Celebrating CLIVE BARKER, First PET SEMATARY Photos, and More!
In this Issue:
- Horror History: Happy Birthday, Clive Barker!
- Image of the Week: Best in Show
- Tiny Bites – This Week’s Best Horror Headlines
- The States of Horror: Arizona + Arkansas
- Things We Love: Fangoria’s Resurrection
HORROR HISTORY: HAPPY BIRTHDAY, CLIVE BARKER!
By Lisa Morton
“Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.” — from The Books of Blood
On October 5th, Clive Barker celebrated his 66th birthday … and about 34 years of completely up-ending the worlds of horror fiction, filmmaking, and art.
It all started around 1984, when a charismatic young Brit burst onto the horror scene with his Books of Blood, six volumes of collected short stories that were smart, gory, elegant, sensual, and completely different from everything that had come before.
Barker, who was born in Liverpool in 1952, wrote his first play before he hit his teens. In 1977 he moved to London, where he continued to write for the stage. It all changed, though, when he read the seminal horror anthology Dark Forces in 1981; eighteen months later, he had written The Books of Blood.
After exploding the art of short horror fiction, Barker went on to write novels: his first, The Damnation Game, was horror, but others — Weaveworld, The Great and Secret Show, Imajica — were rich, epic fantasies.
In 1987 Barker wrote and directed his first feature film, Hellraiser, giving fans a new horror icon in Pinhead. Clive’s Cenobite creations chilled and compelled audiences, bringing fetishism out into the open for the first time in horror movie history.
Although Hellraiser birthed a series, Barker wasn’t content with a single hit; instead, he soon became a one-man horror movie factory. He wrote, produced, and/or directed 1990’s Nightbreed (based on his novelCabal), Candyman (1992), 1995’s Lord of Illusion(which centers on the character Harry D’Amour, an occult investigator who has appeared in a number of his works, most recently the novel The Scarlet Gospels), Gods and Monsters (1998), and The Midnight Meat Train (2008).
Barker is also an acclaimed artist whose work has been the subject of gallery showings and art books, and is featured throughout his young adult seriesAbarat.
Not only has Barker’s work inspired new writers and artists, but he was also one of the first openly gay horror authors to achieve bestseller status.
Happy birthday to horror’s truest Renaissance Man!
IMAGE OF THE WEEK
Best in Show
Executive producer/director Greg Nicotero and artist Tim Bradstreet created this first poster for the upcoming Shudder TV series Creepshow, based on the 1982 movie written by Stephen King and directed by George Romero. They unveiled the new poster last week in Entertainment Weekly and gave out 500 copies over the weekend at New York Comic Con.
TINY BITES
ANOTHER BOOK BY THOMAS HARRIS (BUT NOT CHARLAINE HARRIS) & MORE
Charlaine Harris says “I will never write another Sookie Stackhouse novel” after she received death threats about the last True Blood book.
Guillermo del Toro and George R. R. Martin … who wore it better?
Universal Cable Productions is turning the horror anthology comic Ice Cream Man into a TV series. It features stories of American suburban horror narrated by the ice cream man of the title.
Hannibal Lecter creator Thomas Harris will publish hisfirst book in 13 years, but no one knows what it will be about (other than Lecter won’t be in it).
Lots of new horror TV trailers are dropping now that we’re into October: Stan Against Evil Season 3, theChilling Adventures of Sabrina reboot, and the Blumhouse TV horror anthology series Into the Dark.
Dreadit’s 500,000+ subscribers have chosen their top 100 horror films of all time.
Scott Wilson — who portrayed the beloved Walking Dead character Hershel Greene — has passed awayat age 76.
The new eight-part podcast Halloween: Unmasked looks back on how the original Halloweenmovie changed horror films forever.
Here are 23 great women horror writers sure to terrify you.
The first photos from the new Pet Sematary are out, and the new Church the cat is creeping us out.
Why horror has become “more mainstream and less like something dirty you do all by yourself in a dank basement.”
Here are nine scary movies that take place in a single location. (Misery! Pontypool!)
If they gave out Oscars for horror movies, here’s what should have won each year since 1978.
There’ll be a whole bunch of different ways to watch George R. R. Martin’s new space-horror series Nightflyers series.
Elvira is back as the Mistress of the Dark. to tell usshe’s got her own breakfast cereal.
THE STATES OF HORROR: ARIZONA + ARKANSAS
Today’s States of Horror bring us a Based on True Story double feature (or triple, if you’re feeling fun).
Arizona: Fire in the Sky
Based on Travis Walton’s The Walton Experience, about the Arizona man’s mid-70s alien abduction, Fire in the Sky is one of our great extraterrestrial terrors. Set near Snowflake, Arizona — where the incident is said to have happened — the film captures a visceral, haunting sense of trauma and ultimately, one of the most frightening visions of abduction.
Arkansas: The Town That Dreaded Sundown
Cult auteur Charles B. Pierce brought his distinct brand of docudrama horror to the real-life story of the Phantom Killer, a murderer who struck eight times in 1946 in Texarkana, on the border of Texas and Arkansas. Interestingly, the real incidents took place on the Texas side, but Pierce—an Arkansas resident much of his life—-set the film on the other. His similarly styled cryptozoological favorite, The Legend of Boggy Creek, is also an Arkansas special, and both films make for unsettling, idiosyncratic additions to their respective subgenres.
THINGS WE LOVE: FANGORIA’S RESURRECTION
From its birth in 1979 until its death in 2015, if you were a fan of horror, you had to read Fangoria. For three years, we’ve been without the essential magazine that inspired the likes of Peter Jackson and Edgar Wright. But now Fangoria’s back from the dead as a quarterly publication, with articles on topics such as the unfilmed treatments for films in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise, plus cover killer Michael Myers. Director Eli Roth once said that seeing a movie of his on the cover “was better than winning an Oscar.” Now a new generation of filmmakers will get that chance.