There was a time when I was 14 years old and Clive Barker’s NIGHTBREED was my favorite movie. Maybe that was too soon to move on from BATMAN, or maybe they were both my favorite movie. They blew my brain open in a similar way, and come to think of it they have more in common than just baroque, enthralling music by Danny Elfman (his ninth and tenth film scores). Both are ambitious early films from idiosyncratic directors who are also visual artists, who are breaking into a larger budget range than their previous work but getting even wilder than before. Both are arguably a little stiff with the traditional action expected of a blockbuster, but it doesn’t even register much because they’re so overflowing with visual imagination and invention that they create their own, very specific worlds. And though both were intended as mainstream event movies, at their heart they’re by, for, and about misfits and weirdos.

NIGHTBREED, unfortunately, was treated like a misfit and weirdo itself. It was produced by Morgan Creek (YOUNG GUNS, ROBIN HOOD: PRINCE OF THIEVES) and distributed by 20th Century Fox (whose other releases that year included DIE HARD 2, PREDATOR 2 and HOME ALONE), but they didn’t know what to do with it. Barker was forced to make compromises that were drastic, though not catastrophic in my opinion (or I would never have loved it so much). Other than changing from the book’s title Cabal (I agree with that), they really didn’t know how to market it to the normies, though they did okay with nerds. I still cling dearly to autographed comic books and a “Nightbreed Chronicles” paperback with portraits and bios of the movie’s Star-Wars-esque collection of background creatures. Though a triumph in the minds of myself and my best friend at the time, it was a financial flop and novelist turned director Barker never even wrote the next book in the proposed trilogy.

But this one movie does, against all likelihood, exist. And in 2013 Shout! Factory even released The Cabal Cut, Barker’s long rumored preferred version that (according to his intro) has about 20 minutes of additional footage and 25 of alternate footage. As many times as I watched the theatrical cut on VHS I don’t have it memorized enough to notice the specific differences other than the early scenes where its hero Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer, TURBULENCE 2 and 3) works in a garage and his girlfriend Lori (Anne Bobby, HAPPINESS) is a singer. And then things end the way they did in the book vis-a-vis whether certain heroes and villains are alive or dead. (Back when I hoped for both a movie and book sequel I wondered how they would handle that.)

In his second of only three directorial works, Barker does a trick I don’t think I’ve ever seen before: he puts tantalizing glimpses of what we’re about to see inside the title of the movie as it slides across the screen.

After the credits play out across a prophetic wall painting we’re again rocketed into the unknown in a chaotic (more real than not) dream set outside the gates of Midian, a secret underground refuge for monsters. It’s such a propulsive opening, the aforementioned Elfman music blasting us in the face with mystical exoticism as the camera and beasties alike dart and spin through brush and fog. There’s a fuckin devil-man in an embroidered jacket (Vincent Keene) who does a cartwheel. It’s not normal. Who the fuck are these guys?

One thing I mentioned in the rudimentary review I wrote 15 years ago, that definitely didn’t bother me 35 years ago so why should I care now, is that Boone tries so hard to be a bad boy with his mullet, leather jacket and plain black or white t-shirts, his answering the phone by saying his last name or his answering machine message that says “This is Boone. You know what to do. Adios.” He doesn’t seem to do much except lay around in his underwear or hungrily make out with Lori (who only calls him by his last name, and who after his death will tell the police that their relation is “lovers”). He’s got stuff going on – he’s a troubled individual suffering from violent dreams and hallucinations, his psychologist is a serial killer trying to use him as a patsy, and he’s about to learn he’s the prophesied savior of the Tribes of the Moon. But he has the charisma of a log. A couple years ago it occurred to me to wonder what would’ve happened if they’d gotten one of the cool mullet guys of the era who really popped off the screen? I guess Swayze, Russell or Roddy Piper might’ve overwhelmed the character with their personalities. Or Jean-Claude Van Damme. Maybe Matt Dillon? Sheffer’s pretty much playing him like Matt Dillon. Kevin Bacon was busy doing TREMORS, Liam Neeson was doing DARKMAN. What if Viggo Mortensen left LEATHERFACE: THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE III to star in this? Yeah, actually that’s my alternate history choice. (Or maybe it would screw up the timeline because Viggo’d be meeting one of his future collaborators too early. See next paragraph.)

