Interview with Clive Barker - Part three of three
Interview with Clive Barker - Part three of three
Barker Talks Maximillian Bacchus and Pinhead's Evolution
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Interview with Clive Barker - February 13, 2009
Staci Layne Wilson reporting
PART 3
On how he feels about remakes, especially those of his own movies:
I am a little bit of a schizophrenic about this so forgive me if I sound like two different people on this. There's a part of me that feel that with the new technologies, the way that we had such a modest budget on my Hellraiser movie so if we can have 5-6 times that on the new Hellraiser remake, I think we'll get an awesome picture out of that. Mine was a small picture and I would hate it if they opened it up. That would be really detrimental to the picture. The picture is essentially a family saga, Chekov with blood, and that is this very small thing. And into this small enclosed world comes this god-awful force and I just had the great good fortune been given the image of a guy with pins in his head. Had the greater good fortune to have my good buddy Doug (Bradley) play this character, who has this Shakespearean gravitas about him. He brings to the role…well, have I mentioned him being a priest before? That was a note I gave him early on, that he's a priest of Hell. In number 3, he's called the Pope of Hell which came about later in the scripts. I didn't use those words in my script because that Cenobite didn't even have a name. Pinhead was the name that the special effects guy used actually. I was like 'wait a second, you just named my villain Pinhead?' because I didn't think that sounded very dignified. But it ended up on the call sheet and it just stuck.
It's an image that has seemed to become iconic. I am not going to claim any genius about that at all. It is interesting that there is this dark life that was pointed out to me about 6-7 years ago that was pointed out to me that there are African fetish statues that are used as focuses for feelings, particularly negative feelings. So the fetish statue and are will be used as a place to put 'bad' feelings—like human beings with nails driven into them. When I went to look this up, there's a lot of 19th Century stuff which is amazing and crude but very, very powerful. Pieces of craft and they're often bound with string and blood and are often made with a lot of passion. We're talking having very crude nails driven into them from all angles, so you're talking about having like 100 nails inside someone's body. When I thought about the nails, I had thought about images of rage. Now I don't know how that exactly ties in with Pinhead because he's not necessarily a very angry character. But it does mean that I seem to have plugged into the collective unconscious when I had that image. The fact that it has been picked off a number of times with make-up jobs and magazines, fashion stuff that uses that image in some way since, but I use it too. But I must have somehow unconsciously seen images of these fetishes at some point. So I am not claiming that I was by any means the originator of this. The only that might have added to the imagery of this was its geometrics severity.
I don't know if you've seen anything online but there's been something from Gary Tunnecliffe who was the special effects guy who created Pinhead for maybe the last 3 or 4 movies. He's now redesigned Pinhead and I think Gary's a very smart and creative guy but I think he missed something in the redesign, because it is a very bloody redesign. I don't think that's right. I think the whole point about Pinhead is that he isn't bloody. That his victims are bloody but he isn't. The other thing is that there are these lacerations that are diagonal and very random. The original had the feel of geometry paper in school where it was broken up into segments and lines, which to me had a severity to it. Having the pins of the intersections of the crossroads made it have a surgical severity to it almost. I think this new version has sacrificed that feeling. I had always wanted back in 1986 to do a revel that Pinhead had a piercing below the navel but somehow wanted to be discreet about it. Something that indicated he had genital piercings. I would love to tell you about the sex scene that almost made it in but had to get cut actually because it involved some spanking. These people who said no- I have no idea what they do on Sunday nights but it is pretty damn dull.
On why it's taken so long to get the Maximillian Bacchus book published:
Part of it was finding someone who was going to do the detail work I really wanted in terms of illustrations. Richard T Kirk who is an extraordinary artist has done some mind-blowing black & white illustrations for the book. It is remarkable and so wonderful to have that much love to put into the work.
He did the illustration for the Appendices for the special edition of "The Magica" and he just has a completely has an off-the-wall imagination especially with what he can make happen on a page- it is just extraordinary. This will be a limited edition run with 2,500 copies. These are stories I started writing when I was 17 so there are some insights to back then. I deliberately didn't do any do any real edits and I didn't polish anything either. I just didn't do anything to "improve" it either. Doing that would have completely been against the spirit of the project of 'this is what Barker did when he began.' I think they're very entertaining stories and I hope people have fun with them. I hope we get a movie out of them too because I think there is a wonderful movie there. Even in something I was writing back when I was 17 there's some really bad villains, some cross-dressing- you know, the 'usual' stuff. This is something that is very close to my heart because this is who I was when I was 17 and I haven't tried to change my very limited vocabulary from back then either. I hope people have a good time reading. There is another piece, a novel that I wrote the year after which we are looking at getting released too so that would be the two pieces of unpublished young Barker that are out there. There is a lot of unpublished older Barker stuff, too.