Weekly 5: The 5 Weirdest Clive Barker Adaptations

Hello Friends:
Clive Barker is usually remembered for his directorial debut “Hellraiser” (1987), but that wasn’t his first foray into the wonderfully wacky world of filmmaking. In 1985/86 he wrote 2 scripts that went into production. I’d risk saying only a minority of Clive’s fans know what we are talking about, and those who do tend to remember them for the wrong reasons. We’re talking of course about Underworld  (Transmutations) and Rawhead Rex. Like it or not, at their core these are adapted from Clive Barker’s screenplays, so with that in mind, let me take you on a tour (in no particular order) through the 5 Weirdest Clive Barker Adaptations.

1. Underworld / Transmutations (1985)

Underworld (Transmutations)

I feel as this is the most obscure movie in the list, so I need to talk about it the most: This was Clive’s first attempt to shift from writing books and short stories into script-writing, being the new enfant terrible of the Horror genre after the publication of his Books of Blood. Underworld was co-produced by Limehouse Pictures and Green Man Productions, who provided the initial development. It was shot in February 1985, in the Limehouse Studios near London’s East End docklands, and was directed by a graduate of the London International Film School, George Pavlou, whom Clive Barker had met at a dinner  party. The director asked Clive for an original script, and took Clive’s initial 15-page synopsis to Green Man who liked it so much they decided to option 5 stories from the Books of Blood. One of which was Rawhead Rex, which we’ll talk about in the next slot.

The story featured Dr. Savary, an unscrupulous scientist, who invents a drug called Whiteman, enabling people to literally live out their fantasies. He experiments on human guinea pigs, most of whom have become mutants, living under the East London docklands. However, Nicole,a beautiful prostitute has survived the treatment and is the focus of Savary’s attention as well as the movie’s arch-villain Motherskille. Retired private detective Roy Bain is hired by Motherskille to track down the girl after she is kidnapped from a brothel by the Whiteman-addicted Mutants from down below.
The cast seemed solid; Denholm Elliot played Savary, Stephen Berkoff played Motherskille, while Roy Bain was played by Larry Lamb. Ingrid Pitt played Pepperdine and the beautiful Nicole was portrayed by Nicola Cowper. Sean Chapman (Frank Cotton in Hellraiser) is also supposed to play Buchanan in the movie. The music soundtrack for this hallucinating gangsters vs. monsters film was composed by Freuer and Special Effects were provided by Coast to Coast Productions.

As soon as the movie was green-lit, they started production as quickly as possible and were forced into starting the shoot without having a final draft of the screenplay. In the article Gangsters vs Mutants by Philip Nutman, he reveals that the original draft had undergone “substantial, though inconclusive revisions“, and “Pavlou was forced, through limited studio time, to start shooting with what amounted to little more than an expanded treatment“. Some of the additional material added to the movie’s third draft rewrite was written by James Caplan. The fact this movie had limited studio time, low budget and a lot of interference from the producers regarding the script ultimately caused its failure. It’s a messy, boring film, the lead actor fails in providing his character with the necessary presence and charisma we’d expect, the re-written dialogue sounds fake and cliché, it was scored with an ill-fitting soundtrack and had serious problems with pacing. When this movie completed negotiations for US distribution by Charles Band’s Empire Pictures they re-cut it to from 103 minutes to around 83 minutes. The currently available DVD version is 87 minutes. Clive Barker wrote the first 2 script drafts, But for the third draft, Caplan’s rewrites and new material threw out, according to Philip Nutman, “sixty percent of Barker’s slick, hardboiled witty lines, only to be replaced by leaden pages of second-rate gangsterisms.”

In 1987, Clive said in interview in Nexus magazine #04: “I finished the screenplay; they said it needed tits and car chases. I did one rewrite, then they took it off me and they wrote in tits and car chases. There were seven of my lines left.”

2. Rawhead Rex (1986): Howard Hallenbeck (David Dukes) is an American professor who travels to Ireland to research items of religious significance. He goes to a rural church to photograph some graves. Meanwhile, three farmers are attempting to remove an ominous stone column from a field. Two of the farmers head home. A thunderstorm appears out of nowhere, and smoke pours from the ground. Lightning strikes the column. The monster Rawhead Rex rises from the dirt…

Rawhead Rex (1986)

For this second movie, Clive Barker was approached by Green Man producer Kevin Attew for a script of Rawhead Rex, which was going to be at this time simply titled Rawhead. They had bungled Underworld because they had promised their backers a 90 minute rock video and had taken the horror out of it. However, for Rawhead they promised they intended to make it “the ultimate monster movie for adults”. Seems to this scribe like they missed their mark quite a bit.

