The Troubled Journey from Page to Screen of Clive Barker’s Cabal (1988)

David Edwards

 “The movie that was (sic.) released is not the movie that was shot at Pinewood, and it’s not the movie that Clive wrote. If anybody has read “Cabal,” then there’s the movie, because the movie that was shot…is a very faithful, almost page-by-page faithful, adaptation of “Cabal.” And Fox, in my opinion, screwed the movie up.” (Doug Bradley)

Clive Barker’s Cabal (1988) saw the author embrace what would soon become his raison d’être of intertwining the fantastical with the dripping blood of horror. Although evidence of this style could be seen in The Books of Blood (1984-1985), it was the flesh-ripping Cenobites of The Hellbound Heart (1986) and the later film adaptation, as well as a perfectly-timed marketing quote from Stephen King that was emblazoned on first editions of The Books of Blood – “I have seen the future of horror…and it is named Clive Barker” – that saw the Liverpudlian catapulted into fame as a horror writer.

Barker’s novella Cabal is more than a simple genre piece, however. Barker aimed to depict the “world of William Blake colliding with the gritty, brutal reality of living in the later part of the twentieth century.” Through its often-poetic prose, combined with the monstrous actions of a humanity hellbent on the destruction of the breed, Barker produced one of the strongest texts of his career: “Cabal demonstrate(s) why the gleefully gory Mr Barker is on top of his game.”

The positive reviews of the time have been eroded somewhat by the film adaptation, Nightbreed (1990), which encountered budgetary, artistic and critical obstacles throughout its production. Not only did the film sully Barker’s Hollywood career, it also meant that, somewhat predictably, the original novel found itself guilty by association. The now critically derided context of the film saw critics recontextualise the original text: “Cabal is fine, it’s just not fucked up good like the previous material I’ve read from Clive Barker…and that disappointed me.” Although The Cabal Cut (2012), a work print discovered by producer Mark Miller in the Seraphim Films vaults, and the critically well-received Director’s Cut (2014), curated by Barker’s friend Russell Cherrington, have led to reappraisals of the film, the book has not received similar reassessments.

Cabal’s narrative focuses on Aaron Boone, a man who is having visions of the mythical Midian, “a place of refuge, a place to be carried away to…a place where whatever sins they’d committed – real or imagined – would be forgiven” (Barker 31). It is Midian that is the centre of Barker’s narrative, an otherworldly underground haven for the perceived monsters in society. Boone’s psychiatrist, Dr Decker, is a serial killer with a modus operandi of taking out whole families, and it is during their sessions that the doctor convinces his patient that he is actually the culprit, thus providing the catalyst for Boone’s suicide attempt and then later journey to find, and remain at, Midian.

It is here that Barker sets his two-pronged narrative. First, the haven of Midian, the fantastical locale with “the breed in (many forms): unfurling wings, unfolding limbs. One becoming many (a man, a flock), many becoming one (three lovers, a cloud). All around, the rites of departure” (Barker 229). Even this prose is both lyrically poetic and leaves plenty to the reader’s imagination – something that potentially poses problems for a film adaptation. While the book is “rather impressionistic,” in a film adaptation, “people need to see what these guys actually look like” (Floyd). For this very reason, forty special effects experts fashioned over 200 monsters for the film, visualising the community of the lost, and, just like Barker’s prose, there is a beauty to their creations. From the crescent-mooned Kinski to the animalistic Peloquin, there is an imagination to the creature design not seen since Star Wars (1977).

So, where the first strand of Barker’s narrative focusses on the misunderstood, the fantastical, the second concentrates on a more traditional form of horror – the violent elements of humanity. This can be found most obviously in the mask-wearing, slasher-esque Decker, but also in the bigoted police chief Eigerman and scrupulous catholic priest Ashbery, the latter two working together to eradicate the breed from a neo-conservative religious society. It is in Decker’s crimes that Barker juxtaposes these two worlds. As opposed to the lyricism with which Barker describes Midian, Decker’s crimes are described bluntly, “Not simply murdered: butchered. The life slashed from him in a fury of slices and stabs, his blood flung on the blade that had taken out his neck, taken off his face, and onto the wall behind him” (Barker 18). This structure follows the more violent elements of the early 80’s slasher genre, in your face and coursing with the red stuff. The fact that Decker is also masked means, from a franchise point of view, financiers must have been rubbing their hands with glee over the potential marketing opportunities being afforded them.

