety hours in one shift. Welcome to the world of effects! It was just hard work and at the end of the day you tend to run on adrenaline anyway, and any time you see Pinhead or a Cenobite that you have created walk on set you get such a huge buzz.
‘One of the most memorable days was walking out on set with Pinhead, and Kevin – who, you will remember has done make-up and effects for years – walked up and was transformed into a fan. He just stood there looking at it muttering about the great design and that Clive Barker has got such a clear vision, and he just took it all in, the costume and everything. He just loved it. I think everybody does. If Doug Bradley charged a dollar for everyone who wanted their photograph taken with Pinhead then he’d be a very rich man!
‘The nicest thing I’d like to hear about Pinhead is that he looks just like he did in the first film. And maybe people will like Angelique a little bit, that would be nice too.’
Ultimately fans are going to have to wait until Hellraiser IV: Bloodline is finally released to appreciate the work and skill that Gary Tunnicliffe and his team at Image Animation have put into the film. This is always assuming that their work survives the rocky path through the censors and the film distributors.
Interview conducted and written by David J. Howe. With thanks to Gary Tunnicliffe at Image Animation in Los Angeles.
1995
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