Nightbreed (1990)
Directed by Clive Barker
Written by Clive Barker
Starring Craig Scheffer, David Cronenberg, Anne Bobby
Release Date February 16th, 1990
Box Office Gross $16 million dollars
Clive Barker wastes no time; you see his monsters before the credits roll in Nightbreed. In terms of visual storytelling, a wall of cave paintings tells us that the monsters here are ancient, perhaps a pre-cursor to, or a compatriot of, early man. If these cave paintings are telling a story, that's unclear. Holy crap! Again, we waste no time. A mess of monsters are racing about to a classically Danny Elfman score. The scene is very... Andrew Lloyd Webber. The monsters and the choreography of the chase is, at the very least Broadway inspired.
This is a dream sequence which explains the highly theatrical production and the stage-setting for the action. Our lead character, Aaron Boone (Craig Scheffer) has awakened from a dream of these fantastical monsters and the way in which Cliver Barker self-inserts himself into the story is hard to miss here. Having his handsome main character dreaming up these fantastical monsters is a very obvious corollary to the writer-director-author who has, in fact, created these monsters for this movie.
Nightbreed is based on the novel 'Cabal' by Clive Barker. Barker adapted the book into a screenplay and directed the film based on that screenplay from his own book. So, yeah, this is a Clive Barker joint through and through. I imagine having himself inserted as the main character, stopping just short of calling the character Clive and having him be a multi-hyphenate artist, won't be the last time we see parallels between Aaron, AKA Cabal, and his creator.
Seemingly out of the blue we get a sequence of slasher horror that is among the best of the decade. Barker takes us to a random suburban home. A loving wife and her husband are laughing together and playful. They have a young son and he gives us the first sign of something unseemly occurring. The boy tells his mother that he's afraid and claims that he was kept awake by a 'bad man.' This bad man turns out to be the real deal, a slasher killer who makes an incredible first impression.
Employing a a horror filmmaking trope, Barker has the mother open the freezer door in the kitchen. This serves to block a portion of empty space next to her. Naturally, the trained film watcher knows that when mom closes the freezer door, someone, or something, will be there and this scene will move jarringly from the suburban mundane to the terrifying. Here, since he's employing a familiar trope, Barker has to deliver something big. Something shocking. And boy does he deliver.
A killer in one of the most terrifying masks we will see in 90s horror, is behind that freezer door. He immediately slashes mom to death with what is surely an incredibly sharp knife. The movement is swift and horrifying and your breath catches when you see it. The visual of the blood on the ground and the sight of apples that the mother was near or carrying covered in blood as the roll across the floor is a sublime horror visual. The gurgling of the mother character, having been slashed across the face and throat, and the seemingly realistic amount of blood, only serves to amplify the terror.
Dad is next. The killer, wearing this incredibly scary mask and a long black trench coat, a look that evokes a much more frightening take on Claude Rains' The Invisible Man, enters the living room and shuts off the lights. In just a brief moment that superbly heightens the awfulness of what is to come, dad smiles to himself, assuming that his lovely wife has returned for more intimacy. He's wrong, of course, and that we know it and he doesn't adds another layer of deep dismay. Once dad is dead, the scene heightens again.
Our mind flashes to that little boy at the top of the stairs. Knowing this, and taking remarkable advantage of our empathetic rooting interest, Barker chooses to move the camera to the child's perspective, looking down the stairs at the killer. Here, Barker masterfully pauses, giving us the brief hope that maybe the killer won't look for the boy, maybe the child will merely bea witnes to this terror. That hope is snuffed out as the killer's sickening gaze, through what looks like buttons where his eyes should be. The mask evokes another, much less well-known influence, 1976's The Town That Dreaded Sundown, a Charles B. Pierce directed film, and also a movie about a serial murderer in a mask.
Does the child die? We don't know. in the moment but but it certainly did not appear that he had much chance of survival. I can't stress how great this scene is. In only his second feature film, following the less than stellar but entirely memorable, Hellraiser, Barker demonstrates masterful control over his camera, the patience of Hitchcock in letting his scene build while adding details to amp the moment, and an ingenious notion of how to end a scene thick with dread and intrigue. It's remarkable and I am shocked I've not heard about this scene before.
Another example of Barker's growth as a director is his choice to follow this scene by letting off some steam. He needs to place his characters on a map for the story to proceed. Thus, Aaron is at work and his girlfriend, Lori (Anne Bobbi), drops in for a visit. She explains that she's going to be at a nightclub that night, performing as a singer. The dialogue is all exposition but it's not tedious as Aaron and Lori are making out almost the whole time, breaking for dialogue and an occasional breath. Scheffer and Bobbi have tremendous sexual chemistry so the making out is a good choice but we now also know where the characters are going to be and why. What looks like a superfluous scene then, is thus now a scene that has set the table for what is to come and established the couple even further as young lovers we want to see together again.
Find my full length review at Horror.Media
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