Clive Barker's "Salome" and "The Forbidden": Two Short Films (1973)

It is hard to reconcile the young, chipper, handsome Clive Barker, the horror author and film fantasist of an undeniably boyish countenance, who held the sway of even the venerable Stephen King (who declared him the "future of horror" in the late 1980s) with the ravaged, haggard figure we see in contemporary photographs. Barker, despite whatever health problems and personal demons he has wrestled with over the decades, has maintained an output often bordering on brilliance; a steady, if underappreciated oeuvre of chilling depictions of man's possession by infernal forces, his exploration, and capitulation to these dark shades of desire and pain; his seeking out of doorways into Hell, pathways into darkness parallel to our own.

The director of Hellraiser (1987), the author of Cabal (1988), Weaveworld (1987), The Books of Blood (1984, 1985), The Great and Secret Show (1989), and the painter and illustrator behind masterful artistic expressions ranging anywhere from gallery pieces to comics and graphic novels, was ruminating, meditating upon the same secret passageways into darkness, into those alternate worlds that promise to the Faustian spirit both pleasure and, ultimately pain. Here he delivers his early light and shadow shows of passion and despair, black and white living ink drawings of grainy figures lost in the gloom of their own soul's excursions into the deepest, most primal pits of their hopes, hunger, and fears.

Salome begins obscurely, almost forgetting its source material; actually, virtually disposing of it while using it as a framework. Dark grainy images of a male and female figure; a burning flame, dancing against the black and white void. The posing of a male human nude figure; the living statue, perhaps, of "Jokannan" (John the Baptist) from Oscar Wilde's play (later adapted by Nazimova, during the silent era, and later by Ken Russell in Salome's Last Dance (1988), but the action of the film, the events, are shown in deep light and dusty shadow, obscure and silent, we see a face ripped by a clawing hand, a bloody-mouthed kiss, a "Dance of Seven Veils," and the removal of a coffin lid (or what seems to be). We have a righteous Jokannan pointing his finger, exclaiming his wrathful pronouncements wordlessly. And then we come to an end.

The Forbidden presents to the viewer one of those Faustian bargain-makers Barker loves so much, such as Frank Cotton from Hellraiser or The Jaffe from The Great and Secret Show. The man is bearded, stripped to the waist; he is shown in negative, contemplating the perambulations of a cockroach; but, most importantly, drawing from an inkpot a series of obscure cryptograms on little tiles. His "Lament Configuration"; his egress to his hell.

The pieces of the tile puzzle come slowly into place (the theme of haunted tiles will reappear in Barker's work, decades later, in the novel Coldheart Canyon). Behind the similar grate or bars in which our man is trapped, animated ravens or perhaps starlings (messengers from the land of the dead) flap their wings, wanting entrance as much as the Raven did in Poe's hoary old chestnut of a poem. Outside, crawling on his hands and knees, a nude figure is exposed before a pagan celebrant in a bizarre mask with tusks. Bodies are disrobed in close-up; a satyr-like man with huge erection twirls. Our prisoner beats against the bars of his cell in frustration. Later. on an operating table, he is tattoed by a nude woman, and then surgeons of some sort begin to strip away his flesh in bloody folds. (The same themes that would be developed later as his Hellraiser film series; the egress to an alien world via an intricate puzzle, the cutting away or stripping away of the outer layer of skin, to expose the skeletal musculature and dripping anatomical beauty hidden beneath the outer surface of the mundane; the inner workings of the flesh-machine. An apt metaphor, one observes, is the fetishistic obsession of the surgeon exploring the "hidden form.")

All of this is shown in negative black and white, in close-up, often rendering the surface an inscrutable yet weirdly beautiful landscape of abstract detail. It is never hard on the eyes, at any rate. Comparisons could be made with E. Elias Merhige's Begotten (1989), which would come about well over a decade later. Here Barker reveals himself to have been the budding wunderkind who would go on to acclaim and success, if not quite to usurp the "King of Horror," Stephen King, whose latter work, at any rate, became increasingly bourgeois and toothless, tame; a stale, bloated, supermarket commodity, the "Book of the Month Club" shadow of its former greatness. (This is not to say his earlier novels were not great, nor some of his more recent writings, but, overall, it is not the same product that first attracted many of his readers.)

Whatever personal demons Barker has wrestled with over the years, the resultant combat is etched across his features. If you'll forgive the seeming cheapshot, the man "looks like Hell." But his vision shines on, in darkness, seeking evermore darkness, and eternally lost, with the souls he paints in film, and on the printed page. And in the mind's eye of all those who have loved and cherished his dread visions, for so many long and wandering years.

Note: Clive Barker's "Salome" and "The Forbidden" can both currently be viewed for free on YouTube. I can't link them here because of explicit nudity. I have elected, instead, to link an interview of Barker from his heyday in the 1980s.

Cult Films and Midnight Movies: "From High Art to Low Trash" Vol 1 by Tom Baker