NIGHTBREED – THE SECOND OF TWO VISITS TO THE DARK CINEMATIC WORLD OF CLIVE BARKER

 

A publicity poster for Nightbreed (© Clive Barker/Morgan Creek Productions/20^th Century Fox/Warner Bros – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

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.

 

A second publicity poster for Nightbreed, in which the predominant snarling face is that of Boone whenever he transforms into his Nightbreed state (© Clive Barker/Morgan Creek Productions/20^th Century Fox/Warner Bros – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

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.

 

The front cover and spine of an official VHS videocassette of Nightbreed (© Clive Barker/Morgan Creek Productions/20^th Century Fox/Warner Bros – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

HELLRAISER – THE FIRST OF TWO VISITS TO THE DARK CINEMATIC WORLD OF CLIVE BARKER

 

The official UK DVD of Hellraiser (© Clive Barker/Film Futures/Entertainment Film Distributors – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Despite my love of literary fantasy works, I must confess that I've yet to read any of English author Clive Barker's writings. Moreover, until little more than a month ago I'd never viewed any of the movies based upon or inspired by them either. But then came a visit to a local charity shop where I saw the UK DVD of Hellraiser on sale for a mere 50p, so I decided to give it a go, and enjoyed it sufficiently to seek out a second Barker-based movie, Nightbreed, which I again enjoyed. Now, as a dark fantasy double-bill, I am reviewing both of these phantasmagorical films here at Shuker In MovieLand. I had originally planned to review them together, in a single post, but as they are such complex, multi-faceted movies I have chosen instead to deal with them separately, with Hellraiser reviewed below, and Nightbreed reviewed here.

Just as I do with cryptids, with movies & TV programmes I've always concentrated more upon lesser-known or forgotten examples than upon the more famous, classic ones. As a result, there are some gaping holes in my movie/TV viewing, i.e. many extremely famous films and programmes that I've never got around to watching.

On 2 November 2021, however, I plugged one of those gaping holes by viewing for the very first time the major horror movie Hellraiser, based upon a novella by Clive Barker entitled The Hellbound Heart, after buying its DVD on a whim earlier that same day.

Directed by Clive Barker himself (in his feature-film directorial debut), who also wrote its screenplay, and released by Entertainment Film Distributors in 1987, Hellraiser has become such a famous fantasy-horror movie, spawning a blockbuster multi-movie franchise, that its plot hardly needs recalling. But for those few who, just like me until recently, have yet to view this film classic, here’s a summary.

After purchasing it some time earlier from a local vendor in Morocco, a man named Frank Cotton (played by Sean Chapman) is seated in a darkened unfurnished attic room, endeavouring to open a strange golden puzzle box covered in intricate carvings. Suddenly, he succeeds, but as he does so the attic is bathed in light, and from out of its walls a series of hooked chains emerge, which promptly, and very bloodily, tear Cotton apart. Nice… A dark-robed figure then appears, gazes at the chains covered in flesh and soaked in blood, and twists the puzzle box back into its original configuration, whereupon the attic is instantly returned to its normal state.

So begins Hellraiser, in which we later learn that the puzzle box is a Lemarchand box, named after its insane occult-dabbling creator. When opened correctly, this cryptic construction will enable whoever has succeeded in doing so to experience unimaginable levels of sensual, perverted pleasure and pain, but at the dire cost of losing their mortal body and finding themselves trapped in the hellish world of a merciless race of hedonistic interdimensional entities known as the Cenobites, one of whom had entered the attic room following Frank's dreadful demise and closed the box.

Years pass, and the house containing this accursed attic is eventually purchased by none other than Frank's own brother, Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson), who duly moves in with his wife Julia (Claire Higgins). Unbeknownst to Larry, however, Julia had entered into a passionate, sadomasochistic affair with Frank just before her marriage to Larry, and still yearns for Frank's savagely cruel, wholly selfish, but utterly mesmerizing domination, so different from Larry's mild, ineffectual yet kindly demeanour. Larry also has a teenage daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence in her film debut), who lives close by (with her boyfriend), but for whom her step-mother Julia has no love whatsoever.

