Yesterday here at Shuker In MovieLand, I reviewed English fantasy author Clive Barker's self-directed classic 1987 horror movie Hellraiser (click here to read my review of it), which was based upon one of his own novellas, The Hellbound Heart. Today, as promised, I am now paying a return visit to Barker's dark cinematic world in order to review a second movie directed by him (and based upon another of his novellas, Cabal) – the very surreal but superb fantasy/horror movie Nightbreed.
It was following a recent recommendation from Swedish Facebook friend Håkan Lindh that I sought out Nightbreed. Finally, after tracking this movie down in DVD format, on 17 November 2021 I duly watched it – and what a spectacular movie it proved to be!
Directed by Barker, and released by 20th Century Fox and Warner Bros in 1990, Nightbreed takes its name from the motley gathering of monstrous, magical, semi-human entities that inhabit a secret subterranean community named Midian, which is a veritable city supposedly concealed from the eyes of all humans beneath a huge but long-abandoned, remotely-situated cemetery on the far outskirts of Calgary in Alberta, Canada. However, an emotionally disturbed youth named Aaron Boone (played by Craig Sheffer) has experienced a number of dreams in which he is fleeing the Nightbreed within the confines of Midian and the cemetery directly over it.
Boone informs his psychoanalyst Dr Philip K. Decker (played by famous movie-maker David Cronenberg, and named as a tribute to sci fi author Philip K. Dick, whose character Deckard appears in the novel by him that inspired the movie Blade Runner). However, he is shocked when Decker tells him that these dreams indicate that he has murdered several people and is in fact the serial killer who has slaughtered several families locally and is currently being sought by the police. Decker encourages Boone to hand himself over to them, which Boone agrees to do, little suspecting that the real killer is none other than Decker himself (hiding his identity when committing his atrocities by wearing a horrifying hood over his head and face), who intends Boone to be his scapegoat.
On the way to the police station, however, Boone is struck by an oncoming lorry and rendered unconscious. He wakes up inside a hospital, stunned but otherwise uninjured, and overhears another, seemingly insane patient begging the physicians to let him go to Midian; the patient also attempts to remove his own face to reveal what he calls the real one underneath! Boone asks the patient, a man named Narcisse (Hugh Ross), for directions to Midian, and Narcisse, thinking that Boone is a Nightbreed who is testing him, readily gives them to him.
Soon after entering the cemetery below which is Midian, Boone is accosted by two grotesque humanoid Nightbreed entities – one called Kinski (Nicholas Vince) whose head is shaped like a crescent moon, and a taller, more powerful, and far more savage Nightbreed named Peloquin (Oliver Parker) who bites Boone and chases after him, desperate to devour him, but Boone narrowly escapes, exiting the cemetery, beyond whose perimeter Peloquin dare not pass. What Boone doesn’t realize at that point, however, is that by having been bitten by a Nightbreed, he is now one himself, and can no longer be killed.
This proves very fortuitous when Boone is gunned down shortly afterwards by a police posse rustled up by Decker, but when they take his body to the morgue they are unaware that he is not dead, only unconscious (as a Nightbreed, he no longer has a pulse). When everyone has left, Boone awakens and escapes from the morgue, fleeing back to Midian where he is formally initiated as a Nightbreed by their own priest, Lylesberg (Doug Bradley – who also played Pinhead in the Hellraiser movies).
Unknown to Boone, however, his faithful girlfriend Lori (Anne Bobby) is in hot pursuit after discovering that his body is gone from the morgue, and being well aware of his dreams relating to Midian. But unknown to Lori is that Decker in turn is in hot pursuit of her, recognising that if he can attack and kill her, it will draw out his real target, Boone.
To cut a very complex story short: at the cemetery, Lori discovers Boone (not to mention a diverse selection of exceedingly bizarre Nightbreeds), and Decker discovers from a failed stabbing attempt that Boone cannot be killed. Due once again to Decker's malevolent influence, however, Boone is then blamed by the police for yet another series of murders that Decker has committed, and after being recaptured by them he is confined inside a high-security prison cell. But thanks to his own Nightbreed powers as well as the assistance of Lori plus Nightbreed friends Narcisse and Rachel (see later), Boone is soon freed, and they all head back to Midian.
As a result of this affront to their perceived capabilities, however, and goaded as usual by Decker, the police advance upon Midian and seek to burn it to the ground, to destroy what they deem to be the unholy monsters inhabiting it, including Boone, or Cabal, to give him his Nightbreed name, now that he is one of them. But do they succeed, and what happens to Boone/Cabal and Lori, not to mention the truly monstrous Decker? The climactic scenes of conflict and conflagration are of truly epic, even apocalyptic proportions, featuring a battalion of uncontrollable berserker beasts, no less, and finally Decker receives his greatly-earned, much-anticipated come-uppance. Or does he?
Both Hellraiser and Nightbreed make compelling, engrossing viewing, but for me the more involving of the two has to be Nightbreed, because of its mythological beings. Having said that, I do have something of a puritanical problem with them, which is as follows.
