The Truth About RAWHEAD REX Part II - Awakenings

When The Books of Blood were first published in 1984, to say they caused something of a sensation in the realm of weird fiction is something of an understatement. This first three volumes published by Sphere were very soon attracting praise from some of the biggest names in the field - Stephen King famously said "I have seen the future of horror fiction and its name is Clive Barker", a quote that very soon was emblazoned on the jackets of subsequent printings, and Ramsey Campbell remarked that Barker was "in the best sense, the most deeply shocking writer now working in the field".

And certainly it was a most shocking début - for here was a fresh, highly talented writer who had emerged full-formed out of nowhere; rather the usual route of short stories appearing in a variety of magazines first, Barker appeared on the bookshelves with three top notch volumes of tales, and another three swiftly followed.  Of course initially, the first half of the Books of Blood emerged with little fanfare, however it didn't take long before publishers were spoilt for choice with a host of awards to cite and a forest of glowing review to quote. 

Barker's own stated purpose for The Books of Blood was to show the diversity and flexibility of the horror story - they could be funny, poetic, sexy, mythological, psychological, and provoking a wider range of emotional responses than the usual fear and dread. Now often when an author states he wants to shake up or redefine the horror genre, this often results in dusting off the old guard - vampires, werewolves, zombies etc. - and giving them the dreaded 'new twist'. And while Barker's magnificent set of stories did feature classic genre staples such as the restless dead and summoned demons, it was far more than just making a reanimated mummy 'contemporary' by slapping on a set of Ray Bans on the dusty bandages. By and large, these were unconventional stories that avoided the typical paths and took us into new and delightfully disturbing territory, and when he did set out to reawaken an old terror, he looked much further than the Universal Pictures canon. 

In Volume III, Barker introduced us to Rawhead Rex, a slavering giant unleashed into the modern world, but as we discovered in the first part of this article, this rampaging beast wasn't one of the menagerie of original horrors borne of Clive's imagination, but an ancient British folk devil given a new lease of life. Seemingly taking a cue from earlier weird writers usch as Arthur Machen and HP Lovecraft who postulated that our angels, demons and fairies were distorted legends of pre-human horrors, the Rawhead-&-Bloody Bones of English folklore became a survivor of pagan times, a remnant of a pre-human race of "things which owned this land. Before Christ. Before civilisation". 

Although it is a fantastic monster-on-the-loose tale, this being a Barker story, Rawhead Rex isn't just an old legend on the rampage. Speaking in Nexus #04 Barker noted "Monster on the rampage stories are about the phallic principle. Large males run around terrorising women. Basically, I wrote a story about a ten foot prick which goes on the rampage." And indeed in this darkly poetic tale, the titular ancient king does embody masculinity run amok, with themes pitting paganism against Christianity, the urban against the rural, and enough symbolism to fuel dozens of academic papers. In other words, exactly the kind of material that had The Books of Blood flying off the shelves.

And given the big splash these début volumes had made, it wasn't long before Hollywood came calling. Or rather, a small independent UK film company asked Barker for a screenplay. The result was Transmutations aka Underworld, a project that barely saw the light of day and that all parties involved were disappointed by. However the same folks also had snapped up the rights to the story Rawhead Rex and asked if Barker himself wanted to do the screenplay, assuringly him that the same mistakes would not be made again. And in fairness, largely they weren't, however the resulting movie Rawhead Rex (1986) didn't exactly meet with approval from either Barker or fans of The Books of Blood...

However despite it's poor reception, director George Pavlou's take on Barker's tale has developed something of a cult status. No one is claiming it to be an unrecognised classic yet, but it is fondly remembered by lovers of creature features and hokey B-movies. For this is exactly the flavour of the movie Rawhead's meat; pure burger and cheese.

To it's credit, it retains the infamous baptism scene and much of Rawhead's bloody violence, although as Pavlou acknowledged in an interview in Fangoria #16, they had to tread carefully on the gore front for at this point in the 1980s the censors were paying close attention to even minor independent horror flicks in the wake of the video nasty furore. However, the problem with Rawhead Rex is not that the violence of Barker's vision had been diluted, for it is still rather faithful to Barker's tale, but that the mythic qualities of the original text has been lost.

