As Hellraiser<\/em> was becoming a money-printing machine, Barker directed another film based on his work: 1990\u2019s Nightbreed<\/em>. Adapted from his novel Cabal<\/em>, the film was in many ways the anti-Hellraiser<\/em>, which did not please 20th Century Fox. The studio wanted more horror; what they got was an earnest fantasy story imbued with a dense queer allegory, so they cut twenty minutes out the final product and left it to languish in theaters while they gave all their attention to White Men Can’t Jump<\/em>. It\u2019s not surprising, alas. This is a film with greater ambitions than to scare.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Young Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) is a seemingly troubled man whose dreams are haunted by images of a city called Midian populated by monsters. What scares him most aren’t the creatures themselves but the sense that he belongs among them. Making matters worse is his blatantly devious psychiatrist Dr. Decker (played, of course, by David Cronenberg), a serial killer who convinces Boone that he’s murdered dozens of people. Eventually, Boone finds his way to Midian, a haven for the peaceful monsters of ancient folklore known as Nightbreed who have avoided being hunted to extinction by humans. As he is welcomed into his new life as one of the creatures, war breaks out as Dr. Decker seeks to annihilate them from the face of the Earth.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While Barker\u2019s horror revels in a bleakness about humanity, his fantasy novels are sincere creations with true investment in the power and liberation of otherness. Gruesomeness can co-exist alongside beauty and is often aesthetically indistinguishable from it. There\u2019s honesty in this way of living, a truthfulness that the hypocrisy of humanity can never hope to duplicate. With Nightbreed<\/em>, the monsters have coalesced to form a new community that redefines their supposed abnormalities as the accepted default. Assimilation is impossible, and not just because of how the Nightbreed look. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The parallels between the discrimination the Nightbreed face and the persecution of LGBTQ+ people has been noted by every writer and viewer under the son. Barker, a gay man, has always imbued his work with queer subtexts and visuals, and it\u2019s not hard to see why stories of outsiders finding a new home and way of being would resonate so much with his own community. Yet even by Barker\u2019s standards, Nightbreed<\/em> is extremely queer. Boone\u2019s journey to becoming his true self as a Nightbreed is blatantly contextualized as an act of coming out. While he has a girlfriend, he often seems hilariously uninterested in being with her, even as she chases after him and repeatedly claims that he belongs to her. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky called Nightbreed<\/em> “the first truly gay horror fantasy epic.” Writer Harry M. Benshoff noted how many of the monsters are styled with leather, body piercings, vests over bare chests, and facial hair that were defined explicitly as queer in 1990. They\u2019re not simply a marginalized community forced into the shadows; they fight back.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The highlight of the film sees the Nightbreed, in all their weird and ferocious glory, face off against a cavalcade of cops, gun-toting bigots, and \u201ccountry folk\u201d who all seem to possess enough fire power and baseless hatred to power many a militia. Now, the fight for their lives has gotten literal, and they don\u2019t take it lying down. If they are to be driven out of their home by hypocritical \u201cnormals\u201d who have no real justification for their cruelty, they\u2019ll throw an almighty riot and make it even. It\u2019s an absolute blast to watch, full of imaginative prosthetics and some striking kills. What makes it all the more impactful is how it evokes contemporary activism of queer radicals who took on world governments as the AIDS crisis ravaged millions of lives. It\u2019s vibrant, unashamedly raucous, a proud display of force against the establishment\u2019s attempts to commit nothing short of genocide. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s all so insatiably unsubtle that you can\u2019t help but wonder if the unfettered queerness of Nightbreed<\/em> was one of the reasons that Fox sliced it to pieces and barely cared to release it. Barker was eventually able to put together a director’s cut (known as the Cabal Cut) with the missing footage and that version, available on DVD via the Shout! Factory, is a more fleshed-out version of his vision. Still, even if you can only find the theatrical cut, as messy as it is in a narrative sense, it’s still evidently Barker’s story and a deeply pro-LGBTQ+ one at that. It felt like a miracle in 1990 and it\u2019s still an exception to the rule in 2022. Keep that all in mind the next time someone on Twitter tries to claim that someone\u2019s trying to make the new Hellraiser<\/em> too woke. “Nightbreed” is streaming on Peacock<\/a> and several AVOD services, and is available for digital rental or purchase via the usual platforms<\/a>. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/nightbreed2-1024x576.jpg\")
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