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Clive Barker - TV Tropes

  • ️Wed Mar 13 2013

Clive Barker (Creator)

"I have seen the future of the horror genre, and his name is Clive Barker."

Clive Barker (born October 5, 1952 in Liverpool, England) is a British horror and dark fantasy author responsible for over a dozen novels, several movies, a few graphic novels, some artwork, and a couple of video games as well.

His works almost always feature sexual overtones that are graphic, disturbing, and disgusting in nature. His stories are usually set in a contemporary urban setting, but with Another Dimension or many dimensions. On the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism, his stories lie pretty far on the cynical side, with heavily flawed but sympathetic protagonists and an overall dark, gritty, and gothic tone, although some of his novels and stories have had happy and magically enchanting endings, and have featured themes such as love, redemption, and accepting the differences of others.

Barker is also an artist, with some of his paintings having been featured in galleries in the United States, as well as illustrating the covers of his own books. He has also created characters and series for comic books, and some of his stories have been adapted to the medium. He has a nearly half-century long friendship and artistic partnership with Hellraiser star Doug Bradley, the two having met when they were in secondary school and collaborated on dozens of projects since.

Some of Clive Barker's works include:

Comic Book

Film

Literature

Theatre

Toys

Video Games

Tropes featured in Clive Barker's body of work include:

