Recent Additions to the Archive

Time for a catch-up on some of the latest things to find their way onto the archive shelves!

Spanning items dating from 1986 to 2023, the earliest here is an August ’86 sketch that Clive drew inside a copy of the US first edition of The Inhuman Condition.  Other titles here by Clive include new US editions of Weaveworld and The Damnation Game, as well as the Hulu tie-in cover for Book of Blood volume 1.

Large glossy books include Sideshow’s Fine Art Prints, Volume 1 from 2020 (with the Hell Priestess by Ian MacDonald inside) and Rick Jones’s 2022 Portraits of Horror, which has a wealth of horror portrait photography.  These sit alongside Howard Berger and Marshall Julius’s glorious Masters of Make-Up Effects from 2022, which draws back the curtain on a myriad of legends from big screen and small. 

Clive noted in the 2012 art book by Chet Zar (who contributed a wonderful afterword to Imaginer volume 3) that his “extraordinary paintings open an elevator shaft that delivers us down into a world of the purest mystery and dread”. 

In the back row are the 1999 Italian edition of Revelations (with Clive’s Chiliad), Phantasmagoria Press’s 2022 tribute to Fantasy Tales and we’ve happily laid hands on a copy of The Pandoric Maker’s Magnum Opus – with thanks to Eric Gross. Darkside Books in Brazil continues its fabulous run of hardback editions of The Books of Blood with this third volume from 2022 – with the other three scheduled to follow.

There are DVDs and Blu-rays of Candyman and Candyman 2 from France, Candyman and Hellraiser together (France), Nia DaCosta’s Candyman (France, and a UK steelbook), Hellraiser: Inferno (Japan), and Lord of Illusions and Cabal (Nightbreed) both from Germany.

Clive’s poetry is featured in Multiverses (2023), Out Of The Ruins (2021) and Sorbet Magazine (2019) while other people’s poetry is in the 2015 French edition of Now We Are Sick from Neil Gaiman and Stephen Jones.  Peter Atkins features twice in the pile of books – with a copy of his new All Our Hearts Are Ghosts short story collection that he handed to us over a wonderful lunch together in Los Angeles earlier this year, alongside his Hellraiser: Bloodline screenplay from Encyclopocalypse (2022).   Hellraiser: Hell On Earth is represented by Danny Stewart’s 2021 making of book, War Is Hell.

Two Funko Pop! Figures for the latest Candyman film sit alongside Suntup Editions’s lavish limited Imajica, and a bag with ‘H is for Hellraiser’ in the horror film alphabet.

In magazines, Hellraiser has had a swathe of recent coverage and Undying is also represented here on the cover of Italy’s Games Machine from 2001. Clive’s artwork is featured inside Hi-Fructose along with an interview we did for our 2022 release of Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds.

Ephemera includes (with thanks to Paul Doble) Weaveworld in a 1988 World Books Review, a flyer for a 1994 signing at Forbidden Planet in London, and a Universal Studios Halloween Horror Nights II flyer from 1998 featuring Clive’s Freakz maze.  The German Candyman flyer was for press preview screenings in 1992.  The Hulu Books of Blood image was used by Mad Movies in France in 2020 and there are two film festival brochures – for Clive introducing The Director’s Cut of Nightbreed at Outfest 40 in Los Angeles in 2022 and for our on-stage introductions of both Hellraiser and the Director’s Cut of Nightbreed at the BFI Southbank in London in 2022 in the In Dreams Are Monsters season.

More to follow!  

Say His Name...

The best tales get told again and again, and Clive’s short story, The Forbidden, filmed as Candyman and its movie sequels, falls squarely in that slot.

Originally published in 1985 in Volume Five of the Books of Blood, Clive was inspired by cautionary tales told to him as a child by his grandmother.

Marrying common elements and fears - the hook-handed man, castration, the uncatchable killer and urban brutality - the story explores not only the narrative of an urban myth but the very nature of mythology, playing on the fame of a whispered myth as it spreads:

‘I am rumour,’ he sang in her ear. ‘It’s a blessed condition, believe me. To live in people’s dreams; to be whispered at street corners, but not have to be.’

“I was writing about the experience of horror,” says Clive. “This was about why we write those tales, why we hear those tales. The story was about story itself.”

The character of the Candyman draws upon a motif Clive had long been developing since writing his 1973 play, Hunters in the Snow - that of the calmly spoken gentleman-villain - who seduces Helen with the poetry of Shakespeare and the measured rhythms of a lover. Hellraiser’s Pinhead would later share some of these characteristics and be all the more terrifying for it.

“I use a quote from Hamlet in the story: Sweets to the sweet,” he notes. The earlier origin of the quote is Biblical:

Judges 14: 14: “And he said unto them, Out of the eater came forth meat, and out of the strong came forth sweetness.”