Clive decided to get involved in this second production, probably more for the sake of protecting his Books of Blood story than out of confidence in the studio. Attew’s partner Don Hawkins, thought Clive was a “pornographer” and didn’t think much of Rawhead Rex. Clive Barker told Alan Jones in ‘Blood and Cheap Thrills‘: “As they owned the rights anyway I thought I’d write a first draft and at least have some control over the project. Frankly I needed the money at the time as well. I wrote a draft and a half and that was literally the last I ever heard from anyone. I was never invited on set, never saw the promised plane ticket for Dublin, and all I kept hearing were pretty lousy things about the way the film was progressing.”

Some fundamental changes were done to the story, changing it from a village in Kent during “a rare hot summer” to a wintry Ireland, the seven-week shoot taking place in several locations around County Wicklow in the Leinster province. Just like Underworld it was a Winter shoot, starting on February 17th, 1986. The original story took place in a hot summer, but the financial deal obliged Green Man to shoot in Ireland and Barker heard from Pavlou that “they had to shoot in February because the money wouldn’t be there in April due to some tax dodge.” The protagonist was also changed from Advertising Executive to University Professor to justify his trip to Ireland.
The movie follows the Books of Blood story at its core and probably wasn’t mangled as much as Underworld, (there’s  some laughs to be had during a scene where Rawhead lumbers through a camping RV and rips a woman’s blouse off, revealing  her breasts) but again low-budget left its mark on a production that abandoned the writer to re-digest the story as they saw fit, to very unimpressive results. One of Rawhead Rex’s main complaints/unintentional hilarity comes from the titular monster’s prosthetics and blinking, glowing red eyes. Peter Litten, makeup effects technician complained that “Rawhead was my main concern and luckily all the animatronics work was scheduled for the end of the shoot so we scraped by. I told the producers I wanted twelve weeks at the very least!” No such luck, as principal photography was only 7 weeks. Litten described Rawhead as a cross between a Neanderthal man, a punk and a gorilla.

Clive Barker: “I went to Litten’s workshop to see the Rawhead figure, and I thought it looked like a gorilla. On film I thought it looked like a wooden piece of effects work and when it lumbered along like an Arnold Schwarzenegger clone it killed the movie stone dead.”
“You know, the novella Rawhead Rex is the one I still get most mail about from the monster fans and they always write, ‘There’s a great movie to be made here.’ And my reply is, ‘Well, they made it and it isn’t!'”

3. The Yattering and Jack  (Tales from the Darkside  Season 4 – 1987/88, episode 76; broadcast Nov 8, 1987)

The Yattering and Jack

Happy-go-lucky salesman Jack Polo receives a yuletide visit from the 3.5-foot-tall Yattering, a snarling horned demon that wants to claim Jack’s soul.

If you’ve seen this, you’ll know why it’s a funny but weird adaptation. The decision to cast a little person as the Yattering painted in red sporting horns is slightly embarrassing, but this very funny Books of Blood story actually works in the small screen (although I always thought it could have been adapted a lot better without the constraints of the small screen). This episode was directed by David  Odell. Jack Polo was played by Tony Carbone and the Yattering was played by Phil Fondacaro. When Jack Polo and  his daughter are supposed to be staring at a resurrected flying Christmas turkey, it’s fair to say they should  have given that scene a little more emotion  than just blank, awkward stares but I can’t say I blame them… at  least they didn’t burst out laughing.
We’ll let Clive talk about this one, as he wrote the adaptation script himself:

“I did write, or rather I adapted, one story of mine – the Yattering and Jack – which is a kind of comedic short story, which came out very so-so as far as I was concerned; I was not happy with it… The problem with network television, the thing you’re faced with all the time – [with] horror on network TV – is that it has to be so mild and my horror fiction is not mild, so we’re always dealing with the problem of, again, censorship, I’m afraid.”
-Clive Barker at The Larry King Show, 11 October 1988.

