Barker was born in Liverpool, the son of Joan Ruby (née Revill), a painter and school welfare officer, and Leonard Barker, a personnel director for an industrial relations firm. [3] [4] He was educated at Dovedale Primary School, Quarry Bank High School and the University of Liverpool, where he studied English and philosophy. [5]

Books of Blood, Volume Two, or Books of Blood, Volume II (1984), ISBN 9780722114131, collection of 5 novelettes: Books of Blood: Volume One (1984), ISBN 9780425083895, collection of 1 short story and 5 novelettes: In December 2007, Chris Ryall and Clive Barker announced an upcoming collaboration of an original comic book series, Torakator, to be published by IDW. [38]The Essential Clive Barker: Selected Fiction (1999), ISBN 9780060195298, collection of more than seventy excerpts from novels and plays and four full-length stories (1 short story and 3 novelettes): In 2013, Boom! Studios announced Next Testament, the first original story by Barker to be published in comic book format. Barker wrote the screenplays for Underworld (1985) and Rawhead Rex (1986), both directed by George Pavlou. Displeased by how his material was handled, he moved to directing with Hellraiser (1987), based on his novella The Hellbound Heart. After his film Nightbreed (1990) flopped, Barker returned to write and direct Lord of Illusions (1995). The short story " The Forbidden", from Barker's Books of Blood, provided the basis for the 1992 film Candyman and its three sequels. He had been working on a series of film adaptations of his The Abarat Quintet books under The Walt Disney Company's management, [21] but due to creative differences, the project was cancelled. [22]

There Once Lived a Woman Who Tried To Kill Her Neighbor's Baby: Scary Fairy Tales by Lyudmila Petrushevskaya / The Best of Gene Wolfe by Gene Wolfe (2010, tie) Love Makes You Evil: What Julia feels for Frank is likely more a kind of deep, lustful obsession rather than actual love, but it still turns her into a murderer.

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Hellraiser, the film version of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, was released in 1987. Barker decided to direct it because he was unhappy with earlier adaptations of his work. While the basic plot—Frank seeking unrelenting pleasure and the puzzle box bringing forth the Cenobites, followed by the mayhem when his brother moves into the home—remains the same, there are major differences between The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser. They include: Frank Cotton releases four demons with the magical cube, which looks quite like a toy. They don't exactly reward him, although it's technically neither a reward nor a punishment. The Cenobites' job is to bring the summoner to the heights of "pain and pleasure". The summoners don't really understand what they're getting into. Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Averted. Frank was implied to have raped Julia the day of Rory's wedding, yet it's treated as no less heinous than anything else Frank did. Clive Barkers Enters the 'Dark Bazaar' with JAKKS Pacific". Bloody-disgusting.com. 15 January 2010 . Retrieved 30 October 2014.

Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh (1995), film directed by Bill Condon, based on characters from the novelette "The Forbidden" The character I played in Hunters, the Dutchman, I can see echoes of later... Pinhead in Hellraiser," Bradley said. "This strange, strange character whose head was kind of empty but who conveyed all kinds of things.” There was no compassion to be had on this side of the Schism; there was only the weeping and the laughter. Tears of joy sometimes (for an hour without dread, a breath's length even), laughter coming just as paradoxically in the face of some new horror, fashioned by the Engineer for the provision of grief.She surreptitiously watched Julia as she worked, and it seemed to Kirsty that the woman was incapable of ugliness. Every gesture [was] infused with such effortless grace. Seeing it, she understood Rory’s doglike adulation." Creepy Monotone: If Clive Barker's own audiobook narration is anything to go off of, the Cenobites sound almost robotic in their speech, having no inflections and speaking stiltedly. The only one whose voice is given any characterization is Pinhead who is said to sound feminine and like an "excited girl".

Julia is on the receiving end as well. She ends up a disembodied head that gets dragged off to Hell by the Engineer. Sometime later, Frank's younger brother Rory moves into the family home on 55 Lodovico Street with his posh wife, Julia. Sullen and more gloomy every day of her four-year marriage to her guileless and boring husband, Julia often entertains herself with thoughts of a frantic coupling she allowed herself with Frank a week before her wedding to Rory. Exploring her new home, Julia finds the largest of the three upper floor rooms to be chilly and uncomfortably stagnant. She also hears a bell ringing somewhere but thinks nothing of it at the time, needing to entertain a mousy co-worker of Rory's named Kirsty who's paid them a social call. During his early years as a writer, Barker occasionally worked as a male escort when his writing did not provide sufficient income. [12] In 2003, he received the Davidson/Valentini Award at the 15th GLAAD Media Awards. [13]

Jenkins, Jason (14 October 2020). " 'Books of Blood': Brannon Braga on the Clive Barker Renaissance and the Sequels He Hopes to Make". Bloody Disgusting . Retrieved 24 October 2020. I felt like all of the people in this story were just puppets, playthings for the sinister, hellish Cenobites