Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) has troubling dreams of strange creatures, humanoid yet inhuman. Monsters racing through the night and toward a strange graveyard location. A place called Midian. He feels close to these outcasts, he feels apart from the ordinary world including his girlfriend Lori (Anne Bobby). Is Boone a monster under the skin? His sinister shrink, Dr. Decker (David Cronenberg), is certainly trying to convince him of this. A weird slasher who wears a creepy mask decorated with buttons for eyes has been stalking the city, slaughtering whole families. Decker points Boone toward the idea that these crimes seem to correlate to confessions arising during some of Boone’s hypnotherapy sessions. Soon, Boone is heading out to the place in his dreams to learn if there is something to the mystery. There he will find out the difference between Nightbreed and Natural, the latter of which is little more than “meat for the beast”. A society of society’s monstrous outsiders live there, hiding from the real enemy: mankind. Soon, the time for hiding will be over and the time for war will begin. The night has a hero in Clive Barker’s sophomore feature, NIGHTBREED (1990).
DANIEL’S TAKE
I first learned about NIGHTBREED in the months leading up to the film’s release. Advertising booklets titled something like “Meet the Nightbreed” were slipped into the middles of the Marvel comics I was reading at the time. Whoever thought the audience for X-men would also be the audience for an R-rated horror flick showed uncanny brilliance, as will be explained. However, at the time, I plucked out the booklet and flipped through. Each page featured a portrait, the sorts of headshots actors used when auditioning for a role. These were not actors like anyone I had seen at the time. No Schwartzeneggers, no Jennifer Connely or Demi Moore. These shorts were decidedly different. A woman with a hawkish face covered with long porcupine quills, a gleeful goat faced satyr, a pair of conjoined twins smooshed together cheek to cheek like two slices of bread on a grilled cheese sandwich handed to a two-year-old, a moon faced guy with both a big assed crescent dagger and some big assed rings, and others. With the portraits were little pieces of prose, fiction hinting at that picture’s background, personality, and abilities. For example, the quilled woman Shuna Sassi was the special room occupant at a brothel as well as a murderess – well, of course she was! The quills would rustle like sequins when she danced. That would be kind of awesome right? And monsters killed all the time. It was the glorious eighties, the heyday of splattery movies and murderous monsters.
I read the booklet to tatters, imagining the stories these characters would be a part of. They were characters, too. Each monster different that the last. Not slight variations on a theme – all lizard men, say – and no clones of the sorts of creatures that shambled out of the Universal pictures. Dracula need not apply to this group.
Needless to say, the advertising sold me on the movie long before I saw the commercials for it on TV. I wanted to hang out with these characters. I wanted to know them.
I managed to be among the folks sitting in the opening weekend theatrical release and found myself conflicted. The images were cool. The monsters were great to look at, imaginative and different and pretty cool. It was one of the most unique filmic love letters to monsters I had seen to that point. However, the movie itself was . . . well, let’s say flawed in its execution. Bungled might not be too strong a word.
This Clive Barker guy must not have known what he had in his possession, I assumed. He had dynamite in a bottle waiting to blow, and while there were fireworks on the screen, they came across like firecrackers instead of TNT. There was more than a hint of talent here. Overall, the flick was beautiful to look at. However, in terms of story?
The opening two acts are mostly solid. Fast paced, passionate, and not terribly confusing. As soon as the crazy rednecks show up and decided to go monster hunting, however, the movie goes off the rails into WTF land. The images remain cool and sometimes heartrending (as Nightbreed families are gunned down like sheep, burned alive, blown to smithereens by yuck-yucking asshats with military grade munitions and no sense of compassion or humanity whatsoever), but the logic and the way the scenes are connected is where the film fell apart. Where there had been an engine running along pretty strong in the beginning, the final thirty minutes or so of the flick felt like a flurry of snapshots that danced, not a clearly or cleanly strung together end to a feature.
At the time, I wondered: Does this Clive Barker guy have a clue about telling stories and making movies?
Silly me. I was a young teenager at the time.
Anyway, there was enough coolness there to convince me to check out the book it was based on, knowing full well that novels were just about always better than movies. At the time, I was a huge fan of novelizations. Alan Dean Foster was one of my favs.
NIGHTBREED was inspired by Barker’s novella CABAL, which in the funky purple edition I picked up was combined with Barker’s BOOKS OF BLOOD volume six. The fiction was engrossing and while it followed the beasts of the flick it was far better in the overall execution. Sure, the psychiatrist had changed from a beefy bodybuilder type – and how different would the movie have been if the role of Decker had been Arnold Schwartzennegar than slight, sinister David Cronenberg? – and some pieces seemed shuffled about, but I found myself wondering what in the hell had happened between the prose and the filming? I was still unsure about this whole filmmaking process. Magazines like Fangoria gave me a peek behind the camera, but I was a dabbler at best. There was much to love about the story, and plenty of dangling threads at the conclusion. I expected more movies would follow, and could not have been more wrong in my estimation.
NIGHTBREED had one hurrah, and it did not deliver at the box office. The idea that there would be more films was shelved. The story, however, was not done.
