Nightbreed

Last night I watched Clive Barker's 'Nightbreed'. This is a film he directed from his short story 'Cabal'. I have not seen the film for a long time but it comes across as an absolute classic in the horror fantasy genre and is at least as good as 'Hellraiser'. It features the story of a young man who is framed for a spate of murders that are actually done by his psychiatrist (played by David Cronenberg). Boone is chased to Midion, gets bitten by a nightbreed and shot dead and all this stems from a series of nightmares and the rumours. The film unfolds at many levels and the creatures of the nightbreed as a race of underground dwellers with a variety of properies such as shapeshifting, bodily weapons and unusual mental abilities. They are a pot pouri between vampires, werewolves and mutations (without being of one form or another).

What I like about it is the many levels of plot and the hero becoming an anti-hero (but surviving to become the leader rather than dying as in "American Werewolf in London"). The special effects, animatronics and action sequences still look great. There is goth erotica too like the woman with spikes and the gypsy woman showing her amazing bosom and sexy voice. A nice bit was the pines shot out from the woman's back and into the police officers (like darts in certain martial arts films). To cap it all the twists continue towards the end when Cronenberg's character is brought to animative life by the mad priest and Boone (Cabal) leads the survivors to safety. This leaves possibilities for a sequel that never came.

Nightbreed is a stylish film and is typical of a genre of plot driven gory horror action- adventures that coined the term 'video nasty' in the 1980s. Other examples are 'Scanners', 'The Thing', 'The Fly', 'Evil Dead', 'Extro' and 'Hellraiser'. Yet there is nothing else like Nightbreed in film form although 'Underword: Evolution' has a chance. The idea of Boone coming from the dead and avenging is very much like Neo in "The Matrix". I think that there are no computer generated special effects quite as horrific as the stuff in the Nightbreed flashback sequence (of a visual impact of that in 'Event Horizon'). There is something about cgi that makes it cute and abstracted rather than give the gore and blood effects of animatronics and physical transformation sequences. Okay so there has not been a truely evil gory horror film since 'Event Horizon'. Yet Nightbreed is one of the best and remains an undersestimated classic.