Morgan Creek Productions picked up the text and Barker was tasked with making his ambiguous Midian into a fully realised visual world. Perhaps somewhat prosaically, Twin Peaks alumnus Mark Frost worked on an initial draft of the screenplay, which seems like a good fit for the move from page to screen as the Lynch/Frost series also examines “the darkness that (lies) beneath the…veneer” (Boyd). The late 80s, however, were already beginning to see an influx from the high-class serial killer genre, a deliberate move away from 80’s slasher excesses. From Manhunter (Michael Mann, 1986) through to Sea of Love (Harold Becker, 1988), the relative critical and/or commercial success of these films meant that during Barker’s pre-production period, films such as Jennifer 8 (Bruce Robinson, 1992), Kalifornia (Dominic Sena, 1993) and, most influentially, The Silence of the Lambs (Jonathan Demme, 1991), would also be going through a similar process. Again, the mask was being removed from the killers of horror, so “Ol’ Button Face” (Barker 226) was already beginning to feel worryingly nostalgic.

Perhaps it was Barker’s initial reluctance to adapt his story for the screen, as he was “committed to the word” (Barker, 1992), or simply that the financiers and distribution company didn’t understand the product before them, but there were huge issues becoming apparent surrounding the adaptation. It is clear to the reader that Barker’s “breed” is largely deserving of our sympathies. They are marginalised and now attacked by a society that seeks to eliminate them – “There were few enough hiding places left where the monstrous might find peace” (Barker 115). Barker found this to be a key adaptive issue since the atypical proto-slasher ‘monster’ was still, even through the dying embers of the late-80s, in vogue as an evil entity, shaped by the faceless, almost motiveless murders of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees and the Sawyer family. These monsters, however, don’t have the considered depth of, say, Frankenstein’s monster, who “represent(ed) a complex combination that is at once human and other, good and evil, sympathetic and repulsive” (Perry 151). Barker was clearly aware of this when talking to a head of Morgan Creek who expounded that “if you’re not careful, some people are going to like the monsters” (Barker).

In the original text, the breed is clearly placed in opposition to another powerful establishment, that of organised religion, “their old enemies the Christians…talking of their martyr and calling for purges in his name. The moment they discovered the breed in their midst the persecutions would begin again” (Barker 253). Ashbery is initially seen as a sullen individual, blackmailed by Eigerman as he “liked to dress in women’s dainties” (Barker 195), but he ends up physically decimated by Baphomet’s fire, although with a knowledge of the breed that Eigerman seeks to utilize in his pursuit of the ‘monsters.’ In the theatrical cut of the film, Ashbery simply seeks to remove the breed and works with Eigerman to that end. He is almost redundant within the narrative, and the religious drive of Barker’s text is largely absent. The priest is also involved with the Christ-like revival of Decker’s crucified body, pressing the blood of Midian deity Baphomet into the doctor’s heart, causing his resurrection. This ending is not found in the original text but was clearly inserted by Morgan Creek producers in the hope of setting up Decker as a franchise villain. It is in The Cabal Cut however that the priest is seen moving through Midian and being enticed by the world he sees, which is taken directly from the book. The revival of Decker is also missing from this cut, aligning it further with the source text. It is of note that Barker chose three white males dressed in their respective ‘uniforms’ to represent the power of authority, roles to be both respected and feared. Morgan Creek executives clearly expected the men to be the heroes, not the true monsters of Midian, as explicitly detailed by Barker in every version of his text.

Although it can be argued that the theatrical cut stands up, it does so only at the expense of the depth of Barker’s text and mirrors the shallowness of the horror films of the preceding decade. It could be aligned with the Argento Cut of Romero’s Dawn of the Dead (George Romero, 1978), high in action and short on soul. Perhaps most disappointingly in the theatrical cut is the adaptation of Decker’s character. In the original text, Decker presents Boone with eleven photographs of his supposed victims. The images Barker describes here are extremely violent but we see them through Boone’s eyes, an unknowing victim of Decker’s abuse. The film takes this subtle indication of the violent acts that have been committed and instead replaces it with a suburban murder scene straight out of Friday the 13^th Part II (Steve Miner, 1981). It no doubt went down well in cinemas, but this scene, more than any other in Barker’s three-film career, feels out of place – cutting right against what Barker wrote in Cabal.