Around the film’s release, Marvel’s adult-targeted imprint at the time (EPIC, I believe the name was) released a gory comics adaptation and then subsequently produced an even gorier (and somewhat sexy) series about monsters on the road and Boone’s journey to become the night’s hero. The storyline pursued by the comics was a bizarre combination of superheroes and the supernatural, involving monsters, blood-n-guts splatter horror, and mythic fantasy. Needless to say, I was sold. It was a lot of what I was looking for at the time (and still enjoy to this day, truth be told). The movie might not have been the best, but everything else that lead to it and came from it seemed to be pretty awesome.
My views have softened somewhat on the picture as I’ve aged. There is a lot to enjoy in there, and a lot to loathe. I realize now, Barker is not really the responsible party for the latter. Perspective as well as obsessive exploration of a topic can lead to illumination and even revelation.
Later on, I learned why the movie felt like an MPD case bouncing between identities. What I had seen was the product of studio tampering, and I believe it may have been one of my first experiences with understanding the dark side of the movie making process and of collaborations in general. The folks who had greenlit the picture (a company called Morgan Creek) were pretty much expecting a redux of HELLRAISER (1987), which could be summed up as a pretty girl who ends up running through a house dodging switchblade or claw hammer slashing maniacs as well as angles/demons (to some) kitted out in sexy leather fetishgear who are threatening to tear her life, sanity, and soul apart. What the studio got instead was a film with a scope greater than a funhouse ride through a single house, and a gothic epic quality exploring one man’s journey from haunted dude to monstrous hero.
In today’s terms, they got the origin story to a superhero.
I was wrong. The question wasn’t whether or not Barker was a talented enough filmmaker and storyteller to pull of the flick. The question was really whether or not the producers had enough confidence in Barker to let him do the job they hired him to do. The distinction is important.
As a theatrical release, NIGHTBREED seems to bounce around tones like a child on sugar bounces between favorite colors or toys. The flick starts out mysterious, passes through an imaginative take on the slasher genre, shifts gears into a monster movie, hits the notes tackled in 1987’s NEAR DARK of an ordinary man turned into a blood drinking creature of the night (though in that earlier flick, the rejection of the Other includes a purging of the self, which always rang as false to me), and finally shifts gears again into an over-the-top actioner. The underlying current running through all these moods is the sympathy the film has for its outsiders, the monsters called Nightbreed.
Boy are there monsters! As I mentioned before these are not the known quantities, either. Why bother throwing us another Dracula or Lon Chaney Wolfman, when you can have a dude who feeds leeches by biting his fingernails and who cooes to the eyeball devouring eel-things that live in his distended gut? There are blood drinkers and shape shifters, to be certain, but they are unusual in their appearance and design. There are human qualities to them, a sexiness to some, a savagery to others, even an innocence as in the child shapeshifter Babette. The monsters range in shapes, sizes, ages. They look like anyone or no one. They are inclusive in ways that current fandom’s rallying cries demand all movies be, and they were inclusive almost thirty years before fandom realized it wanted and needed this diversity. When the critters are on the stage, they are breathtaking. When the people are on the stage, well . . .
Director David Cronenberg turns in one of my favorite acting jobs of the majorly billed cast. He has a subtlety to his delivery as well as his body language. In another life, he might have been a horror film star in the same caliber as Boris Karloff or Christopher Lee. His presentation of the sinister psychiatrist is chilling and oddly fun. My favorite scene with this character is when Decker takes his the first trip to Midian at the time Boone is about to complete his transformation from human to monster. To set the scene, Boone has encountered his first Nightbreed (the moon faced Kinski and the meat-eating lawbreaker Peloquin). Bitten and racing away from them, he escapes the graveyard only to find himself surrounded by waiting authority figures. Backed by a bunch of triggerhappy cops, Decker approaches Boone like a qualified negotiator (“I know how to talk to him”) and then the psychiatrist as much admits that he framed Boone for the murders he has himself committed. Before Boone can process this, Decker throws a glance back toward the cops and shouts, “HE’S GOT A GUN!” before diving aside. Boone is left standing there like an idiot, faced with a highly intelligent, fast thinking antagonist. He is gunned down like a sheep. It’s a beautiful moment.
I cannot say I share the same affection for the star of the picture. Craig Sheffer is a pretty man, but his acting chops are strongest when he is human and dealing with human issues. He knows his lines and he delivers them, but his range is not quite up to the range the character requires. He seems fine as a dramatic actor, but when the sequences call for tough action heroics, I find neither his ability to perform dialogue or stunts work particularly convincing. Still, he has great hair and a fine look.
The rest of the cast (particularly the monsters) range from gleeful scene chewers like Narcisse (Hugh Ross), a wonderful character that was an actor who became (rightly) convinced that he possessed a face beneath his human one, to the staid Lylesburg (Doug Bradley, who serves as the breed’s defacto leader, to the tattooed Ohnaka, who has a boyish face and a heartbreaking fate.