“In England, we have golden syrup. The makers of this syrup put on their can a picture of the partially rotted corpse of a lion with bees flying around it, and the Biblical quote…”

The makers of the golden syrup were Tate and Lyle. Clive had named his heroine Helen Buchanan (but Bernard Rose later renamed her Helen Lyle) and the bees and the sweetness coalesced into the story elements.

As Clive notes today, the figure of the Candyman in The Forbidden wears a motley, his appearance is multi-coloured, standing for every kind of ‘other’ - making his universal story adaptable to resonate widely with all who are outsiders or marginalised.

He was bright to the point of gaudiness: his flesh a waxy yellow, his thin lips pale blue, his wild eyes glittering as if their irises were set with rubies. His jacket was a patchwork, his trousers the same. He looked, she thought, almost ridiculous, with his blood-stained motley, and the hint of rouge on his jaundiced cheeks…

And she was almost enchanted. By his voice, by his colours, by the buzz from his body.

The short story is set in Clive’s hometown, Liverpool, and the re-location to Chicago can be credited to Bernard Rose, as he and Clive discussed its adaptation for the cinema. Bernard also added the Bloody Mary element of invoking the titular presence by repeating his name in a mirror and the Candyman, played by Tony Todd, reflected the racial and urban setting of Chicago’s Cabrini Green estate.

[Candyman] was Bernard Rose's baby from the beginning. We shared an agent at CAA and I'd enjoyed Paperhouse - I thought it was tremendous, a smashing picture. Adam [Krentzman] said, "you know, Bernard really likes your short stories and there are two or three he's interested in and would like to get going...”

Anyway, his favourite story was The Forbidden, because he wanted to deal with the social stuff. He liked the idea of taking a horror story with some social undertones and making a movie of it. This was while I was still living in London, and we sat down several times and talked it through. We agreed that it needed to be relocated to the United States because it was American money and they weren't going to be interested in a story set in Liverpool. But the Cabrini Green setting I think worked perfectly well. He took the thematic material in the story and expanded it and turned it into something that was very much his own. I watched over the thing and worked with him and story-conferenced with him and did all those things, but at the end of the day it's Bernard's movie and I think he did a tremendous piece of work.

As Clive noted on the soundtrack liner notes, Philip Glass’ work had an extraordinary impact on the movie:

Philip elevates horror and suspense to an epic plateau. Moving between the gentle toy piano touches of a child's grim fairy tale and the sinister pipe organ of the most fearsome of fire and brimstone sermons, Philip Glass has found a way to evoke the web of the collective fears woven across the span of a human lifetime and lay it like a shroud across an hour and a half of our lives. To this very day, this music still sends chills down my spine.

Shown below and in the Archive Gallery are two pages from Clive’s handwritten draft, this same sequence in Clive’s final hand-amended typescript for the Books of Blood, the artwork (by John Stewart) that accompanies The Forbidden’s first stand-alone publication in Fantasy Tales in the summer of 1985, a 1987 Literary Guild advert for the US publication of Volume Five as In The Flesh, a Manifesto Film Sales brochure from 1992, the cover and title page of Bernard Rose’s film script, signed by Virginia Madsen, and the review and listing of Candyman’s screening at the 1992 London Film Festival.

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Recent Additions to the Archive

Time for a periodic look back at some of the things we’ve added to our shelves here in recent months!

Recent arrivals at the Archive

Foreign editions of movies include recent releases of Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions in France as well as older VHS releases of Hellraiser III and Candyman from Hong Kong and South Korea respectively.

Guy Astic, who also appears in the French Lord of Illusions Blu-ray extras, has two books of essays on horror, featuring Kirsty and the Chatterer on the cover of volume one.

Amongst the magazine format publications come two career overviews of Clive’s work - in the French Mad Movies and the Italian Nocturno - while Candyman features in HorrorHound and Shock Horror. Lire magazine in France interviews Clive whilst Darkside Books continue publishing beautiful editions of Clive’s titles with The Forbidden and the first Books of Blood volume from Brazil.

Scared Sacred is a collection of essays on religion in horror films published by House of Leaves Publishing and sports a foreword by Doug Bradley.

A couple of photos from the August 1995 Los Angeles premiere of Lord of Illusions sit alongside one of the October 1986 cast of the London production of The Secret Life of Cartoons.

Daniele Serra’s new art book has an introduction by Clive and, at the back, Cemetery Dance’s lettered The Damnation Game is an impressive new edition.

The print at the back of Exiled Mummy is one of more than 25 available now in Clive’s Threadless store at https://clivebarker.threadless.com/ along with shirts, mugs and more…

It’s been a quiet year in publications from us and Clive but we have our collective heads buried in a number of projects that we’re looking forward to having more news on in coming months!

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Spring is in the Air

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Recent arrivals at the Archive

With Spring sunshine tinting London with its energy, the Archive is all set for new projects over the next few months. As we take stock of recent acquisitions, we realise it’s over a year since we shared some of the things that have been added to the shelves here, so there’s much to catch up on!