The sub-textual elements of Decker’s motivations from Barker’s novella are also erased in the theatrical cut, and, to that end, even with Cronenberg’s gentle performance, he is little more than a cinematic instrument of violence wearing a mask. The original novella more interestingly sees the mask as a separate entity to Decker, “Ol’ button head could barely remember whether Dr Decker was alive or dead. Still the monster called him by that name. ‘You hear me, Decker?’ he said. Bastard thing, the Mask thought” (Barker 120).  It is in The Cabal Cut of the film that we find some of these scenes re-inserted and this, combined with Cronenberg’s measured performance, adds an element of sympathy, as Decker is not killing of his own volition and could, potentially, be suffering from schizophrenia. The mask represents protection to Decker, something safe to hide behind, which is how it is described in the original text – “Decker took the mask from his pocket, the button mask he felt so safe behind” (Barker 116).

Perhaps somewhat predictably for a major studio horror, the primary cuts in the move from book to theatrical version are in the relationship between Lori and Boone, particularly Lori’s role as the female lead. Gone is the deep emotional drive that both feel on their separate journeys. In Barker’s text, Lori is the primary narrative perspective as she attempts to find her partner, and it is her unflinching love for him, even after he is transformed into one of the breed after Peloquin’s bite, that drives the story forward. This part of the narrative finds a literary legacy in de Villeneuve’s Beauty and the Beast (1740), Leroux’s The Phantom of the Opera (1910) and the gothic literature of Stoker and Shelley. In Barker’s text Lori is not only the emotive narrative drive but also a person determined to understand “the mystery of how a man she’d known and loved – or loved and thought she’d known – could have died…for crimes she’d never have suspected him of” (Barker 72). Barker shapes her from mourning lover to resolute pursuer of the truth.

The strength of Lori’s character in Barker’s Cabal was severely diluted by the studio, though, with the focus turning to the male characters, specifically Boone. Despite actress Anne Bobby’s best attempts, in the theatrical cut Lori is depicted simply as a vessel who is now empty without her male companion. Even a cursory glance at the changes between the theatrical cut and the Director’s/Cabal cuts show that Lori is the primary victim of a particularly damaging editing process. Even Barker proclaimed that “it’s a romance for dead people!” (Barker) so it genuinely feels that the heart was ripped out of the novel when the runtime was hacked down from three hours to 102 minutes.

Through the Director’s Cut (Barker’s preferred version) and the Cabal Cut, at least audiences have had a chance to see what the original theatrical film could have been. As Barker would later note, “the movie is the book deconstructed and then reconstructed in a different formulation” (Barker). The novella focused on Lori’s pursuit of the truth and Boone’s journey in both finding acceptance in a new society but also in rediscovering the unswerving love between himself and Lori. The Theatrical Cut is a hazy view of an, albeit beautiful, example of Hollywood horror – violent, emotionless and played to the masses.

It is perhaps best to give the final word to Barker and Cronenberg as they discuss the studio’s dilemma, an unfortunate predicament that plagued Barker’s film career and sent him back to written world of fantastical horror.

“After Nightbreed came out [David Cronenberg] said to me, ‘Listen, this is going to happen to you again. It’s happened to me movie after movie – people not getting it, critics hating it and then two years later they say, Ah, you know, it wasn’t so bad. It’s better than the new movie he’s put out.’ In fact, we’ve seen some interesting reassessments of Nightbreed, even in the recent past. Entertainment Weekly just gave an issue over to the ‘100 Best Movies You Never Heard Of,’ and one of them was Nightbreed.”

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Works Cited

Barker, Clive. Cabal. HarperVoyager, 2008.

Barker, Clive. “Manuscript: London, 1987.”  Stokes, Phil, and Sarah Stokes, Cabal: the Delirium of Monsterdom, September 2012.

Barker, Clive. Interview. Fangoria, January 1992 (ii), Horror Zone, no. 1, August 1992.

Barker, Clive. Interview. Mark Salisbury, Fear, October 1990.

Barker, Clive. Interview. Lisa Tuttle, Clive Barker’s Shadows of Eden, September 1998.

Barker, Clive. Interview. Graham Linehan, Hot Press, vol. 12, no. 20, Ripping Yarns: Clive and Dangerous, October 1998, https://www.clivebarker.info/weaveworld.html

Boyd, Nolan. “You Can’t Go Home Again: A Twin Peaks Story,” Off Screen, vol. 21, nos. 11-12, December 2017.

Fullwood, Chris. “Pins and Needles: Actor Doug Bradley on ‘Nightbreed’.” Firelight Shocks, September 2002.

King, Stephen. Quote from advanced uncorrected proof. Clive Barker, The Inhuman Condition. Poseidon Press, August 1986.

Lelievre, Benoit. “Clive Barker – Cabal (1988).” Dead End Follies, May 2018.

The New York Times. Quote from the Simon & Schuster Cabal site.