But I’m being mean to Sheffer, whose particular presence does kinda work for the material. He’s playing a guy who hasn’t found his authentic self yet, and can’t fit in among his people. He’s much cooler after he turns into a monster with weird spiral designs on his face. Anyway, Boone’s gotten past the hallucinations, but then Dr. Decker (David Cronenberg, THE STUPIDS) tells him that a series of brutal murders closely resemble what Boone described from his hallucinations. We’ll soon see that creepy-ass Decker is the actual killer, with a terrifying button-eyed, zipper-mouthed mask, chain mail gloves, an arty room to display his table of knives in, and a eugenicist anger about “families like cesspools, filth making filth making filth.”

He drugs and deceives Boone into believing the accusations, so Boone follows the directions from a crazy guy at the hospital (Hugh Ross, BRONSON) to get to that place Midian, where he immediately encounters a green monster named Peloquin (Oliver Parker, director of JOHNNY ENGLISH REBORN) and tells him to let him in because he’s killed people. Peloquin says he can smell innocence at 50 yards, and that he’s meat.

That’s true. He takes a bite of him – a violation of tribal law predicted in that mural from the opening credits. Then Boone is ambushed by cops, guided thereby Decker, who lies that he has a gun and they fill him full of holes. “Jesus, they weren’t taking any chances,” says the assistant at the morgue (Lindsay Holiday). But the bite resurrects him and he flees back to Midian where he’s accepted now that he’s no longer a “Natural.”

So 33 minutes in it suddenly switches to Lori’s story. She’s got alot to deal with – they tell her her boyfriend lover was a “baby slasher,” is dead, and his body has been stolen. All she can do to process is take a road trip to this place where they shot him. Crying in a bar restroom on the road she makes a friend, Sheryl Ann (Debora Weston, “Teacher,” THUNDERBIRDS). I like this bit of human bonding in the monster movie, even though it’s gonna lead to more atrocity. It’s just nice that this random lady is there for her.

Lori’s urge to see what happened to Boone actually does lead to her understanding him better. She finds a strange creature in the cemetery, seemingly dying from exposure to the sunlight. A woman named Rachel (Catherine Chevalier, Tiffany’s mother in HELLBOUND: HELLRAISER II) hides in the shadows begging for help, and Lori brings her the creature, who transforms into human form as Rachel’s daughter Babette (Kim and Nina Robertson). So later, when Boone disobeys “the boss” Lylesburg (Pinhead himself, Doug Bradley) to go to the surface and rescue Lori from Decker, some of the Breed are willing to tolerate her presence.

She wears a butterfly brooch (a symbol of transformation) on her sweater, a sincere ally but a total square, and a clueless intruder bumbling through Midian refusing to accept that Boone is part of the community and she’s not. Eventually she tells him “Whatever you are, I’m not afraid of you.” They lustily make out and Boone’s face turns monster. She takes a look and then gets back to it. Full acceptance.

When I was a Books-of-Blood and Fangoria-reading teen I don’t think I knew that Barker was gay, and I don’t think it occurred to me to think of this as “a queer text” (which actually would’ve been considered an epithet then). But that’s understandably the popular interpretation now: Boone is discovering something he didn’t previously understand about himself, he has a bigoted psychiatrist who’s giving him terrible advice about it, he comes out and finds a subculture of people who relate to and accept him. They are demonized, persecuted and attacked by religion, law enforcement and rednecks, but they are unique and diverse and talented and they work together to protect their community.