4. Saint Sinner (2002)

Saint Sinner

In 1815 a monk, Tomas Alcala, unwittingly unleashes two female succubi, Munkar and Nakir, upon an unsuspecting 21st century. He is chosen by God to travel through the centuries and stop the demons’ rampage.

Where to begin? Saint Sinner was originally a character created by Clive Barker for his Decamundi universe back in the early 90s, when Marvel gave him a line of comic book titles called “Razorline: Superheroes from the mind of Clive Barker“. It had a very “Vertigo” vibe to it, catering to readers of books like DC’s “Sandman“. It unfortunately died off with the remaining Razorline titles once Marvel faced technical bankruptcy and started cutting down on its large list of monthly titles.

This Sci-Fi channel movie from 2002 connects to those comics by title alone. There is no relation to the comic book character or storyline. That’s what made it weird for me, when I bought the DVD and watched it. The character’s name essentially became a brand that could  be developed into a different story for the Sci-Fi Channel. In interview with Phil and Sarah Stokes from Revelations (CliveBarker.info), Clive announced in July  of  2001:

“Revelations : “Have we got any TV coming from you?”
Clive : “Yes we have – in fact, this afternoon I’m going to talk about the Lord of Illusions series, the Harry D’Amour TV series which is going to come from MGM. We have Saint Sinner which is a show I’m doing for the Sci-Fi Channel – it’s not based on the comic.”
Revelations : “Oh, it’s not?”
Clive : “No, I just love that title! We’ll probably start shooting that towards the end of this year.”

So, if you expect this movie to be in any way similar to the comic book, it unfortunately isn’t. Still entertaining in its own right, the story is fluid but the antagonists Munkar and Nakir overplay their roles a bit, and hunky, time-travelling Brother Tomas seems to have walked out of a gym after having his body waxed just that morning. Don’t expect more than a by-the-numbers Sci-Fi channel movie story. Directed by Joshua Butler with screenplay by Hans Rodionoff and Doris Egan based on a Clive Barker story.

5. Dread (2009)

Dread (2009)

“Produced by Clive Barker and adapted from his Books of Blood collection by Anthony DiBlasi (screenwriter), Dread follows Stephen (Jackson Rathbone, The Twilight Saga) and Cheryl (Laura Donnelly), college students making a documentary about what people dread in life. But they have no idea that their partner, Quaid (Shaun Evans), witnessed his parents being murdered by an axe-wielding lunatic and wants to make others experience his own personal horror. Called “one of the finest Clive Barker adaptations to date,” by shocktillyoudrop.com, “Dread delivers on all chilling counts,” according to fangoria.com.” – Lionsgate Press Release, October 15, 2008.

I followed news of Dread as viral teaser artwork was released, and every little scrap of information that came out about it. But after watching it, I was left with feelings of confusion and disappointment that I didn’t get from other adaptations that I enjoyed tremendously like the Midnight Meat Train (2008) or Book of Blood, also from 2009.
DiBlasi’s adaptation strayed far from Clive’s original story,  completely restructuring Quaid into a deranged fratboy lunatic, and the conversations between Stephen and himself were transformed into a video project about fear, where  all of a sudden people on campus are being interviewed about their fears. I much prefer the intimate and creepy ambience of the original Books of Blood story, where they discuss philosophy in dark, smoky rooms while drinking warm beer, where a glinting smile from Quaid would leave questions in the air, but I also understand this is totally my own preference. However I felt that the characters went through huge transformations during this adaptation process, that were completely against some of  the best elements of the story. New, unnecessary characters were introduced, some times taking over scenes from Stephen, and I felt like the story got diluted in the attempt to modernize it, or make it cater more to modern young adult audiences. There are some awkward painting sequences when Quaid paints naked, and a few sex scenes added to the mix. The changed ending also didn’t work for me.

“I like the film of DREAD. I enjoy having a minor role in helping another creator take a story of mine in his or her own direction, but in the end the film belongs to its new interpreter, not to me.”
– Facebook post By Clive Barker, Facebook, 25 October 2013.

Note: I focused a little more on the first two due to their obscurity. This article was started  and developed by Ryan Danhauser and expanded and published by José.
For more info on Underworld and Rawhead Rex’s production, I recommend reading chapters  25/26 of Clive Barker’s “Shadows in Eden“.