During the moving of some furniture into the house and up the stairs, Larry suffers a minor wound, dripping a few drops of blood onto the attic's wooden floor, which begins to tremble faintly. That night, Julia enters the attic and beholds a terrifying sight – Larry's blood has called back into being his evil brother Frank, but not as a man – as a skinless animated cadaver instead!

However, Frank informs a petrified Julia that if she entices men into the house, kills them, and brings their corpses up to him, concealed in the attic, he will absorb their life force and gradually transform back into his original, fully-restored form, and she can then be with him once again, leaving her loveless marriage to Larry behind. Submissive as ever to Frank's overpowering will, Julia reluctantly agrees to do as he commands, and eventually he is indeed restored – after which he callously kills Julia, as she is no longer of any use to him. After killing Larry too, Frank sets his malign sights upon Kirsty, because following a chance but shocking encounter with him she discovered the Lemarchand box and has promptly fled with it.

 

The Engineer (but unnamed in this movie) (© Clive Barker/Film Futures/Entertainment Film Distributors – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

After inadvertently opening the box, stepping into the Cenobites' realm, and finding herself pursued down a corridor by an unnamed but truly hideous scorpionesque monster (called The Engineer in Barker's novels), Kirsty is confronted back in her own world by a delegation of Cenobites, led by the formidable Pinhead (Doug Bradley), although he isn't actually named in this first film. They promise to consider freeing her and to take Frank back with them if she can somehow coerce him into freely confessing that he has indeed escaped from them.

But can they be trusted? And how is she supposed to extract a confession out of Frank? These are the daunting questions that Kirsty wrestles with as she strives to save herself not only from their terrifying clutches but also from those of Frank… And what becomes of the enigmatic Lemarchand box, the cuboid interdimensional portal that engineered the gore-fest unleashed by Frank in the first place?

Hellraiser is certainly an engrossing if somewhat macabre, sado-erotic, and decidedly splatter-soaked movie, a veritable grand guignol presentation at times, but my greatest surprise was that the Cenobites appear in it to a much lesser extent than I'd anticipated, based upon what I'd read about the movie in the past. The (very) special effects are excellent, especially for their time (mid-1980s), and actually feature some of the earliest CGI work ever included in a film (the only major movies that had previously included such effects were Young Sherlock Holmes from 1985, the Star Wars franchise that began in 1977, and, earliest of all, Westworld, way back in 1973).

Although Clare Higgins was originally intended to be Hellraiser's lead star, the popularity among film-goers of Doug Bradley's forbidding portrayal of the lead Cenobite significantly elevated his status. So much so that unlike Higgins's character Julia, Bradley's Cenobite returns to appear in seven sequels. Incidentally, its Pinhead moniker originally arose merely as a nickname given to it by the studio's make-up crew during the arduous 6 hours that it took each day to apply Bradley's prosthetic Cenobite make-up, but it swiftly stuck, becoming the character's actual name in the movie sequels. Clive Barker didn’t like this name, however, considering it to be undignified, and preferred to refer to the character as Priest, but in the credits for Hellraiser it is simply listed as Lead Cenobite.

Speaking of which: Hellraiser was initially planned to be entitled The Hellbound Heart, after Barker's novella upon which it was based, but the studio felt that this sounded too romantic, so asked Barker to offer up an alternative title – as a result of which, amusingly, it could potentially have been released as Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave! Not surprisingly, however, the studio had other ideas about that, and eventually its less provocative, final title was selected instead.

To date, Hellraiser has spawned no fewer than nine sequels (plus a possible TV series currently in the works). So if I wish to spend further time in the carnal company of the sybaritic Cenobites, I have plenty of movies in which to do so, that's for sure!

Finally: as a longstanding fan of automatons, and especially music boxes, I was particularly interested in the Lemarchand puzzle box (which was conceived and designed for Hellraiser by Simon Sayce). This was also due in no small way to the fact that when a few days earlier I had been to a bric-a-brac market quite near to me that I often visit, what should I see on one of the regular stalls there but two beautiful replicas of the Hellraiser Lemarchand puzzle box!

