With a body of work that is explicit, disturbing, and sexually charged, Clive Barker is among the more transgressive horror authors to breach the mainstream in the past 30 years. So how did Hulu manage to turn a seminal Barker volume into a milquetoast adaptation that resembles an old-fashioned made-for-TV-movie in all the worst ways? Unintentionally, one imagines, because you don’t option Barker’s six-volume short-story collection Books Of Blood—a cornerstone of the cheekily named “splatterpunk” movement—unless you’re looking to push some boundaries. And Hulu’s version of Books Of Blood is a case study in how the streaming revolution has changed the rules of what can and cannot be shown on “TV.” But beyond fleeting moments of graphic violence and nudity, the knife’s edge here is actually quite dull.
Director and co-writer Brannon Braga is a science-fiction specialist whose work on Cosmos and The Orville presumably led to Seth MacFarlane’s name appearing in the credits of Books Of Blood as an executive producer. A longtime writer for the Star Trek franchise, Braga’s first foray into directing was on a Marilyn Manson short in 2014. That stadium-goth sensibility bleeds through into Books Of Blood, which begins with a glitchy title card declaring in bold gothic font that the film “dares to open the pages” of the eponymous book and ends with tempera-paint blood flowing to the tune of Manson’s “Deep Six.” Everything does come back around again eventually, and the Queen Of The Damned and Mother Of Tears era of horror appears to be on the rebound.
Books Of Blood was originally announced as an anthology series before being condensed into a feature film, which may account for its attempt to tie its storylines together into a Castle Rock-style shared universe. Many of the stories in Barker’s collection have already been adapted into films: “The Forbidden” into Candyman, “The Last Illusion” into Lord Of Illusions, Rawhead Rex, The Midnight Meat Train. (There’s even already been a film called Book Of Blood, released back in 2009.) Here, Barker’s framing story “The Book Of Blood” is both bookend and centerpiece, telling the gruesome tale of a skeptical university professor (Anna Friel) who falls in love with a psychic (Rafi Gavron) who claims to be in touch with her dead son.
Onto this Braga grafts another framing device, following a crook named Bennett (Yul Vazquez, a quintessential “that guy”) who’s out to collect the apparently quite valuable Book as a “one last job” type of thing. And then you’ve got Jenna (Britt Robertson), a mentally ill college student whose life has become a terrifying onslaught of troubling hallucinations since she went off her meds. Or has it? If each of these storylines had been given a full hour, it may have been rewarding to see their characters popping up in new contexts further down the road, as in Hulu’s better-developed horror anthology series Monsterland. But condensed into an hour and 47 minutes, it’s pre-emptive, and frankly rather presumptuous.
The performances and lensing are both what one might call broadcast quality, professional but not especially memorable or evocative. Where Books Of Blood begins to show stirrings of excitement is when the stories take a turn for the macabre, cutting in CGI phantoms and extreme gore whose shocks are enhanced by the banality of the storytelling surrounding them. There are also faint whiffs of kinky sexuality in scenes like the one where Friel inspects a nude Gavron like a horse at market, but those can be attributed to the source material, not the adaptation. In fact, the idea that you have to work to locate the delicious perversity in a Clive Barker adaptation is a condemnation in itself.
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I remember buying one of these paperbacks in the 80s. It had a cheesy Halloween mask on the cover, with rubber worms coming out of the nostrils. I went on to read a lot of Barker’s novels, Weaveworld being my favorite.
Weaveworld!!! God, what a book. I still hold out hope that someone will adapt that for the big screen.Hellraiser did him justice, I thought, at least the first movie. The thing I remember most about early Barker books is Stephen King’s blurb: “I have seen the future of horror, and his name is Clive Barker.” Who knew that the future of horror would STILL be King…
Barker himself adapted the first Hellraiser. He thought very little of the sequels still trying to cash in on his name when he had nothing to do with them.
