Clive Barker’s world of gods and monsters. 

I’ll come right out and say it, I love this movie. It’s a story I’ve always been able to connect with over the years, no matter what my age is or whatever is going on in my life. 

Nightbreed was always in steady rotation during my vhs days, appealing to younger me with not only horror, fantasy, and cool monsters, but with life messages along the way about acceptance and a sense of belonging, plus I read Cabal in my teens and that was definitely a big eye opener for my imagination as well . Add up all of those elements plus some incredible monster designs/effects and a sadistic David Cronenberg stealing whatever…

On the one hand, this has some truly clunky and childish 80s fantasy storytelling that becomes hard to make excuses for at this length (the 2-hour director's cut), and Barker for all his impressive depths of gruesome imagination is not particularly deft at the nuts-and-bolts of drama or action filmmaking. It's just a blatant mess, arguably a glorious and ambitious one but a mess nonetheless. On the other hand, you kind of have to respect that a queer horror novelist was given an absurd amount of money to make what he called his "horror Star Wars", and it climaxes on nearly 30 minutes of intricately designed “unnatural” but peaceful monsters popping out of their underground cemetery home (that they've been…

clive barker is one of the great heroes of neo-expressionism -- all of his films contain the ungainly contortions and baroque darkness of a perverted conceptualist. nightbreed exists in an undeniably queer world, merging horror and camp and inexplicable occult lore into a truly imaginative text that feels like a tim burton movie without all the provincial suburban immaturity that burton was never able to escape from -- barker loves monsters and blood and mystical portents and feels comfortable resting within the mystery of a wide-world which we only see a glimpse of here; nightbreed bursts at the seams with cool shit, too much cool shit for one movie to possibly explore, it's a film that aims for the moon…

Still feels fresh and cool every time I go back to it… and that takes a lot of doing these days.

On the outside, Nightbreed is totally '80s: from the fantastic makeup to Danny Elfman's Hellraiser-ish soundtrack; almost like a last solemn farewell to the golden age of Horror. But on the inside, Nightbreed is full-on progressive '90s stuff: An ultra-sharp political allegory about the persecution of outcasts. Ethnic cleansing wrapped up in mythical fantasy.

The Cabal Cut is very much the real deal. The version that started it all. Less "Muppets of Horror", more "Freak Holocaust". More emotionally resonant, focused and cohesive. Simplicity over complication!

Respect to Clive Barker for not giving up on his true version. And mad…