Clive Barker

• 1. Introduction

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  Clive Barker was three years old when he saw a man fall out of the sky. At an air show in Liverpool, the French skydiver Leo Valentin plummeted to the ground during a public performance, and a toddler in the crowd watched it happen. That moment would follow Barker for the rest of his life, surfacing again and again in the stories he would eventually write. It tells you something important about the man: his imagination was seeded early, by real images of real mortality, not by the comfortable distance of fiction.

  Barker was born on the 5th of October 1952 in Liverpool, a city he would leave behind but never entirely escape. His mother Joan was a painter. His father Leonard worked in industrial relations. The household was not artistic in a conventional sense, yet something in it produced one of the most restlessly creative figures in the English-speaking world over the past half-century. By the time Barker was in his thirties, Stephen King had declared him the future of horror. That was only the beginning.

  This documentary follows how a Liverpool schoolboy became a playwright, then a novelist, then a filmmaker, then a visual artist, and somehow managed to remain all four things at once.

• 2. The Stage Before the Page

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  Barker's first creative outlet was not writing fiction but staging it. While still a schoolboy, he directed productions called Voodoo and Inferno in 1967. Theatre was where his instincts first found a public form.

  In 1974 he collaborated on six plays with Theatre of the Imagination. Two years later, in 1976, he wrote A Clowns' Sodom for The Mute Pantomime Theatre, followed by Day of the Dog for the same company in 1977. These were not casual student experiments; they were produced works for named theatre groups.

  The decisive move came in 1978, when Barker co-founded The Dog Company with former schoolmates. Several of those collaborators would later become central figures in his film career. Doug Bradley, his long-time friend and former classmate at Quarry Bank High School, was part of that founding circle. Bradley would eventually play Pinhead in the Hellraiser series. Peter Atkins, another collaborator from that period, went on to write the scripts for the first three Hellraiser sequels.

  Over the following five years, Barker wrote nine plays for The Dog Company, often directing them himself. Among the best known were The History of The Devil, Frankenstein in Love, and The Secret Life of Cartoons. From 1982 to 1983, he shifted to Cockpit Youth Theatre, writing Crazyface, Subtle Bodies, and Colossus. That body of stage work closed when the Books of Blood consumed his attention, but the theatrical instinct never left him. His plays were later collected in two volumes: Incarnations in 1995 and Forms of Heaven in 1996.

• 3. Books of Blood

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  The first three volumes of Books of Blood appeared in 1984, and the reception changed what horror fiction was understood to be capable of. Stephen King, already the genre's dominant voice, was quoted on the American paperback covers: "I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker." That line did more for Barker's visibility than any review could have.

  The six volumes of Books of Blood collected short stories and novelettes that ranged from brutal to lyrical. "The Midnight Meat Train", "The Yattering and Jack", "Rawhead Rex", "The Forbidden", and "In the Hills, the Cities" were among the stories gathered across the series. The Forbidden would later form the basis of the 1992 film Candyman and three sequels.

  The collections won immediate recognition. Volumes One through Three took the 1985 Locus Award for Collection and the 1985 World Fantasy Award for Anthology/Collection. "In the Hills, the Cities" won the 1985 British Fantasy Award for Short Story. The Forbidden won the 1986 British Fantasy Award for Short Story.

  Barker has described his influences as including Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Ray Bradbury, William S. Burroughs, William Blake, and Jean Cocteau. That range is visible in the Books of Blood: the writing is often dense and literary, concerned with bodies and transformation and the texture of dread rather than shock alone.

  After the short fiction, he published The Damnation Game in 1985, a Faustian novel that won the 1987 Bram Stoker Award for First Novel. The scope of the work was already expanding beyond the horror category he had entered.

• 4. From Fantasy to Epic

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  Weaveworld arrived in 1987 and marked a shift toward modern fantasy with horror elements. It won the 1988 Locus Award for Fantasy. The Great and Secret Show followed in 1989, taking the 1990 Locus Award for Horror. Then came Imajica in 1991, described in the source as world-spanning, which won the 1992 Locus Award for Horror/Dark Fantasy and was later awarded the 1998 Grand Prix de l'Imaginaire for Foreign Novel.

  Barker has said that he thinks of his writing less and less as horror. Imajica suggests why: at that scale and with those ambitions, genre categories become inadequate containers.

  Sacrament came out in 1996 and collected an unusual cluster of awards: the 1996 International Horror Guild Award for Novel, the 1997 Lambda Literary Award for Speculative Fiction, and the 1997 British Fantasy Award for the August Derleth Award. It was also a personal work. Barker had been publicly out as gay since 1996, and Sacrament's concerns with identity and mortality carried that weight.

  The Abarat series, beginning in 2002, moved into young adult territory. The first volume won the 2002 Bram Stoker Award for Work for Young Readers and the 2003 Locus Award for Young Adult. Barker painted the illustrations for the series himself. In early 2024, he announced he was stepping back from conventions and public events to concentrate on writing, citing manuscripts for 31 different projects at various stages of completion.