And so we have a straight-forward monster movie unspooling on screen, and while Pavlou tries gamely to play it straight classic horror style, unfortunately the constraints of the budget shrouds the entire proceedings in B-movie hokiness. Now for lovers of corny creature features, this makes for an entertainingly schlocky hour and a half, however Barker fans will be groaning at at the wandering plot, cheesy not-so-special effects, and the generally dumbing down of the original text. And when I first saw this flick, back in the days when VHS was king, I was very much in the latter camp.

Having seen numerous stills and heard Pavlou talking a good game in the aforementioned issue of Fangoria,  I was quite looking forward to it, however in the end the film itself left me disappointed. Now partly this was because the Rawhead FX didn't look as nearly as impressive when you saw them in motion - he looks great in photographs, but in the movie he's clearly a very large puppet head most of the time. But in fairness, Peter Litten and his crew did wonders with meagre resources and very little time, and the reason Rawhead ends up looking more comical than horrific is more down to the woolly direction.

Less forgivably on the FX front, and a perfect example of how this movie really loses its way, is the grand finale where assorted electric blue blobs are scribbled over the action to denote the ancient pagan feminine force that is the only thing that Rawhead fears. Now the trouble is not that the less-than-magical light-show is an el cheapo rendition of the ILM lens flare galas that crowned the climatic scenes of '80s blockbusters like Raiders of the Lost Ark or Poltergeist, but more the fact that these unwelcome bad acid visuals are a sledgehammer blow to the plot as well as the eyeballs.

Now I appreciate that the ending as written by Barker may well have been deemed less than cinematic - in the original story, our pagan titan is subdued by a fertility icon and stomped to death by a mob of villagers. However while the replacement light-storm of neon doodles and glow-in-the-dark standing stones that somehow age Rawhead into a senile delinquent and cause him to buried once under the earth, may have looked better on paper, what we get on-screen is less than satisfying. Aside the budget not being up to delivering the fireworks, the trouble is that although the script has a nice twist in the use of this artefact, not found in the original tale, this final confront feels somewhat fudged.

Firstly because while the magna mater statuette seems to drain Rex of his vitality, it stops short of what any lover of monster movies expects - namely that he is not just going to age, but disintegrate before our very eyes. Secondly, and no doubt the reason why he doesn't crumble into dust, is the fact that at the very end he pops up again from the grave (© Carrie 1976) for no discernible reason. Well, other than to deliver a final shock and completely trash the logic of the preceding narrative. Finally there's a nagging sense of cop-out to Rawhead's defeat, with shades of a wizard did it - you can't help feeling that the death by mob ending of the short story would have been far more visceral and fitting. 

And this is the crux of the matter, the dark poetic guts of the story are torn out by rusty monster movie clichés. Now on one hand, I can appreciate Rawhead Rex as a slice of '80s schlock but on the other, you can see there's a better film of the tale to be made, that would be gripping and disturbing rather enjoyably corny. Indeed Barker himself has spoken at length on where the movie got it wrong, identifying in particular that they went in the wrong direction with  the character design -

I drew this big dick and they said 'it looks like a dark dick to us.' I said 'you've got it.' They thought more Arnold Schwarzenegger and I knew I was in trouble. They got this German ski instructor who was 6' 3" with bigger pectorals than Linda Evans - his tits overshadowed his navel. They got it all completely wrong. I whined at them a little bit and they said 'get out of our face'.

However several years later we would see a version of Rawhead that was closer to Barker's vision, when Eclipse Comics adapted the original story 1994.

Rawhead Rex as envisioned by Les Edwards

Now I'm sure you can understand why the film-makers were perhaps a little reticent to go down this particular design route and opted instead for the bestial ancient warrior look. And despite the excellence of Les Edwards' painted panels, I'd have to say that when you have the phallic metaphor rearing up before your very eyes, the story does lose something. The cheeky subtext become just text - Rawhead isn't just a symbol for a penis, he clearly IS a penis - and consequently you are left feeling like you are trapped in the middle of a curiously bloody dick joke. 

Hence I am not entirely sure that changing the design of Rex is the real problem, as the hulking beast-king of the movie is still suitably symbolically phallic to retain the subtext without tea bagging you with it. Rather what the movie is really missing, and whose absence reduces it to a standard creature feature, is Rawhead's point of view - in the story, we see many scene through his red-litten eyes. And without experiencing his interior processes, we are left with a ravenous but empty shell. 