Looking to be about 4 inches by 4 by 4, these ornately-carved cubic replicas were quite heavy, as they were intended as paperweights, and seemed on first sight to be made of brass. Happily, they were entirely solid, with no moving parts, so there was no danger of opening them and having any Cenobites appear unannounced! Regrettably, not having seen the movie at that time, I didn't pay much attention to these items on the stall, but after having watched it, I resolved that if they were still there on the next occasion that I visited this market, I would buy one of them (if not too expensive) to add to my paperweight and ornamental box collection.

And sure enough, when I went back to that market on 7 November and discovered that they were indeed still there, on the same stall, I duly purchased one, and for only £7 (they are listed at much higher prices on ebay etc). Measuring 8 x 8 x 8 cm, and with five of its six sides bearing the same intricately-carved patterns as those on the movie version (the sixth side is its base and is left plain in the replica, covered instead with a felt layer), it has a brass-like finish, but the box itself turns out to be made of very tough resin. At the end of this review is a selection of photographs that I've snapped of it in different lights to show off its very attractive colour and carvings.

"We have such sights to show you!", as Pinhead would say – so to discover what they are, be sure to click here to view a thrilling, chilling official trailer for Hellraiser on YouTube. Also, don't forget to click here to check out my review of another classic Clive Barker movie – Nightbreed.

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.

 

 

A selection of photographs depicting my replica in resin of the Lemarchand puzzle box featured in Hellraiser (©  Dr Karl Shuker)

 

DOWN IN THE VALLEY

 

Publicity poster for Down in the Valley (© David Jacobson/THINKFilm/Element Films/Summit Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

I recently watched a movie described as a neo-Western, a somewhat unusual choice for me as I am not normally a fan of Westerns, neo- or otherwise. But as it starred Edward Norton, a favourite actor of mine ever since I first saw him many years ago in one of my all-time favourite movies, Fight Club, I thought that I'd give it a go, and I'm very pleased that I did, because it proved to be unexpectedly compelling.

Directed and also written by David Jacobson, with Edward Norton as one of its producers and editors as well as its lead star, Down in the Valley was released by Summit Entertainment in 2005, and centres upon Harlan Fairfax Curruthers, an ostensibly affable if delusional 30-something James Dean lookalike drifter played by Norton.

We are introduced to Harlan when he has a chance encounter one day while working as a petrol-pump (gas-station) attendant in the San Fernando valley region of Los Angeles with late-teenager Tobe (short for October), played by Evan Rachel Wood. She is in a car with some female friends, and they stop at the station en route to their beach destination in order to fill up with fuel. Tobe and Harlan start chatting, and before we know it he has impulsively quit his job, in order to join them in their car as they drive to the beach. Here Tobe and Harlan spend the day playfully frolicking together in the sea, before going back to Harlan's sparse apartment for some rather more serious frolics.

When Tobe returns her own home, however, she is met by her enraged, overbearing father Wade (David Morse), who smashes the door of her bedroom in fury when she refuses to tell him what she has been doing that day, while her timid younger brother Lonnie (Rory Culkin, the real-life younger brother of Macauley) looks on nervously. Nevertheless, Tobe and Harlan subsequently meet up and go out together on several occasions, but when Harlan turns up at her home, Wade is decidedly unimpressed by him, and tells him so in no uncertain terms, with his pistol pointed directly at Harlan's brow during one particularly fraught, challenging altercation.

Harlan seemingly takes it all in his stride, however, maintaining an affable, genial façade, and in both his cowboy attire and his matching mode of speech, not to mention his highly-tuned sharpshooting abilities, portrays himself to Tobe as a former ranch-hand, accustomed to working with horses in the great outdoors. He even takes her for a ride on a beautiful white horse upon land belonging to someone he claims to be an old friend named Charlie – until a furious 'Charlie' (Bruce Dern) appears on the scene, claims not to be named Charlie and never to have seen Harlan before, and threatens to have him arrested for stealing his horse, even though, to be fair, Harlan had already returned it.

