Personal Project Extract

Rewriting Barbara: Night of the Living Dead (1990)

...In Romero’s revisions, the 1990’s Barbara begins the narrative in a similar manner to her 1969 counterpart but, instead of regressing into catatonia, she is becomes a positive force, an active, capable and strong person. The 1990’s Barbara becomes a continuation of the character Sarah from Day of the Dead (1985): as a scientist Sarah is written as someone who is fully aware of the situation, one who has a strong ethical stance and is driven to search for a practical solution to the undead threat. As an individual person, Romero writes her as a mature, sexual and capable woman. And, when the undead attack or bite, she proves herself to be an aggressive and effective survivor. The 1990’s Barbara demonstrates all of these qualities, consistently proving herself and consistently proving that for all the protective and macho posturing of Ben and Cooper, she is the most mature and masculine of them all.

Romero begins his remake in the same way as his original, with Johnny driving Barbara to the cemetery. As they drive through the desolate landscape, brother and sister bicker about their deceased mother. As the argument develops, Johnny accuses Barbara of being afraid of their mother. She immediately denies this but Johnny pursues the accusation by commenting that “She damn near drove you into a convent” and then “When was the last time you had a date?” Johnny’s implication of repression becomes all the more apparent when Barbara steps out of the car: bespectacled, she wears a blouse buttoned up to the collar over which she wears a pink knitted cardigan. Her heavy woollen skirt hangs below her knees.

As they approach their mother’s grave, Johnny continues his taunts until, inevitably, the first of the undead attacks, grabbing then clawing at Barbara. Both fall to the ground, Barbara’s glasses knocked from her face as they do so. As she tries to defend herself, Johnny attempts to pull the zombie off but his attempts are hampered by Barbara who, throughout the brief struggle, manages to both accidentally kick her brother’s face and stab his hand. As the struggle continues Barbara loses her cardigan, the top buttons of her blouse come undone and her shiny black shoes come off. The attack ends with Johnny managing to drag the undead person off his sister only to slip on one of her lost shoes and, as he falls, breaks his neck on a tombstone.

This opening sequence, although reasonably similar to the original, has great importance to the revised Barbara. Her life, up until this point, has clearly been dominated by her mother to the extent that her confidence and sexuality have been suffocated. During the opening struggle the clothes of her repression – the glasses, the cardigan, and the concealing blouse – are all stripped from her and her brother killed. Symbolically the dead have inadvertently undressed her of her repressed state.

Current Commissions

In the final stages of the First Draft of the Doctor Who chapter for The Science Fiction Foundation and have taken some time out from commissions to work on a long-term personal project concerning Guillermo del Toro...

Recently Viewed

The Midnight Meat Train (Ryuhei Kitamura, 2008)

The involvement of Clive Barker in any project – be that a novel, film, art work or console game – is often a sure sign of quality. Regardless of format, Barker’s distinctive vision of the world of the real, of fantasy and of horror consistently emerges and confirms him as one of the greatest creative minds of the genre. Imagine then the potential of a film adaptation of one of his ground breaking short stories from The Books of Blood – The Midnight Meat Train.

The title alone is enough to get the genre fanatic salivating. The imagery it conjures up – the dark, cold, and rickety corridors of a train slick with blood and littered with meat – is ideal material for an era of horror cinema preoccupied with Painography. Yet, even though the film has a reasonably small body count, the gore content of Midnight Meat Train is quite obtrusive: fast and bloody, the violence perpetrated by Mahogany seems strangely at odds with the rest of the narrative. Although the explicit nature of these events will slake the thirst of the average gore hound – as fingers are mashed, bodies butchered, limbs carved and brains are tenderised all in sickening close up – these scenes actually detract from the tension the film is trying so hard to generate. The potential horror of Mahogany lies in his menacing presence, the contradiction between his normal appearance and Everyman quality with his brooding nature and seemingly endless repressed rage. Watching him act out his fury in a frenzy of explicit violence only manages to dissipate whatever fear that surrounds him.

This is no Hellraiser nor was it ever intended to be but the shadow that film has cast is long and deep, making it difficult not to measure any film that is Barker related against it. Where the film does succeed is in its depiction of the contemporary city as a space of concealed horrors, the anonymous nature of city life and the immense claustrophobia of the tube trains. All are admirably constructed by director Kitamura and provide an interesting foil to the gouts of blood that are freely spilled. Yet, for all this, the film feels way too long and stretches Barker’s original material to the limit before the concluding payoff. Die hard Barker fans will not be overly disappointed given earlier filmic treatments of his work (Underworld and Rawhead Rex) nor will those who like blood and brains sprayed and splattered across the screen. But for those looking for the melancholy in Barkers work and manifestations of his immense imagination may be disappointed.