Of course, capturing the flavour of the thoughts of a monster is a tall order for even the most gifted director. However just by the simple means of staging a few flashback sequences to Rawhead's reign in ancient days, or just having more mood shots of Rawhead roaming through his now lost kingdom, would have given our monster more depth and character. And that's what marks out all the truly great monsters: it isn't how fearsome they are or how bloody their exploits, it's their personality, whether it's the humanity we find in Kong, the elegance of Dracula, or sheer otherness of the xenomorph.  

However sadly the Rawhead in the film could easily be replaced by any other monster or even just standard slasher killer. Really the movie needed to build more of an atmosphere of a dark fairy tale, with a greater sense of the rural landscape - in other words, in needed to draw on the very folk-tales from which Rawhead sprang. 

But in another way the movie has been strangely influential. Barker was so disappointed with the way Rawhead Rex turned out, that the next time Hollywood came calling, he insisted on directing and the result was Hellraiser. So then, in a fashion that will no doubt delight students of monsterology, Rawhead Rex could be said to be the progenitor of Pinhead and the order of Cenobites...

TWIHARD PART IV - Total Eclipse of the Heart

As a companion piece to The Black Dog Podcast Twihard marathon (episodes #62 to #64), I too took up the challenge to watch all three Twilight movies...

So then, while I had gone into New Moon feeling fairly positive, after that dragging, and to be honest, fairly tedious flick, it was with a heavy heart that I slapped Eclipse into the player. And after New Moon the various claims bandied around that the franchise improves with each instalment did not so much as ring hollow but sounded like the cracking chimes of doom.

Nor did I gain much comfort from knowing that in the director’s chair this time around was David Slade. Yes he’d made a big splash with his debut Hard Candy and followed it up with 30 Days of Night, one of the better vampire films to emerge in recent years. Just as I could understand why Hardwicke seemed as a safe pair of hands to bring Stephenie Meyer’s novel to the screen, in giving the reins of Eclipse to Slade it seemed like Summit Entertainment were keen to have a director onboard with a proven track record for handling horror, something that this franchise dealing with creatures of the night had been oddly lacking so far.

But then on the other hand, I had been impressed by previous flicks by Catherine Hardwicke, but we all know how well Twilight turned out, and while I’d still defend that movie as not being as bad as it’s made out to be, it still falls far short of Lords of Dogtown. Would the same fate befall Mr Slade’s entry in the Twilight Saga?

Most troubling of all though was that that this instalment of the saga of Bella and Edward rocked up to the theatres less than six months after its predecessor. Now that’s one hell of a production schedule for an el cheapo Z-grade slasher sequel never mind a healthily budgeted blockbuster franchise. And while I could appreciate that shooting had begun a little before the release of New Moon, the fact it still seems like this sequel appeared awfully fast. Were Paramount and Summit rush releasing these films because they feared that their target audience would be growing up faster than they could make them? It certainly looks that way which doesn’t foster much hope for the quality of Eclipse or indeed the supposed deep reverence for the source material that their publicity department bangs on about at every given opportunity. Because if they are rushing these films to market before the bubble bursts, either it shows a contempt for their core audience or a lack of belief in the merits of Meyer’s novels. And in the spirit of compare and contrast, it should be noted that Warners Bros. have no such worries about Harry Potter – they have frequently delayed releases and many of the children that comprised audience for their first adaptation are now old enough to have kids of their own. So whichever way you cut it, it doesn’t reflect well.

Further signs of this production being the product of undue haste arise when one consults the cast list. Recurring villain Victoria in this outing is played by Bryce Dallas Howard as apparently Rachelle Lefevre, who had played the role in the first movies, was unable to sign on due to alleged scheduling difficulties. I say “alleged”, because Ms. Lefevre was none to pleased by the decision. As she notes here, there was an overlap of ten days between her commitments, but for a supporting character to be unavailable for just over a week in a three month shoot surely wouldn’t be that much of a problem. Well, unless you are Summit Entertainment who apparently thinks that the entire fanbase is going to disintegrate into dust overnight… Deep respect for the source material and its fans my eye!

If you recast your series’ villain just to rush your property into the theatres, then it’s fairly clear that you see this as a fad, a bubble that is going to imminently pop, and furthermore you think your audience is too vapid to care about the casting change. Whether you love or loathe the Twilight saga, if you’ve ever been a fan of anything this sort of needlessly hasty recasting seems to signify a shoddy attitude towards the material.