  • Anyone Can Die: Indeed, in the second novel of Abarat, it seems that Barker can only keep a certain number of characters alive at any given point, so for every new character introduced, another is cleanly hacked away.
  • Author Appeal: A few of his stories feature men getting raped by other men, and then realizing that they like it.
  • Author Tract: Some of Clive Barker's works serve as this for his feminist and environmentalist views, respectively. Imajica and Sacrament are this in particular.
  • Bedsheet Ghost: The protagonist of the short story "Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud" is a strait-laced Catholic man framed as a porn kingpin and murdered, who possesses the shroud covering him in the morgue to take his revenge. The story is a Black Comedy based on the ridiculous visual gag of a bedsheet ghost murdering people in increasingly graphic fashion.
  • Blood Bath:
    • Mister B. Gone, the demonic Villain Protagonist from the story of the same name, bathes in a tub full of blood from dead babies. He complains of how difficult it is to keep them alive long enough so the bath would be warm when he empties their blood into the tub.
    • The effigy in "Human Remains" needs to bathe in blood (the younger the better) to become human.
  • Body Horror: So, so much Body Horror. The Cenobites' entire religion is based upon it, and that's just the tip of the grotesque iceberg.
    • "Jacqueline Ess" has this as her superpower, being a Reality Warper whose powers work upon human biology. Ultimately she suffers from Power Incontinence, and she and her lover Vassi choose to die together in what can only be called "mutual body horror passionate suicide."
  • Creator's Oddball: Night of the Zoopocalypse, which Barker executive produces and provides the concept for, marks the writer’s first foray into animation and family friendly entertainment, following a mostly adult body of work.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: Most of the monsters in his works, such as Pinhead of Hellraiser, are antiheroes or tragic beings, human or otherwise, that are feared for their powers despite being on the side of good. However, in Cliver Barker’s works, when Dark Is Evil, angry, or at the least doesn’t play nice with others, run.
  • Genre Deconstruction: The Midnight Meat Train, at least in its film incarnation, is a huge deconstruction of slasher movies. Every single slasher movie trope used or referenced in it is either subverted or justified; the protagonists are responsible adults instead of rowdy teens, the authorities are useless because they're working with the killer, and the supernatural slasher turns out to be upholding an Ancient Conspiracy to keep an Eldritch Abomination out of our world.
  • Good Is Boring: Jack Polo in The Yattering and Jack. So much so that the Yattering is nearly driven insane trying to corrupt him. It's one of his funnier stories.
  • Gothic Horror: His works are definitely overtly gothic, right done to the imagery and themes mixed in with explicit sexual and graphic violent content.
  • Half-Human Hybrid: A number of these turn up across Barker's writings:
    • In a positive example, the "divils" in "Skins of the Fathers" seek to (consensually) impregnate human women so that they can create a new hybrid creature that will unite the two species in a new age of harmony.
    • In a very negative example, Rawhead Rex's species absolutely despises human women, and are described as having in the past kidnapped human women and raped them purely out of spite. The resulting hybrid children had a nasty tendency to chew their way out of their mothers' wombs.
  • Hell Seeker: In the short story "Down Satan!", a wealthy businessman becomes convinced God doesn't exist, and decides to find out whether the devil does by building a literal Hell on Earth.
    • Humans who seek the Lament Configuration are typically presented in this way: however, their conception of Hell often differs widely from that which the Cenobites can promise, as is the power that humans hope to obtain from trading their souls in such way.
    • MP Burgess from "Hell's Event" is this, having sold his soul and a good amount of his flesh for unlimited power from Hell. However, when his demonic race contestant fails yet again to win for Hell, Burgess finds out quickly that he made a big mistake and ultimately suffers a gruesome death at Satan's hands.
  • Humans Are the Real Monsters: Stories combine fantastic and supernatural evil with the evil and cruelties that humans perpetrate against each other. Consider, for example, that the true villains of the novella The Hellbound Heart (basis for the Hellraiser movies) are Frank and Julia, wretched excuses for human beings (Frank even moreso than Julia), not the Cenobites.
    • Made much more explicit in Nightbreed and "Skins of the Fathers", where humans are the monsters who have hunted their rival beings to the brink of extinction.
    • The Confessions of (Pornographer's) Shroud focuses on a ghost possessing a bedsheet on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge who can kill people in the most over-the-top ways possible, but the story is set in a crime-ridden Crapsack World in which brutal murders are an everyday sight. In fact, most of the murders throughout the story are committed either by the protagonist before he became the ghost or by other (living) characters. At one point a cop character merely pretends how he’s shocked by one of the ghost’s murders so as not to stand out, even though he’s actually seen even worse crimes throughout his career.
  • In Case You Forgot Who Wrote It: (Clive Barker's Clive Barker's Jericho, by Clive Barker, Clive Barker's Razorline (a short-lived imprint of Marvel Comics))
  • In the Style of: Barker can be seen as basically a Gothic Horror Ken Russell.
  • Magical Homeless Person: The Inhuman Condition includes one in the form of Mr. Pope. Although his exact nature is never clarified, he at minimum has a knotted string sealing away monsters, and a book of spells.