After interviewing everyone back at the station, the police decide not to take matters further, but the first seeds of doubt regarding Harlan's authenticity have been sown in Tobe's mind – as well they might, because throughout the movie the viewer, unlike Tobe, has been privy to Harlan's effortless ability to lie, and his unhealthy obsession with a cowpoke lifestyle that he has clearly never experienced in real life, only inside the confines of his own unbalanced mind.

Finally, however, when Tobe learns that one afternoon, when Harlan had come round to her home and found her gone, he had taken Lonnie out instead and taught the young boy how to shoot a pistol, she  has to accept the truth, that her much older boyfriend is also much more dangerous than she could ever have anticipated. But her realization comes almost too late – during a heated argument resulting from Harlan earnestly begging her to leave home and come away with him, bringing Lonnie too if he'd like to join them, Tobe loses her temper, and Harlan's hair-trigger grasp upon reality finally snaps, as he responds to Tobe's perceived aggression in the time-honored pistol-toting cowboy tradition…

Thinking that he has killed her, Harlan flees and even shoots himself glancingly in order to hide the blood that had spurted on him from Tobe's gunshot wound and to lie to Lonnie that Wade had encountered them together and had shot both of them. Because Harlan has always been kind to Lonnie (in stark contrast to how Wade habitually treats him), when he asks Lonnie to flee with him, the boy agrees, and after stealing the white horse from 'Charlie', they ride off together into the hills. But Wade, the police,, and 'Charlie' are all in swift pursuit, Wade having found Tobe and taken her to the hospital in time for her life to be saved, the police having exposed Harlan in their records as a charlatan criminal named Martin, and 'Charlie' having lost his prized horse once again to him.

I won't say how this sad saga ends, though I think that you can probably guess, especially as almost every cowboy-related movie has a climactic shoot-out, and the very last scene, featuring Tobe, Lonnie, and (after a fashion) Harlan, is especially poignant. Indeed, I found the whole movie unexpectedly affecting, and Norton's performance as Harlan especially so – no-one could have portrayed this complex, charismatic character more effectively. But therein lies what, at least for me, was the central, core issue that I had with Down in the Valley.

By rights, Harlan should have come across as the bad guy, the duplicitous, delusional, pathological psycho, with Wade as the good guy, the honourable father protecting his daughter and young son at all costs from this unhinged drifter's inimical influence. In reality, however, their roles are reversed. For until he is pushed too far by the highly combustible combination of Wade's raw hostility and Tobe's inability and/or reluctance to commit fully to him, Harlan is easy going, laid back, and invariably gentle both to Tobe and to Lonnie (who eventually comes to idolize him). Wade, conversely, is not just domineering to the point of coming across as a total control freak, he is also physically brutal, cowing Lonnie in particular to such an extent that the boy is virtually monosyllabic throughout – except, that is, when, tellingly, he is in Harlan's company, where he relaxes and learns to laugh and enjoy his life, away from hyper-volatile Wade.

Consequently, even though as a viewer I was indeed privy to the secret, delusional side of Harlan's character, I couldn't help but root for this rather sad, lonely guy who seems so out of kilter with the world around him, rather than for the decidedly unsympathetic, bullish character of Wade. Indeed, I cannot help but wonder whether, if Harlan had not been hassled and hustled so much by Wade, the lethal facet of his sham cowboy persona would have ever been unleashed. Perhaps he and Tobe, and possibly with Lonnie in tow too, would have lived happily ever after, after all – who can say?

Described by one reviewer as Norton's best film since Fight Club, Down in the Valley is one of those deep-rooted, thought-provoking movies that stays with you long after its closing credits have rolled, and I can certainly recommend it to anyone interested in viewing something off the beaten track, in every sense.

Moreover, if you'd like a taster of what to expect from Down in the Valley, be sure to click here to watch an official trailer for it on YouTube.

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.