• 5. Writing and Directing Hellraiser

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  Barker's first two screenplays, Underworld in 1985 and Rawhead Rex in 1986, were directed by George Pavlou. Barker was displeased by how that material was handled. Rather than write another screenplay and hand it to someone else, he decided to direct the next one himself.

  Hellraiser opened in 1987. It was based on his own novella The Hellbound Heart, and he wrote the screenplay and directed. The film introduced the character Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley, Barker's former schoolmate from Quarry Bank High School. It was the same creative circle that had formed The Dog Company nearly a decade earlier.

  Nightbreed followed in 1990, based on his novella Cabal, but it flopped. Barker returned to directing with Lord of Illusions in 1995, based on his short story "The Last Illusion". In between, The Forbidden was adapted by Bernard Rose into Candyman in 1992, with Barker as a source but not the director.

  He served as executive producer on Gods and Monsters in 1998, a film about the later years of Frankenstein director James Whale. Barker explained his investment in the project directly: "Whale was gay, I'm gay; Whale was English, I'm English. Whale made some horror movies, and I've made some horror movies. It seemed as if I should be helping to tell this story." The film won the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

  In 2020, Barker regained control of the Hellraiser franchise. He served as executive producer on a 2022 reboot released through the streaming service Hulu, directed by David Bruckner.

• 6. Painting and Visual Art

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  Barker's paintings first reached a public audience through the covers of his official fan club magazine, Dread, published by Fantaco in the early 1990s. They also appeared on the covers of Incarnations in 1995 and Forms of Heaven in 1996, the two published collections of his plays.

  His artwork has been shown at Bert Green Fine Art in Los Angeles and Chicago, at the Bess Cutler Gallery in New York, and at La Luz De Jesus in Los Angeles. Around 150 works by Barker were used in building the set of the Academy of the Unseen Arts for the Netflix series Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.

  Two early collections of his visual work are Clive Barker, Illustrator, published in 1990 by Arcane/Eclipse Books, and the follow-up Illustrator II: The Art of Clive Barker in 1992. Visions of Heaven and Hell was published by Rizzoli Books in 2005 and won the 2006 Locus Award for Art Book.

  A longer ongoing series, Clive Barker: Imaginer, has run to at least eight volumes between 2014 and 2020. Barker also designed Halloween costumes for Disguise Costumes, and provided the artwork for The Thief of Always and the Abarat series. The visual work is not ancillary to the writing; it runs alongside it as a parallel practice, drawing from the same imaginative world.

• 7. Comics and Video Games

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  In 1993, Barker published his Razorline imprint through Marvel Comics, extending his horror characters into sequential art. Hellraiser adaptations and spin-offs ran across Marvel/Epic Comics, including series for Nightbreed, Pinhead, The Harrowers, Book of the Damned, and Jihad. Eclipse Books published Tapping The Vein, Dread, Son of Celluloid, Revelations, The Life of Death, Rawhead Rex, and The Yattering and Jack. Dark Horse Comics published Primal.

  IDW became an active partner in the mid-2000s. A three-issue adaptation of The Thief of Always, written and painted by Kris Oprisko and Gabriel Hernandez, appeared in 2005. In December 2007, Chris Ryall and Barker announced an original series called Torakator for IDW. In October 2009, IDW published Seduth, co-written by Barker, with three variant covers. IDW also began publishing a 12-issue adaptation of The Great and Secret Show.

  Boom! Studios published an original Hellraiser comic series beginning in 2011, and announced Next Testament in 2013, described as the first original story by Barker written directly for comic book format.

  The video game work is smaller but notable. Clive Barker's Undying was developed by EA Los Angeles and released in 2001; Barker provided the voice for the character Ambrose. Clive Barker's Jericho, developed by MercurySteam and Alchemic Productions for Codemasters, was released in late 2007. A further title, Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, was in development by Boss Team Games as of the time the source was written.

• 8. Private Life, Public Art

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  Barker was open about his sexuality from an early point. He stated on Loveline in 1996 that he realised he was gay when he was around 18 or 19 years old. He dated John Gregson from 1975 to 1986. A later relationship with photographer David Armstrong, which ran from 1996 to 2009, was significant enough that Armstrong was described as Barker's husband in the introduction to the novel Coldheart Canyon.

  In 2003, Barker received the Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th GLAAD Media Awards. The award and the decade in which it was given locate him within a specific cultural history of LGBTQ visibility in mainstream entertainment.

  His health has at times been serious. In a December 2008 interview, he described throat polyps so severe that a doctor told him he was taking in only 10% of the air he was supposed to breathe. He had two surgical procedures to address them. Then in 2012, a visit to a dentist led to toxic shock syndrome; bacteria entered his bloodstream, he fell into a coma for several days, and almost died. In response to what felt like a narrowing of time, he began writing the novel Deep Hill, believing it might be his final book.

  He received the 1995 World Horror Convention Grand Master Award, the 1995 International Horror Guild Living Legend Award, and the 2013 Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award. The 1991 Inkpot Award also appears in his record. These are career honours given to someone whose body of work is treated as already complete, even as the manuscripts kept accumulating. By his own account in early 2024, there were 31 of them in various states of progress.