For Fans of Clive Barker

When Clive Barker adapted his own novella The Hellbound Heart and released Hellraiser in 1987, he did something the genre had never quite managed: he made the monsters glamorous. Pinhead and the Cenobites were not mindless killers. They were priests of sensation, collectors of experience, beings for whom the extremities of pleasure and pain had ceased to have separate meaning. The film's central proposition, that desire itself could open a doorway into something terrible and sublime, was genuinely new. Horror has spent the decades since living in that shadow.

Bernard Rose's 1992 adaptation of Barker's short story The Forbidden transplanted the action from Liverpool to Chicago's Cabrini-Green and turned a ghost story into a meditation on myth, race, memory, and violence. The film understands something Barker has always known: legends are not just stories. They have weight. They have need. Candyman remains one of the most formally intelligent horror films ever made, and its score by Philip Glass is one of cinema's great collaborations between genre and art.

Barker's Nightbreed, based on his novel Cabal, was butchered in post-production and arrived in 1990 as a truncated, confused film. The director's cut, restored and released in 2014 as the Cabal Cut, reveals the film Barker intended: a mythic story of monsters as the rightful inheritors of the earth, and humans as the true predators. It is queer in the deepest sense, a film about outsiders who form community under persecution. The restored version stands as one of his finest achievements.