Nightbreed (1990)

By the late eighties, Clive Barker had enough clout in the movie world that he could pursue bigger and grander projects, including writing and directing an adaptation of his dark fantasy novel Cabal, which constructed a mythology tailor-made to appeal to the horror and monster-loving outsiders of the world. “Humans are the real monsters” is a common enough theme (that’s why I have an entire tag for it), but Cabal and its film counterpart Nightbreed might be the most blatant examples, presenting a story that explores the allure of the monstrous and the macabre, especially to the disenfranchised, and pitting it against the violent prejudice of the close-minded mass of mainstream society. In interviews, Barker explains this story in terms of obvious fantasies that monsters let us live out—of possessing immortality and other amazing abilities—but it also clearly draws a connection between monsters and underground subcultures, often similarly persecuted, which I’m sure was a very meaningful thing for an openly gay writer like Barker to explore, especially at the very end of the AIDS-haunted eighties. So the subversion in having the monsters be the “good guys” in the scenario carries a lot of weight.

Before I get into the bulk of the post, I should clarify which version of Nightbreed I watched—because this was famously one of those movies that the studio mishandled completely, leading to some crucial changes to the final product that in turn led to multiple cuts of the movie existing. The original 1990 theatrical version was 102 minutes; altered and removed footage was rediscovered in the late 2000s and early 2010s, which were re-inserted into what is called the Cabal Cut and has been re-released with lengths from 145 minutes to 159 minutes. The version I went with was the 2014 Director’s Cut put out by Shout! Factory, which is just over two hours long and utilizes footage from the Cabal Cut. None of us want to be here all day, so I won’t go over the differences between the versions.

Creature Classic Companion: The Brood (1979)

David Cronenberg’s name is synonymous with body horror—he spent the first three decades of his career defining it (and recently came back to it after a long absence), pushing the envelope when it came to fleshy protuberances and disturbing hybridization. But as repulsive as the effects could be in his movies, they’ve never really felt like puerile shock for its own sake, as there has always been a sense of fascination about the way bodies could be warped, and an equal amount of fascination with how physical changes affect people. They are visceral both physically and psychologically, and that’s why Cronenberg’s filmography is a thing unto itself, an idiosyncratic fusion of horror and science fiction.

It all started in low-budget exploitation films of the seventies, beginning with Rabid and Shivers, all shot in his home town of Toronto (where all, or at least most, of his movies have been filmed), which overcame moral outcry from local sources who took umbrage at their combination of sex and violence to be reasonably profitable, allowing him to continue making increasingly larger-scale movies. All of his obsessions were there from the beginning, from bizarre body modifications and infections to, yes, a combination of sex and violence (and music brought to us by regular collaborator and future Lord of the Rings composer Howard Shore)—and his seventies run culminated in The Brood, distributed by Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, which was the big leagues, comparatively speaking. Here, Cronenberg went beyond just the parasitic terror of his first two movies and turned to both parenthood and psychotherapy, and with those themes created some of those notably Cronenbergian images that would define his aesthetic. But this is a movie that is also deeply personal in a way that his other movies aren’t, which makes it all the more disturbing.