According to one Nightbreed, a photophobic woman named Rachel (Catherine Chevalier) who looks entirely human but can transform into a cloud of smoke, they are the last representatives of their many respective shape-shifting creature clans of folklore and legend that once shared the planet peacefully with humanity – until humanity inhumanely went to war against them, mercilessly slaughtering virtually all of their diverse kinds, until the last few survivors fled to the remote cemetery where they founded the subterranean city of Midian. There they have remained in hiding ever afterwards, safe from their human persecutors – until Decker's machinations causes this, their final sanctuary, to be torched.
Yet forgive me for being pedantic here, but with only a very few exceptions, the Nightbreed versions seen in this eponymous movie look nothing like any of the semi-human entities from traditional folklore or mythology that Rachel claims them to be. True, there is one who looks a little like a mini-minotaur, but where are the centaurs, harpies, mermaids, Faerie folk, goblins, giants, etc? Instead, for the most part they are wholly original albeit often repulsive or at least overtly macabre monstrosities that bear no resemblance to anything from folktales or fable.
One Midian inhabitant, for instance, looks like a huge amorphous mass of rotting flesh, whereas another resembles a normal human youth coyly peering over an outspread fan covering the lower half of his face – until he removes the fan, and reveals that his face's lower half is in fact a hideous shapeless mass of raw crimson flesh. And don't forget the porcupine lady, bristling with lethal toxic quills that she can shoot out of her body and into that of anyone she chooses not to take a liking to – you have been warned!
My only other quibble is how Decker is able to deceive the police so easily and often. Surely one of them should have noticed that whenever there is another spate of serial slaughtering, Decker is invariably in close proximity to it? Then again, these are the same police who fail to notice that Boone no longer has a pulse even though he is clearly still very much alive. Instead, they have to be informed of this salient, fundamental fact by the shocked police doctor sent to examine Boone after they'd assaulted him in his cell, wrongly believing him to be responsible for the murders perpetrated by the foul Decker. Sherlock Holmes they ain't, that's for certain!
Never mind. All of the lead stars, most especially Sheffer and Cronenberg, perform their roles with great verve, so that even a storyline as patently unbelievable as Nightbreed's is ultimately rendered all but believable somehow. And regardless of whether they represent or even recall any familiar creatures of folklore, the Nightbreed entities are undeniably very memorable and well-conceived visually. Indeed, it is only when they make their first appearance that the movie really gets into gear, but thereafter it definitely takes the viewer on a full-throttle, white-knuckle, rollicking rollercoaster of a ride into unrelenting unreality.
And now for some interesting Nightbreed trivia to toy with, courtesy of the IMDb website's very extensive entry for this movie. Did you know, for instance, that 1970s rocker Suzi Quatro filmed a part in it? Sadly, however, her contribution didn't make the final cut. Having said that, a greatly-extended version of Nightbreed dubbed The Cabal Cut, and containing several segments deleted from the original theatrical version prior to its release, was made available commercially in 2014, but which I have yet to view, so Suzi may survive intact in that. Another music star who nearly appeared in Nightbreed is Marc Almond of Soft Cell, who was contracted to play the heavily-tattooed humanoid Nightbreed character Ohnaka. But for reasons that vary from one source to another, he eventually dropped out and was replaced in the role by Simon Bamford.
Moreover, sci fi/fantasy movie heavyweights Rutger 'Blade Runner' Hauer and Christopher 'Highlander' Lambert were both considered for the role of Boone before it eventually went to Craig Sheffer (who went on to appear in the Barker-based Hellraiser sequel Hellraiser: Inferno, released in 2000).
Speaking of The Cabal Cut: in it, Narcisse is murdered and decapitated by Decker (who else!!), but this scene had been deleted from the movie's theatrical release, in which Narcisse survives, because pre-screenings of it had received negative responses from the audiences, who liked Narcisse and didn't want to see him killed. Incidentally, he is named after Clarvius Narcisse, a shambling, semi-comatose figure investigated by researchers in Haiti, and widely deemed to be a bona fide zombie (albeit not of the undead horror movie variety!).
Finally, in case the name sounds familiar, Midian is not confined to Nightbreed, nor, indeed to the Clive Barker novella Cabal upon which it is based. In fact, as mentioned in the Bible (a mention, moreover, that is specifically alluded to in the movie), it is actually the name of the land where Moses spends 40 years in exile from Egypt until God appears in the burning bush here, exhorting him to return to Egypt and lead the Israelites out of slavery and away into the Promised Land.
A movie in which the monsters are by and large the good guys was by no means as common a commodity back when Nightbreed was made as it is in today's cinematic Solar system, so it was far ahead of its time, and despite (or because of?) its sometimes gross, sometimes savage characters attracted a cult following that has stayed faithful to it ever since. As for me, I can unhesitatingly recommend this marvellous if slightly manic movie to all fans of dark (sometimes positively sable-hued!) cinematic fantasy-horror.
And if you'd like to catch a glimpse of Midian's extraordinary denizens, please click here to watch an official Nightbreed trailer on YouTube. And don't forget to click here to read my Shuker In MovieLand Hellraiser review.
To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.
Barker's explanation of the Nightbreed sounds quite similar to John Keel's Ultra-Terrestrials, now that I think of it...
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