He also wrote the second Hellraiser movie, but didn’t direct it. It brings in a lot of the wider Cenobite mythology the first movie didn’t touch, that make for the more iconic pop culture image of Pinhead. That, to me, makes it at least notable. Don’t bother with any of the others.
not even the one with Adam Scott?
Ah, that makes sense. The first one was really nightmarishly good. I also remember a friend loving his novel “The Great and Secret Show,” which apparently was supposed to be a trilogy but stopped at the second book…
Weaveworld is my all-time favorite book and just seeing other fans has made my day. Books of Blood (all volumes) are in the top ten, too, and were my first introduction to Clive Barker. “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red.”With an opener like that, I knew I was hooked.
A.V. Club really HAS turned into story time at the old folks’ home.
Weaveworld was excellent, as was The Great and Secret Show. Some years ago I heard there was going to be a TV adaptation of the latter but I don’t think it ever materialized.
I’m still waiting for the Thief of Always to be adapted to a movie or limited series.
I only read the first Book of Blood and the Yattering and Jack was by far the best story in it. The rest ranged from good to meh.
TYAJ was genuinely funny. I didn’t know Barker had it in him.
They should turn Imajica into a series.
I mostly agree, only because I’d love to spend a week watching it, but most of his adaptations fall pretty flat.
I still think Nightbreed would make an excellent series. Diving into the lore, as well as flushing out the Doctor and other characters
It was attempted: Clive Barker’s Imajica being developed for TV by The Stand’s Josh Boone (joblo.com)Who knows, maybe it’ll still happen. The Stand took forever to get made.
Hulu’s Books Of Blood somehow manages to make Clive Barker blandHuh? Director and co-writer Brannon Braga…Ahhh.
Are you telling me one of the top minds behind Star Trek Voyager made something mediocre? I don’t believe it!
Also Enterprise! (although apparently not Insurrection or Nemesis, which surprises me)
I saw the opening of the 2009 version on SyFy years ago. An Australian guy was sitting across from the guy with the stories etched into his skin, and he said, “You’re a book of blood!”Good times
One of the odd things about this aggressively mediocre movie is that only one of the three stories is actually based on a Clive Barker story, and that story is more of a frame story for the entire book series than a standalone short. Out of the other two, one has a few Barker-esque themes and the other is just a bunch of spookiness with barely a hint of a plot.
There are so many good stories across those 6 volumes. Why would they try to do their own thing? As a Barker fan, it’s kind of infuriating.
Whenever Barker gets interviewed about something, he usually brings up what story from The Books of Blood “they’re” going to do next. So someone finally allows him to film several of them, and he goes with one that was already released in 2009 – he’s REALLY into that stupid, non-scary idea of a human being the Book of Blood, isn’t he? – and then suggests two other “ideas” he’s had in his head. So it’s not really The Books of Blood, is it? Clive Barker has always been the Salvador Dalí of horror writers. He gets a freaky image in his head, puts it out there (occasionally), and then spends years giving interviews as if he’s the dude that made horror his bitch. His Wikipedia page has more failed horror projects than finished ones, and a large percentage of the finished ones are hot garbage, so I can’t understand why he keeps getting these offers (that usually don’t happen). If the next one isn’t Mike Flanagan’s The Books of Blood, then just stop with the Clive Barker Renaissance.
It’s much easier to make a bland Barker adaptation when they don’t bother to adapt his stories. Only the framing story is actually from Barker’s original anthology.
Barker put out a tweet indicating that there would be more of these, but I’m so confused as to why they would go so tame by only adapting one of his stories for this initial amuse-bouche and then not one but TWO stories by Braga to fill it out. When I initially heard that this was going to contain two brand-new stories, I was super psyched but now learning that they’re not two new Barker stories, I feel like I couldn’t care less. Personally, I’m still waiting for someone to have the guts to adapt the Books of the Art. EVERVILLE is not only my favorite of Barker’s novels, but one of my favorite books ever.