Although in all fairness, the upside of this cynically swift production meant that Chris Weitz was replaced with David Slade. Indeed after the plodding endurance test that was New Moon, if Weitz was back in the director’s chair for this third outing I may well have abandoned this entire review project. And thankfully Slade is a vast improvement on his predecessors.

To begin with, this is easily the best looking Twilight movie so far. After Hardwicke’s too blue opening feature, Weitz’s too golden sequel, Slade finally gets the colour balance just right, cooking up the Baby Bear porridge of chromatic scales. The locations of Eclipse looks believably overcast enough for vampires to thrive but there’s enough incidental colour to avoid the overly washed out look to irritated many in the first movie.

Secondly Slade is equally at home with both the emotional and action content, unlike Hardwicke who had the dramatic chops but couldn’t seem to handle the SFX sequences or Weitz who could grasp neither. Here we have a movie that, at last gets closer to the right balance, doing justice to both the romantic and the horror tropes. Obviously he has an advantage here with the particular novel he is bringing to the screen, which sees the storyline picking up its pace. But even so, any director worth their salt should be able to inject some dynamism into the most low-key of scenes.

But for all the flourishes and flair Slade brings to the Twilight table, Eclipse still isn’t as satisfying as a film as it should be. While Slade pulls out all the stops, the script sadly still tends to stroll where it should be loping. Now this is a problem all three movies have had and one which can be firmly laid at the door to Melissa Rosenberg who drafted all three screenplays. While I appreciate the effort to remain faithful to the source material, there are clearly pacing problems with the versions up there on the screen. Now I’ve not read Meyer’s original novels and therefore I can’t comment on their structural qualities, but I do wonder whether some creative editing was needed to bring these books to the screen; some reshuffling of the timelines akin to what Peter Jackson did with Lord of the Rings trilogy, The Two Towers in particular.

Admittedly Eclipse doesn’t dawdle across the screen as like an empty headed clothes horse like New Moon did but it doesn’t feel as quite as exciting as a movie about vampire and werewolves should be, nor does the love triangle between Bella, Edward and Jacob crackle with all the emotional energy it should. And in fairness to Slade, I think a large factor in not quite exploiting the potential for action and drama in this chapter is that he is coming in at the third instalment and his style simply doesn’t match the preceding films. And more to the point, the thrust of the narrative has been completely lost as each movie has had a different look, tone and directorial approach and these differences prevent the story line building up any head of steam. When the first two entries in the franchise had both missed their marks, it’s near impossible for any director, no matter how talented, to deliver a rousing third part as the foundations for ramping up the action just aren’t solid enough. Eclipse may be the best house constructed for the Twilight saga so far but unfortunately it’s been built upon shifting sands.

Now throughout this marathon I’ve argued that, contrary to popular opinion, Twilight having a romantic focus, or even that its vampires sparkle, isn’t the problem. And I would still assert that all three films are nowhere as bad as they are painted in certain vociferous quarters. And although admittedly the mediocrity of New Moon comes close to the realm of truly awful film-making, I’d still argue that both Twilight and Eclipse have their merits. But the trouble is they don’t match up – Hardwicke’s film looks and feels like an indie offering whereas Slade delivers a movie with all the traits of a typical fantasy blockbuster.

And I don’t necessarily blame either director for this – ironically for a paranormal romance series, the trouble with the Twilight saga is the heartless way Summit and Paramount have constructed the franchise, cynically rushing them out to milk the faithful and chopping and changing the approach at every turn. Admittedly in the history of genre cinema, we’ve seen various franchises mutate in different ways between instalments but usually this is due to the makers tacking on sequel after sequel without any plan of where the overall story is going.

However in the case of Twilight, all the sequels were already there as novels, and so to deliver three movies that are so inconsistent in their tone and focus smacks of laziness if not outright contempt in their attitude to bringing Meyer’s novels to the screen. And even if the haters are right and the novels are badly written bobbins, the concepts could still be made into a rewarding and enthralling film saga.

However Summit seemingly care little for consistency and their approach to adapting Meyer’s series of novels reminds me of an inept vampire hunter jabbing away at a fresh disinterred corpse and managing to hammer the stake in anywhere but the heart, resulting a bloody mess full of holes. Frankly this story deserves better, and furthermore I sincerely believe that the fans of the Twilight saga deserve better too.

Earlier parts of this saga can be found here I , II and III. And don’t forget, you can hear The Black Dog podcast marathon that inspired these articles here