Okay, gang, it’s time to talk about Clive Barker. In the eighties, Stephen King contributed the highly-publicized pull quote “I have seen the future of horror…his name is Clive Barker”, based primarily on Barker’s six-volume short story collection The Books of Blood, which were published in 1984 and 1985. Among the stories first seen in those collections were classics like “The Midnight Meat Train” and “The Forbidden”, the latter the basis for the film Candyman—but it was a story in the third volume, “Rawhead Rex”, that ended up becoming the first of Barker’s works to make it to the big screen, with a script by the author himself and direction by George Pavlou, who had collaborated with Barker earlier on the 1985 horror film Underworld (aka Transmutation.) Unfortunately for Barker, this early stab did not go off as he hoped.
In prose form, “Rawhead Rex” is a tale of the primeval past returning to our modern (Read: mid-eighties) world, infecting it with a wild animal brutality long forgotten by humankind. Taking place in rural England, a small village that is quaint enough to become tourist spectacle (described by Barker in a particularly poison-tipped prologue), the titular Rawhead is accidentally uncorked from deep in the earth, having spent eons pinned alive under a massive monolith, and immediately goes to work eviscerating every living thing he comes across—except for any women exhibiting signs of fertility (whether they are menstruating or pregnant), which are the antithesis of this maliciously male symbol of anti-life. Similar to the story of Blood Tide, Rawhead is a figure from the pre-Christian past, and maybe even a pre-Pagan past (although it seems that his reign was ended through use of very pre-modern fertility goddess symbols), walking in a world bereft of the untamed forests that used to be his home—it feels quite important to Barker to remind the characters in the story, and the readers, that England is a land that has existed long before any hint of our modern civilization. In some ways, he’s a feral old god figure with similarities to the forest demon Humbaba from The Epic of Gilgamesh, except that you might feel bad for Humbaba, but you can’t really sympathize with Rawhead because, honestly, he’s kind of a jerk.
His wildness extends to every part of him, a visceral, bodily entity who goes out of his way to contravene all of our social niceties—he loves eating children, he loves causing random death and destruction, he’s a thing of random piss and ejaculate. For the human men in the story, his mere presence is felt in the gut and the groin, bringing out their deepest and most disgusting sexual fantasies before he rips their heads off. In a particularly nasty bit of anti-religious sentiment, the local verger is corrupted by Rawhead almost immediately, calling him his new God and in one of the more infamous scenes, receives his “baptism” when Rawhead urinates on him. We regularly get to see things from the monster’s perspective, who provides wryly straightforward observations of all his bouts of inhuman violence. For all of Barker’s frequently eloquent prose, there’s definitely a sense of knowingly juvenile, line-crossing delight all throughout the story, like an ruthlessly extended dead baby joke—even outside of descriptions of the monster’s actions, he’s sure to make mention of bodily functions whenever possible (pants wetting, vomit, etc.) to maintain the atmosphere. Rawhead is meant to be a remnant from a time when everything was really gross, and the writing itself reflects that.
With a fairly straightforward beast-on-a-rampage plot and the psycho-sexual themes that Barker is known for subtly/not subtly lurking under the blood-n-guts, “Rawhead Rex” would have seemed like one of the more obvious Barker stories to make into a mid-eighties Video Nasty (and yet Rawhead Rex, the film, never made the list of Video Nasties in the UK—I would be surprised if Barker wasn’t just a little disappointed about that.) That turned out to not be the case—without Barker’s prose, and without all the interesting details and darkly comical elements like the sections told from Rawhead’s POV, all we’re left with is a movie with plenty of violence and other gross things but without much else. What’s strange is that, in interviews, Barker says the film more or less followed the script he wrote, and that the problems are with the direction, which does not provide the visual punch that a good monster movie needs. He is certainly correct that the direction is a problem—as is the depiction of the monster itself—but the script doesn’t help matters much either.