Sheffer is also subjected to the male gaze more than most male leads, having a scene in his tighty-whiteys, another gratuitously fresh out of the shower, wrapped in a towel, dripping wet. When he first arrives in Midian he’s shirtless under his leather jacket. On the other hand he is extremely horny for his heterosexual lover Lori. When she visits him at work he kisses her so much it’s like he’s about to eat her, which may kind of be true. And in the end she (spoiler) TWILIGHTs herself so they can stay together. But until that there is definitely a subtext that they can’t be together because of what he’s discovered about himself. Only now does it occur to me that the tagline I always hated – “Lori thought she knew everything about her boyfriend – Lori was wrong!” – was more appropriate than I realized. Actually now I really wish Lori let him go at the end. But maybe it was already too much of a downer of an ending. It needed some romance.

I don’t know if this is the way Barker would’ve told the story anyway, or if the gay themes had to be hidden a little because it was 1990 and a mainstream movie and he was either closeted or being subtle enough that a naive kid who went to all his book signings didn’t get it. Whatever the reason, it made the story more universal, with the Nightbreed standing in for any “other.” To me it was about all persecuted people, outcasts, misfits, freaks, misunderstood people who insisted on being themselves. This would include the LGBT community, yes, and the victims of the Salem Witch trials, and heavy metal kids accused of satanism, and (selfishly) whatever kind of artistic weirdo I thought I was (a P-Funk kid accused of satanism, I guess). We all can fancy ourselves Nightbreed. We’re sure as shit not Naturals.

One interesting character is “Decker’s Victim,” played by John Agar (FORT APACHE, MR. NO LEGS, MIRACLE MILE). He’s an old eccentric who collects junk, lives in a shed lit by Christmas lights, knows about Midian and apparently tried to be one of them. Didn’t work out but he respects them, has to be tortured by Decker to give up information on them, asks “What harm they ever done to you?” and “Did they kick you out? Is that why you hate them so much?”

Indeed, there is some element of self-denial to Decker, the Stephen Miller of horror. He’s the bad kind of monster but also, obviously, a freak with his weird mask and all that. If he wasn’t such a bastard he would have so much in common with them, and he knows it, and it makes him furious. Before he comes out as Button Eyes, when he’s trying to push the story that Boone is a murderer, he tells Lori, “Everyone has a secret face.” He’s lying about Boone (not knowing he will literally have a secret monster face) and also obviously describing his human face that stands in for his mask.

The guy from the hospital, Narcisse, says “There’s a face beneath this face!” and has little thumb blades that he uses to cut his face, but instead pulls off everything around the face and holds out chunks of skin pathetically. When Boone arrives at Midian though Narcisse is already there and comfortable enough to show him around. “We belong here. No place else on Earth would take us in.” I guess his real face is a guy with no skin on the sides and top.

That’s the difference between Decker and the Nightbreed – they don’t want their faces to be secret. They shouldn’t have to be.

Whoever you think the symbolism is about, this is an anti-fascist movie, that’s for sure. When Babette shows Lori a vision of the past, we see a history of atrocities done in the name of religion and racial purity: men in pointed hoods wielding crosses and Bibles, crucifying people/monsters, burning them, making piles of severed heads. This is not just symbolism, it’s common sense. If there were people who shifted shape or grew fangs, of course this would’ve happened to them.

I can concede that NIGHTBREED isn’t quite ACAB, because Calgary P.D.’s Inspector Joyce (Hugh Quarshie, Captain Panaka from THE PHANTOM MENACE) seems hesitant about all this shit, but he still trusts serial killer Decker, then gets shoved aside by nazi-esque rural sheriff Captain Eigerman (Charles Haid, Hill Street Blues), who calls Boone a “freak” and beats him as soon as he’s in a cell. He lets alcoholic priest Ashberry (Malcolm Smith, THE CREATION OF THE HUMANOIDS) out of the drunk tank to go to the church and get religious paraphernalia to use in raiding Midian. What else is Jesus for to these people except to use as a weapon? I noticed this time that Ashberry is more legitimately Christian than the others, because during the raid he recognizes that “there’s no evil here” and tries to stop things from getting out of hand. Then I think he wants to convert after Boone rescues him with a flying kick. But in the end he’s disfigured and seems set to oppose the Breed in the non-existent followup.