The handsome Beardless Warriors / Brothers in Arms set arrived on our doorstep from Gauntlet Press just this week, bearing Clive’s cover art on the second volume, and over past months we’ve seen an ever increasing number of publishers with local language editions of the Shining in the Dark anthology, containing Pidgin and Theresa. Cemetery Dance also produced a chapbook of artwork by Erin S. Wells, inspired by the stories of the anthology.

Non-fiction additions include Jon Towlson’s take on Candyman (including an interview with Bernard Rose), ESC / Bragelonne’s Hellbound Heart translation which includes an interview between Clive and Pete Atkins and accompanied its release of Hellraisers 1-3 on Blu-Ray, and Manchester University Press offers a collection of pieces focussed on various aspects of Clive’s work edited by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn.

But it’s often some of the older, ephemeral things that become uncovered - often with thanks to friends of the Archive - that are most unusual: as Hellraiser debuted on VHS rental in 1988, New World produced a promotional standee featuring the box office data from The Hollywood Reporter on the back; and a set of Murray Close’s black and white contact sheets for Hellbound has happily found its way to the Archive some thirty years after they were created.

Promo VHSs for Gods and Monsters and Lord of Illusions sit next to a much more recent DVD release of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, which features Clive’s art on the walls of the Academy of Unseen Arts throughout, and the new Blu-ray release of Candyman.

Of course, Clive’s own notes and working papers form the backbone of the Archive and his manuscript of Heaven’s Reply and a hand-amended Tortured Souls screenplay are new additions.

The growing complexity of the Abarat plot demanded that, whilst writing the third volume, Clive kept a firm track of characters and places by creating a pinboard of index cards, each one devoted to a plot point - these two cards were recently rescued from a water-damaged storage area deep under his library. Once dried off, they could be safely added to others in the Abarat papers, together with the proofreader’s marked up pages for Absolute Midnight.

More news on upcoming projects to follow!

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New Arrivals

Recent arrivals in the archive include various editions of Brian James Freeman's excellent Detours anthology which collects shorter pieces of writing which grew as offshoots of authors' current work. These include a lost first chapter of Michael Marshall's Smith's Spares, an abandoned fragment from Ray Bradbury, and Clive's A Night's Work - all fascinating..!

It's always great to come across editions from around the world - although we found these Chinese copies of The Books of Blood pretty close to home in England. The Lilja's Library collection, Shining in the Dark, (including Pidgin And Theresa) has been enjoying multiple translations, so we look forward to seeing more of these in days to come.

Scored to Death collects the thoughts of composers on the horror films they've written for, and includes interviews with Simon Boswell and Christopher Young, to say nothing of a host of other eminent composers! 

Idolos del cine is the Spanish edition of Graven Images, a fabulous collection of horror film posters with an essay by Clive in it, and the Death Head artwork poster is a new arrival in the store - in stock and shipping now! 

Oh - for those of you eagerly awaiting new titles in the Playscripts Series - we came across a number of handwritten amendments to the script for Hunters in the Snow which delayed us a little whilst we made edits. But we're full steam ahead on those and our next update will have a firm publication date!

In the meantime there are new additions to the Archive gallery, including some rather nice Hellraiser 2 lobby sheets from Spain, some soundtrack covers and the front page of the shooting draft screenplay for Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh - do take a look!

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What's new..?

Recently arrived to add to the archive, here's a quick look at some of the things that have come our way!

First up, the fabulous original art for the cover of one of the first run Nightbreed comics (issue #12). Painted by John Rheaume, this representation of Rawhead Rex has superb attention to detail. This photo doesn't do justice to Matt Ryan Tobin's stunning art, shown here on the Arrow Hellraiser steelbook and Christopher Young's soundtrack on vinyl (it's also on a glorious Mondo poster which is currently heading to the framers!) 

Other movies here - a Spanish language VHS of Lord of Illusions is new to us and the new Kino Lorber Rawhead Rex Blu-ray was released last month. The Art of Horror Movies is Stephen Jones's latest offering from Applause - a fascinating walk through poster and press art from around the world (including work for Hellraiser sequels, Nightbreed, Lord of Illusions and Quicksilver Highway). Hugely insightful and definitely recommended.

Thanks to Cemetery Dance for advance copies of Detours (contains A Night's Work) and Reading Stephen King (with Clive's 2007 speech to the Canadian Booksellers Association), and to Steve Dillon for the Hellraiser-inspired Empath's Tale collection. Earthling Publications' beautiful lettered edition of The Scarlet Gospels is a great addition to its suite of CB publications.

Last, but not least, we love this Candyman figure! Sculpted in polymer clay, Clay Disarray produced this figure as a one-off to create a photographic poster for the movie and we're delighted to give it a home in the archive. (There's also a Clay Disarray Pinhead out there somewhere..!)

A quick reminder that we're turning around orders for the new Clive Barker Playscripts within 24 hours, so there's still time to get copies for you or your very best friends for Christmas!