He’s A Perfectly Normal Boy! Hooptober XI
9/32 - Director's Cut 2/1

Nightbreed certainly wasn’t the first film with otherness at its core, but at 16, it was the first time I remember seeing the “others” in a genre movie portrayed so clearly as the protagonists and victims. The creatures of Midian were so clearly developed and fully realized it felt like the X-Men of horror. So unique was all of this that the film actually held a Guinness Book record for the most monsters on screen. Sadly, Nightbreed was grossly misunderstood and released with a hacked-up version that just didn’t jive. I was a big fan of Hellraiser and a defender of this movie, which only recently came back around thanks to the restoration of about half of the original footage from Barker’s original cut (and released by Shout!)

This was my first time seeing this new Director’s Cut and it certainly rekindled my affection for this movie to something more akin to Fellini’s Satyricon. It was also to see the influence this film had going forward on filmmakers like Guillermo Del Toro (who lifts Median for Hellboy II) and Tarsem Singh. This movie was to be Barker’s Star Wars trilogy of horror and you can see that in the ending, and imagine what he could have done with a bigger budget and support from the studio. Great movie and one of the best director’s cut stories.