The movie is a streamlined version of the story, many scenes recreated but with the focus tweaked and much of the chaotic build-up rendered rather lifeless. In the film version, tourist hero Howard Hallenbeck (David Dukes) is portrayed as an American (I’m pretty sure he’s just a Londoner in the short story) historical writer who is visiting Ireland (instead of rural Kent) to do research for a book. I don’t know, as much ancient history as Ireland has, I really got the sense of something specific in the original story’s choice to be set in England, where the use of Ireland here feels like an attempt to make it feel more…”exotic”? At the very least, these kinds of ancient secrets seem more like a cliche when put in an Irish context. Anyway, like in the story, his wife (Kelly Piper) and two kids are not all that enthused to be stuck in a small, boring town, but I don’t think they capture the sense of being annoying, entitled tourists that their characters did in the story. His research gets Hallenbeck talking to Reverend Coot (Niall Tobin) and Verger Declan O’Brien (Ronan Wilmott), and the latter makes no bones about his allegiances as he stares evilly at the stained glass depiction of figures of ancient Irish history subduing a monster, whose red eyes reflect a laser light on a suspicious altar in the church.
Rawhead enters the picture bright and early, a tall Battle Troll figure that walked off a lesser-known heavy metal album cover (portrayed by 6’11” actor Heinrich von Schellendorf) and not unlike the ancient monster in Blood Tide, he has kind of a stupid donkey face—but quite unlike Blood Tide‘s beast, we get to see a lot of Rawhead throughout the movie. Maybe the mask looked neat when it was immobile, but he is shot flatly most of the time, and at no point does he ever look particular frightening, no matter how many times he tears the flesh off people’s necks, rips up the kitchens of random farmers, or wrecks Irish trailer parks. There are times when we get a deep look into Rawhead’s maw, and I can’t really tell if the second mouth I see is supposed to be there, or if I’m just seeing the actor’s actual mouth inside the mask (it’s not a bad effect even if unintentional.) Apparently Barker’s own vision of the monster was something entirely more phallic—appropriately given the themes of the story—and with a head made of raw meat, a vision that seems to have been brought to life in comic book adaptations of the story. This rather banal eighties rubber suit, which almost never looks like anything other than a guy in a rubber suit, was one of his main qualms with the adaptation.
We get the most plot-important violence on screen, like Rawhead pulling Hallenbeck’s son out of their car and killing him, but even with the onscreen blood, the level of mayhem here is definitely subdued compared to what Barker describes in the story. Rather than the additional child murder and Rawhead re-learning his love of burning things, we instead get a trip to the trailer park where two randy Irish teens come very close to re-enacting one of the parody Space Mutants scenes from The Simpsons. We do get to see the scene where Declan joyfully accepts his holy golden shower, after a build-up to his mania that feels like it takes forever to get going (at least the actor playing Declan goes suitably over-the-top), and for added rudeness, Rawhead slashes up a painting of Christ while pettily vandalizing the church (we see a demonic figure disrespecting and shrugging off religious symbols in Pumpkinhead as well.) The two bonehead detectives investigating the murders come close but don’t quite reach the same heights as the other idiot detective duos seen in many other monster movies I’ve watched, and without a peek into their depraved minds their inevitable deaths don’t have the same zing. One of the cops is hypnotized by Rawhead into eventually setting the rest of his squad on fire during a shoot-out scene, but that and Declan are the only remnants of Rawhead’s corrupting influence present in the movie.
There are other more blatant changes to the story in the ending. Where Hallenbeck was able to use the hidden fertility statue to weaken Rawhead and allow an angry mob of locals to rip him to shreds, the movie makes the logical thematic change that the power must be wielded by a woman (in this case, Hallenbeck’s wife) to work. The women in the short story weren’t exactly the focus, their presence more a symbolic weapon for the men to use against a monster that represents their worst impulses, so this alteration does give at least one of them something more to do. On the other hand, the ensuing light show is a slightly less satisfying ending, despite being more “visual”…and also allows them to throw in a cheap, final, and pointless pre-credits jump scare, the lamest I’ve seen since the one in Prophecy.
The movie ultimately feels like some cheap eighties B-movie cheese that only hints at the sick imagery and savage ideas of the original story. Even so, the hints of something more interesting are certainly there, and I originally discovered the whole Rawhead Rex enterprise through bad movie-loving websites who found some fun in the relentless meat-munching and pissing on priests. The historically important role that Rawhead Rex plays, though, is ultimately based in its lack of success: Barker’s disappointment with the final version of this movie likely encouraged him to handle other adaptations of his work more directly, leading to some much more interesting celluloid creatures.
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