This was 1990 and Canada, so the cops don’t look like our modern tactical kit goons, but it’s certainly a militarized police force, marching like an army, using explosives, rocket launchers, blowtorches and guns supplied by a militia called “Sons of the Free.” One cop shows off a garrote, and lustily rubs it against his lip. As in NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD and DAWN OF THE DEAD they’re joined by local plaid shirt enthusiasts jumping at the opportunity to shoot people. Grown up Rittenhouses.

They’re all out to kill. Midian has guys like that too – “Berserkers. Mad bastards. They’ll rip off your head and shit down your neck.” But the Breed keep those guys locked up until this emergency. They know that’s no way to act.

Rachel and Shuna Sassi (Christine McCorkindale, “stand-in: Jessica Rabbit: dancing [uncredited], WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT) both use sexuality to distract cops before killing them. I’ve always gotten a chuckle from the Shuna Sassi part, because she’s a lady with no nose and covered in deadly quills. Barker stories always assume everyone is deeply horny for the kinkiest shit imaginable, but dropping everything to fuck a random porcupine lady while on duty always seemed like a stretch. On this viewing, however, it felt more true to me than before. I’d been thinking of it from the perspective of “guys are horny,” and a recognition that some of the dumbest seductions in horror movies could work on me, but not this one. Now I see it from the angle “bastards are sexually attracted to what they hate.” A cop going in to kill some monsters, yes, he’d want to hit that.

Like so many of my favorite movies, these poetic truths and evolving meanings keep NIGHTBREED dear to my heart even as I notice more of its flaws. But I should mention the surface pleasures that made it stand out in the first place. In particular, obviously – that’s a whole lot of monsters!

Shuna is one of the more prominent Breed characters, along with Peloquin and Kinski (Nicholas Vince, the Chatterer from HELLRAISER), whose crescent-shaped-head has always unfortunately brought to mind the McDonalds mascot Mac Tonight. But there are dozens of Nightbreed, each one distinct. Barker set out to make “the STAR WARS of monster movies,” which accounts for those barely glimpsed extras having names and bios. Effects supervisor Bob Keen learned models and makeup working on the original STAR WARS trilogy before starting his company Image Animation. Another Star Wars legend, Ralph McQuarrie, was NIGHTBREED’s conceptual designer, title designer and from the looks of it matte painter.

I like the part where Lori looks for Boone and peeks around a various weird Midian shit, including a stop motion cat person on a lizard:

a guy feeding his blood to eels, this guy:

and whatever is going on here:

(just bathing, I think.)

Maybe the equivalent of “I guess there’s also a werewolf in the cantina” is the random shots of snakes, scorions and tarantulas in Midian. Ooh, scary! And some of the makeups are kinda silly (some lady with motionless rubber fingers coming from her chin?) but there’s so much invention here – the obsidian statue god Baphomet (Bernard Henry), the split heads, bug eyes and scaled flesh. Even Rachel, whose appearance can be described as Generic Exotic Lady, turns out to be really cool when she reveals the power to transform into smoke and then back into a fist while inside a person’s body.

NIGHTBREED is one of those movies I always talk about from the ‘90s, when for some reason studios were giving checks to oddball artists, maybe getting in the way a little, but letting them do strange shit. Their spirit and energy overpower their messiness, and there’s nothing quite like them. This has everything – it’s an epic fantasy, it’s a gore movie, its heroes are bizarre and dangerous and fetishistic, its villain is deeply disturbing in both meaning and countenance. It’s too bad the story didn’t continue – Boone really needs to redeem himself after being brand new to this community, getting the entire place destroyed and having to lead them to a new home. (I can’t believe they still haven’t turned it into a TV show!)

In the opening she wants to get out of Calgary to “somewhere we can be alone together.” Well, that ain’t happening. Sorry lady. But right now it’s pretty important for him to be with his friends.