When the film is at its best, it presents its monsters as a different kind of people. They fly, they change shape, they do all the things human beings dream of doing, but they are just folks. Jealousy drives human beings to hate them and fear drives these “naturals” to want to kill the Nightbreed. Their story is nothing less than a superhero tale ala the X-Men, so it is perhaps not so surprising that the audience for those particular comics actually was among the target audience for this R-Rated horror film. In fact, NIGHTBREED may well be the original comic book film for horror fans. It might not have a Marvel stamp on it, but the movie presents the beats that would come to be used (some might say overused) in the MCU and DCU flicks twenty plus years later. (The argument can be made that those beats are from mythology or the Campbellian Hero’s Journey.) As I mentioned before, this is an origin story for an unlikely hero.
Speaking of ties to comic book movies, special mention should be made about the film’s score. The year before NIGHTBREED’s release, composer Danny Elfman brought both gothic and epic touches to Tim Burton’s BATMAN (1989). Echoes of that feature can be heard here. Some of the motifs and movements he chose for the story of Boone’s adoption into the Nightbreed and humanity’s eventual war upon the Breed’s home would also be touched upon two years later in the score he provided Tim Burton’s followup BATMAN RETURNS (1992), particularly the twisted carnival tunes as Lori explores Midian. Some of those pieces would end up in the themes for Penguin and his carnie cronies.
It was a shame that many of the monsters advertised in that booklet in my comics were not featured as more than walk-ons or few liners in the theatrical cut. Effects designer Bob Keen and his people were responsible for over two hundred different creature designs for this film. What could have been the ultimate monster mash bash was relegated to a sort of extended Cantina sequence from Star Wars. Lots of neat creatures who get little screen time and even less to do with it. At the time, they opened the floodgates for my own imagination, of course. I would create my own stories for the Breed. My mind was always making stories. Had fanfiction been a thing at the time, I probably would have been writing about the Breed obsessively for a while . . .
Some of the film’s shortcomings would be corrected in time.
Years later, Scream Factory would announce its intentions to do the seemingly impossible and then manage to actually do it (thanks to the delightfully named fan movement, Occupy Midian). Gathering up enough footage to release a version of the picture closer to Barker’s original vision. The Cabal Cut of NIGHTBREED played the film festival circuits. Then, different footage surfaced, and a Director’s Cut Blu-Ray/DVD release hit shelves. I understand Barker’s Seraphim Films intends to release a new cut, which will incorporate footage from both releases. In a way, NIGHTBREED has become the BLADE RUNNER (1982) of the fantastique.
This is not to say that all the film’s problems were erased. Far from it. Given budget contraints and access to materials at the time, the film was never going to be perfect. However, it is closer to its potential. Unfortunately, the shifts in picture quality is noticeable and somewhat distracting. The movie is watchable and enjoyable in its Director’s cut version, but it is not the be all and end all solution to all the film’s issues. More than suspension of disbelief, the film requires a suspension of audience expectation in uniformity of film stock. However, the Director’s Cut is a welcome attempt at getting closer to the story Barker wanted to tell. The Director’s Cut deserves plenty of props, however. Even if only for such small touches as restoring Doug Bradley’s own voice to the role of Lylesburg or for making the final War on Midian more than an impressionistic series of scenes and episodes strung together.
It is a difficult task to talk about NIGHTBREED without recognizing the influences upon it and the influence it would have. You can draw a line from Universal pictures such as James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN (1931) or Jack Arnold’s CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON (1954) to del Toro’s THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017), and that line will pass right through NIGHTBREED’s Midian. Certainly, the line to del Toro’s HELLBOY: THE GOLDEN ARMY (2008) is drawn through Barker’s film. The whole otherworldly market scene is a walk through a more grandiose Midian. Or if not grandiose than certainly a bigger budgeted one.
The idea of not just one sympathetic monster (or two or three for the inevitable mash up flicks, sometimes featuring the delightful Abbot and Costello) but a whole city of them is engaging. When I talk to people who refer to “finding their tribe” I often mentally rewrite the term as “finding their tribes of the moon,” which is what the Nightbreed refer to themselves as.
Barker has been discussing a sequel (or two) for decades. As films, they will probably never see the light of green, but as novellas they still might. Perhaps Mark Alan Miller will be the fire under Barker’s feet to get him hopping on some of these projects that fans have been waiting decades for. Time alone will tell.
Either version of NIGHTBREED is a film worth studying and considering. I feel as though I have only scratched the surface here.
#
As mentioned above, Scream Factory has unleashed the Director’s Cut upon the world in Blu-Ray/DVD combo pack. Once upon a time, they offered a limited release with the original theatrical cut as well. The film is also available in its theatrical cut on DVD and video streaming.
Also, the omnibus edition of the NIGHTBREED comics from the nineties is worth seeking out. It’s a fun peak into the film as source of inspiration. Hell, in some issues the ‘Breed face off against the Cenobites and Rawhead Rex. How cool is that?
Next week, we will take a look at THE ENDLESS (2017), a new horror flick from the creators of SPRING (2014) and RESOLUTION (2012). Join us for a peak at this thrilling example of low budget, high concept cosmic horror and strangeness.
This article copyright © 2018 by Daniel R. Robichaud.
consideringstories 
8 thoughts on “MOVIE MONDAYS: NIGHTBREED”