NIGHTBREED

After an evening with Stephen King, Friday Freak-Out presents its second double feature of the season, this time with cult auteur Clive Barker. Creator of Hellraiser, father of Pinhead, Barker is multi-faceted artist – a film maker whose also an illustrator and a brilliant novelist.

Both his cinema and written canon project one into fantasmagoric or alternative worlds. In Nightbreed, realeased in France in 1990 as Cabal, the title of Barker’s novella on which the film is based, a young man, whose therapist is a psychopath, dreams nightly about Midian, a city of monsters beneath a cemetary. Pursued for crimes he didn’t commit and confined to a mental hospital, Aaron Boone/Cabal, played by Craig Sherrer, does everything in his power to return to the terrifying, supernatural world of his monsters.

David Cronenberg plays a key character in the film, thereby connecting to his own cinematic universe, where dreams and horror are no strangers to each other. Nightbreed was a commercial flop, but remains, nonetheless, an important film in the Barker canon. It’s often referred to as the Star Wars of horror, due to its epic scenes and fantastic bestiary.