Monsters and Mullets

"Everything is true. God's an astronaut.

Oz is over the rainbow, and Midian is where the monsters live."

Nightbreed: The Director's Cut (1990)

Nightbreed is another Clive Barker cult classic, based on his novella Cabal. It's from the 1990s, so it's bound to be a bit campy by modern standards, but it's quite a good movie and I'd recommend it to anyone interested in a movie that's as unique as its monstrous characters. (Netflix has the snazzy HD director's cut Barker just finished recently.) Our protagonist, Boone (Craig Sheffer), is a troubled man who finds himself plagued with nightmares. He fears that he is guilty of terrible deeds, as a serial murderer is going around slaughtering families in their homes and Boone is afflicted with mysterious blackouts every time it happens. (He also has this truly unfortunate early-90s haircut to worry about, but I guess he's got bigger issues on his plate.)

Get that crazy-ass mullet off your skull.

In truth it's Boone's psychiatrist, Decker, played by David Cronenberg of all people, who's committing the murders and setting Boone up to take the fall. His motivations are pretty simple -- he just hates people and wants to kill everyone, which seems like a fairly ambitious goal for one person to accomplish, but at least he doesn't bother coming up with some convoluted excuse for why he goes around butchering people. He also has this kind of murder-appreciation room where he keeps articles about the killings and an assortment of long bladed weapons, so he should probably hope nobody finds out about that. Anyway, after Boone escapes from the hospital, he flees to Midian, a secret city underneath a local cemetery that's been appearing in Boone's dreams -- calling him to join the other monsters.

Midian serves as a hidden sanctuary for all the hunted, near-extinct or unique creatures of the world. Here there are the faeries, the grotesquely deformed, the things that go bump in the night, the werewolves, the shapeshifters, the freaks of nature and the more traditionally monstrous, all known as the tribes of the moon or, of course, the Nightbreed. The denizens of Midian aren't too happy with a human seeking sanctuary with them, and when he's kicked out of the city, he ends up getting himself shot by the police as a suspect in the murders.

Shuna Sassi and Peloquin

This is obviously not the end for Boone, who wakes up in the morgue -- thanks to a bite from one of the Nightbreed -- and takes a second shot at life in Midian. It turns out that he's been chosen by Baphomet, the mysterious entity who serves as the heart and protector of Midian. Boone basically becomes a vampire from Buffy. He retains his personality, has some facial scarring, acquires superhuman speed and strength and healing, but he's still concerned for the safety of his girlfriend Lori, who's become a target for Decker, who seems to have realized that his quest to kill all of humanity is futile and decides instead to kill the tribes of the moon, which is a bit more realistic since most of them are the last of their kind.

Like most of Barker's work, Nightbreed is full of body horror, the interplay of the violent and the erotic, and the overarching theme -- one Barker shares with a lot of Guillermo del Toro's movies -- that humans are capable of horrific acts of evil, while something that appears outwardly monstrous can be as human as any of us, protecting their families and homes, wishing for the outside world to leave them be. As one of them tells Lori, the tribes of the moon represent everything that humans envy and misunderstand, and what is envied and misunderstood is to be destroyed. It's a perennially relevant point that was, at the very least, wasted on the film's producers, who apparently told Barker to rewrite some parts of the script because he had "made the monsters unintentionally sympathetic." (Barker went home and slammed his head into a wall a few times.)

Cronenberg'll shank ya.

I would hesitate to call Nightbreed a horror movie. Despite the guy tearing his own scalp off and the serial murderer going around chopping people's heads off, I'd say it's much closer to dark fantasy. Think of it as a gory adult version of Labyrinth. It's full of wonderful makeup work that reflects its creator's love of the monstrous. There's no doubt in my mind that at least one person out there finds Shuna Sassi attractive not in spite of the fact that she's some kind of porcupine lizard woman that shoots poison spines out of her back, but because she's a porcupine lizard woman that shoots poisonous spines out of her back -- and I also don't doubt that Clive Barker is happy about that.

If nothing else, you have to be at least a bit curious about a movie with David Cronenberg as the main bad guy.

Trivia: There was a Nightbreed action game on the Amiga. Check out those graphics.

Available On: Netflix.