Current Commissions

Completed the Doctor Who chapter for the Cambridge Scholars commission and have now begun work on the Emily Rose short essay for Electric Sheep: the text will examine the real-life events behind The Exorcism of Emily Rose and discuss their depiction in this film and Requiem. Preliminary texts have also been drafted for the second Doctor Who chapter for The Science Fiction Foundation publication.

Notebook Extract

30 Days of Night

The sense of the vampire group functions as a family is reflected in the survivors and highlights their deficiency in the face of the Other: whereas the vampires are an organised collective and have trust in their leader, Marlow, the humans are disorganised and continually question their assumed leader, Eben. A further disparity occurs in the sense of relationships that occur within each group: the humans are survivors, familiar to each other only as friends and neighbours whilst the vampires, although from completely different families, are a family that is quite literally blood related through the contaminating bite of the vampire. As the film progresses, Marlow’s relationship with the dark haired female vampire suggests that they are, in some sense of the word, a couple. They respect each other, share victims and Marlow’s allows this ‘partner’ chance and opportunity to attack and kill before the others. In this state, they function as a normal couple, a further instance of difference that highlights the deficiency in the humans as this relationship is reflected in Eben and Stella: whereas the vampires suggest a healthy, mutual and equal relationship, Eben and Stella are clearly unhappy with each other to the extent that their relationship has collapsed and the pair have split up.

Interview Extract

Rendering Nature: An interview with Richard Bell, Background Artist on Watership Down

Based upon Richard Adams best-selling novel Watership Down (1972), Martin Rosen’s animated adaptation (1978) is a remarkable achievement. As James Clarke suggests, “Watership Down is a seminal moment in British animation, building on the tradition set by Halas and Bachelor with Animal Farm as well as, in more general terms, showing that classical animation could be produced in Britain.” (2004, p.103) Part of the film’s sustained popularity lies in its ambiguity towards the audience: although one expects a film about rabbits to be aimed at children, the narrative and animation combines to create an ‘adult’ world, one which projects brutal images of violence and bloodshed alongside a commentary on the value of the landscape and humanity’s inherent need to destroy it.

Production on the film began in 1975, with producer Rosen employing Disney veteran John Hubley as director. Hubley worked on the film for a year but his desire to move away from animated realism contrasted with Rosen’s idea that for Watership Down needed to be as realistic as possible. By the end of the first year, Hubley had left the production and Rosen took over as director. Regardless of this early departure, commentators have suggested that Hubley’s approach is evident in the mythical prologue that opens the narrative as well as in the final scenes where Hazel is confronted by the rabbit’s harbinger of death, The Black Rabbit of Inlé.

In effort to explore the depths of this production, I contacted Richard Bell, one of the film’s Background Artists. Working as an artist with a considerable interest in natural history, Bell seemed like the ideal choice in relation to the film’s inherently realistic depictions of nature.

How did you come to be involved in Watership Down?

A painter friend of mine who had graduated a year ahead of me at the Royal College had gone to see the Watership Down people. She didn’t want to do it but she referred them to me. So I went to an interview with John Hubley. That was about a year after I’d graduated from college. They liked my work.

Once you were offered the job, did you visit the real Watership Down?

When I heard I got the job, I said, right, what I would like to do is go and see the place for myself and so they paid for my expenses. (Richard reaches across the table and picks up a sketchbook. He briefly leafs through it and then shows me a drawing of the landscape near Sandleford Warren.) I thought this is the sort of thing I should be drawing because I know they [the rabbits] have to cross this stream. Of course in the film its more of a river than that – you have to add a bit of drama. I actually found a lad who had caught a rabbit down in the valley here and I kept that in a homemade rabbit hutch but I felt so sorry for it that I soon let it go back down in the valley. (Richard flips through his sketchbook and finds the pages he is looking for, the spread of line drawings of rabbits.) Those are my versions of the main characters from Watership Down. The problem with making the rabbits naturalistic is that it is difficult to tell the difference between them so they had to be humanised to some small extent: if Bigwig was a big rabbit then he really was big and if Fiver was a little rabbit he really was scrawny.

Can you tell me about your interview with Hubley?

John Hubley looked through my sketchbooks and he said “I can see how we could use that” and there was a picture of May blossom and he said “I’d like to use something like this so that it would just be cut to white like a sketchbook page and you would have my shaky pen and ink drawing of this May blossom and then the rabbit would come in below.

So the rabbit would enter from off-screen onto the sketchbook page in order to step into the imaginary world of the drawing…

Hubley obviously had this playful sort of way he would have liked to have done it but I suspect that he could see that Watership Down was part of that English tradition of natural history illustration and he could obviously see that I was part of it too. He took me on. A couple of my painter friends came for interviews but, although I was accepted, by the time it came to decided on my pals working on it things had changed a lot at Watership Down. It became a different film…. It’s quite remarkable what Martin Rosen did with it but there’s this kind of lost film there that was never made, a concept film that never got made.