Uncut Print of Clive Barker’s Nightbreed To Be Screened

An old English teacher of mine went to school with Clive Barker and he let everybody know it: every single class. Barker is a strange talent. Ostensibly a writer, he has worked very closely in film down the years, beginning with his classic Hellraiser film. For his second effort, he got the “studio interference” treatment which left Nightbreed a big mess. It starred David Cronenberg as a serial killing psychotherapist with a scary mask. So it’s still watchable and unique!

Film fans get excited when news of “discovered” prints get announced. Just last year, Fritz Lang’s seminal sci-fi epic, Metropolis, was found in its “director’s cut” in an archive in Argentina. It’s getting a full outing this year. The holy grail still remains the Lon Chaney and Tod Browning’s London After Midnight, a film in which only still images exist. It’s a sad fact, but over 60 per cent of films made before 1950 are lost. Not even film achieves immortal, it seems.

Shock Till You Drop have put out the great news that an uncut work print of Nightbreed has been found. For horror fans in general, this is tantalizing news, but let’s hope they’ve given it a clean first, so the quality doesn’t suffer.

Nightbreed is an adaptation of Barker’s own novel Cabal and sees a disturbed young man enter the fantastic and very violent world known as Midian. There he transforms into a monster and seeks his revenge on the psychotherapist who framed him for the murders.

It is a film rich in bizarre visuals and creatures. Of course, Nightbreed will always be an acquired taste. But Clive Barker’s original vision deserves to be shown, does it not? Let’s hope it gets put out on DVD and Blu-ray faster than you can say, hell-bound heart!

The 145 minutes cut is having a screening next month at the Horrorhound convention. Check out the advertising trailer below.