  • Magical Land: Most of his novels deal with an alternate reality or more than one realm, which maybe be accessible through paintings, rugs, complex toy boxes or the like.
  • Man of Wealth and Taste: Michael Maguire from "Confessions of a (Pornographer's) Shroud", at least in his own eyes. A gangster, now mostly retired, he lives in a mansion in an elegant neighborhood, surrounded by works of art, and cultivates "the noble art of bonsai". And he also thinks of taking up painting as another hobby.
  • No Accounting for Taste: A lot of marriages have long since gone sour after the couple has been together for many years, whereas romantic relationships where the man and woman have just met will be full of love and the two will struggle against all odds to come together. This isn't always the case, but it's common enough in his stories to be worth mentioning.
    • Also worth mentioning is that an old couple doesn't even need to be officially married to fall apart. In Mister B Gone, the two demons who are described as having a relationship similar to an old married couple end up separating.
  • Non-Malicious Monster: Many appear in Barker's writings, though perhaps most notably in Nightbreed and the short story "The Skins of the Fathers". Usually dovetails with Humans Are the Real Monsters.
  • Nothing Exciting Ever Happens Here: Both The Thief of Always and Abarat open with the child or pre-teen protagonists in towns like these. Abarat begins in a town called Chickentown, for Christ's Sake, where the place's entire purpose seems to be to make Candy Quakenbush miserable.
    • Zeal, England is described as a pleasant but non-descript old village in the countryside. Then Rawhead Rex is resurrected...
    • In "In The Hills, The Cities," the small, very old Serbian towns of Popolac and Podujevo are sleepy places well sequestered from much of the modern world whose citizens contentedly live a pastoral lifestyle. That is, except for the one day a year that the able-bodied residents of both towns strap themselves together into giants made of people to perform ritualistic combat in the hills between.
  • Older Than They Look: He's nearing seventy and looks quite a bit younger than that. Of course, if you go back and look at photos when he was younger, he always looked older than he was, so it's starting to even out. His infirmities have definitely taken their toll on him, though.
  • Oop North: He was born and raised in Liverpool.
  • Psychosexual Horror: A lot of Clive Barker's stories involve the darker or more sordid aspects of sex; such as BDSM, prostitution, sexual misconduct, and STDs. These stories were inspired by Barker's own experiences as a male prostitute.
  • Sealed Evil in a Can: In the Hellraiser movies, as well as the novella that they are based upon, The Hellbound Heart the only way the Cenobites will come after you is if you open the puzzle box known as Lemarchand's Box. So much so, in fact, that, at least in the novella, the Cenobites make and honor a deal with the protagonist (who has accidentally opened the box, and has no idea what it is or does) to spare her if she can lead them to the novella's REAL villain, who has escaped their clutches.
  • Self-Adaptation: Clive Barker was exclusively a horror writer before becoming a film director. He has based several of his films on his earlier stories, such as Hellraiser (based on his novella The Hellbound Heart) and Lord of Illusions (based on his short story "The Last Illusion").
  • Something Blues: Short story "Pig Blood Blues".
  • Spiritual Successor: He can be this to filmmaker Ken Russell, especially when comparing Russell's work Altered States to Barker's works. Even one of taglines for Hellraiser, "He'll tear your soul apart" on the original poster could may be a reference to Russell's 1975 film adaptation of Tommy, which features the same poster tagline in exactly the same font.
  • STD Immunity: Averted in "Human Remains". Gavin, a male prostitute, does not mind occasionally dealing with crabs but gonorrhoea, which he has caught twice, is really bad for business as it means three weeks off work.
  • Summoning Artifact: The Lemarchand's Boxes, and especially the Lament Configuration, which summon the Cenobites.
  • That Poor Cat: Barker really dislikes cats, and it shows. If a cat appears in a story (e.g. The Yattering and Jack), it will meet a horribly gruesome demise.
  • Too Dumb to Live: Frank in The Hellbound Heart. He tracks down the Lemarchand Box because he thinks the Cenobites (who he assumes will be beautiful naked women) will teach him new methods of attaining pleasure. However, he's disgusted to see that they're all heavily pierced and mutilated, and even at this point it doesn't occur to him that their offering of "sensual experiences" may not fit the classic English definition of the word. But he learns. Quickly.
  • Torture Cellar: A number of these appear throughout Barker's writing, most notably Quaid's lair in Dread.
  • The 'Verse:
    • "The Last Illusion," The Hellbound Heart, Weaveworld, The Great and Secret Show, "The Lost Souls", Everville and The Scarlet Gospels all take place in the same universe due to the crossover between Harry D'Amour and the Cenobites in the latter work and the prominence or cameos of either in all of the others. Other works may also share the universe, though this is not confirmed.
    • In addition, the Epic Comics adaptations of Nightbreed and Hellraiser share a universe, which also includes Rawhead Rex.
  • Would Hurt a Child: Rawhead from "Rawhead Rex" treats children's meat as a delicacy, particularly the meat of newborns "still blind from the womb".
  • Wouldn't Hurt a Child: The shroud from "The Confessions of (Pornographer's) Shroud" exacts really cruel and brutal revenge on his enemy—and afterwards is worried about the feelings of said enemy's little daughter and even tries to comfort her.
  • Write What You Know: Barker's heavy focus on sexual horror was derived from his own experiences moonlighting as a male prostitute during the 1970s.