Why Clive Barker’s Horror doesn’t work
Ramsey Campbell, HP Lovecraft’s greatest disciple, once said that the Blair Witch Project was the greatest example of a truly Lovecraftian horror film. Gasp! How can this be? There’s no tentacles in Blair Witch!
Campbell is truly a genius of the horror genre. His work has genuine literary heft in a way that Stephen King has never even attempted. When he says something as weird as Blair Witch is actually Lovecraft you need to listen.
It’s hard to understand today because Lovecraft is just pulp to us, but at the time his writings were seen as so grounded in reality that many people thought his stuff was in some sense true. This hasn’t completely left us. Ancient Aliens is the legacy of Lovecraft and loads of people think that BS is true. If you don’t believe that Lovecraft is ultimately responsible for Ancient Aliens (and most of what I call weird $#!1 ology) then you need to read Jason Colavito’s Cult of Alien Gods: HP Lovecraft and Extraterrestrial Pop Culture.
Lovecraft knew that things are only scary when you believe what is happening. If you ground your tale in reality then your audience will become scared. That’s why Blair Witch is Lovecraftian. If you were alive at the time the film came out it wasn’t clear that it was fiction till after the fact. But more importantly because it’s found footage the movie is trying to convince you of its reality. There’s even a fake documentary about the film’s lore you can watch to this day. It’s all about convincing you this is true, this happened. Blair Witch was very restrained building slowly to its final terrifying moments.
Clive Barker is the exact opposite of this. He has a remarkably childish view of horror, and I think it’s related to his sexuality. Barker sees horror as fundamentally pornography, that is something stimulating rather than scary or awe inspiring. His works tend to eschew grounding in reality and just start getting right to it as it were. There is no foreplay, no build up, no tension leading to a climax.
Barker could never have made a film like Alien where basically nothing happens for an hour. And even then when things start to happen they’re brief. The Alien is never completely visible, hiding in shadows, obscured by flashing lights. That’s why the film is so terrifying to this day. The audience becomes convinced of the reality of the world they’re presented with before they’re confronted with the “supernatural” aspects. And the alien is definitely supernatural in the same sense that Lovecraft’s monsters were, we can’t comprehend them in normal terms. They don’t belong.
Barker wants to stimulate not frighten. Genuinely frightening stories are difficult because they require work. This is one of the differences between homosexual Eros and heterosexual Eros, and Eros itself and porn. True eroticism is based in reality and connection not stimulus. Porn is only stimulus with no connection or reality. The restraining differences between the sexes leads to the tension of true Eros, whereas the lack of restraint in homosexual sex is its defining attribute.
Homosexual sex is so celebrated in our culture for this reason. It represents a lack of restraint, a lack of discipline. It is inherently non reproductive. There is literally no point or telos to it. Fundamentally it’s nihilism. Which also comes through in Barker’s horror. The reason Halloween (or slasher films in general) is scary is because telos is interrupted. Normal life is destroyed by evil. Without an understanding that a human life means something horror isn’t scary. That’s what makes Lovecraftian horror cosmically terrifying: it unravels a world that appears teleological into one with no meaning at all. Barker starts with a meaningless humanist definition of life, he starts with a fundamentally pointless stimulus based world and then just pumps in the stimulus.
It’s not that different from people who love gore. I’ve never understood these people. To me these are anti horror fans. “Did you like that movie?” “No, I wanted more gore.” “What do you mean it was terrifying!” “Yeah but I just really like seeing lots of blood.” Why? The only reason could be stimulus. It’s pornography.
A view of the human person as valuable, within a world where good and evil are real is what undergirds truly successful horror. Even if ultimately the point is to unravel that idea you have to at least start with it.