Archivists And Authors Phil And Sarah Stokes Examine Clive Barker's Dark Worlds - Exclusive Interview

"Clive Barker's Dark Worlds" encompasses 50 years in his career and obviously "Hellraiser" is a big part of that, but what part of Clive's world do you hope finally gets its due with this book? Is there a specific area of his career that people maybe haven't focused on as much as maybe they should be about Clive?

Phil Stokes: We saw this as a huge challenge because it is 50 years. It's actually a bit more than 50 years. He's [just celebrated his] 70th birthday [on October 5]. We first came across him with the "Books of Blood," which he sold as a deal when he was just about to turn 30. From the "Books of Blood" to today, that's 40 years. 

What we were really intrigued [about] was where did he come from, or how did he suddenly come out of almost nowhere? When "Hellraiser" broke on the screens, and then he had his novel "Weaveworld" came out a month afterwards, there were two really important pieces of work that really spoke to us, and we wanted to know where he'd come from. 

To a certain extent, this book is also helping us to go back and remember all of the reasons why we fell in love with his work. There are areas where some people know he's very active. In the last few years, a lot more people have come to know that he's a painter because there's been a series of books about his paintings, but not many people know his photography. Not many people know he's a poet. In many cases, it's because poetry is a piece of work that he hasn't yet shared with the world. Over the next few years, we're going to see a lot more of Clive's photography and his poetry get showcased.

It's not about one area that you want people to discover, but much more.

Phil: What the book hopefully does is allows people to look across a breadth of creativity, one where the idea's the important thing, not the medium. If an idea strikes Clive and it looks like it should be a short story, he'll go and write it as a short story. If it doesn't quite work as a short story, he'll put it on a shelf, and it'll get repurposed as a comic book two years later, or it'll come back in a different form.

What we loved was seeing the themes that have been with Clive throughout his career and the way that they've bubbled up at the right moment to come out into a project which is shared with the world. We've loved that process.

Given the fact that there's so much of Clive's artwork and other material assembled for "Dark Worlds," how difficult was it to determine what makes the cut and what doesn't?

Phil: You've hit the nail on the head. We started out planning a book of 300 pages, and that was too much of a challenge. The publishers very kindly granted us another 50 pages to squeeze a bit more in. We've clearly had to make a balance, and what we were attempting to do was to balance the visual with the text, the familiar with the new, the unknown, to balance fact with a little bit of commentary, but really to showcase all of the media. We tried not to leave anything behind. Some things have justified four pages in the book. 

Some things have got a passing message in a paragraph to remind us that we might need to go back and say more about it at some point, but we've tried to be comprehensive, to dwell on the areas where we think there's a story to tell or there's something that people might not know, or there's a fact to uncover, which helps illuminate how all of this really fits together. 

Clive had a lovely expression many years ago, that he didn't know how all this connected together, but it was a little bit like a patchwork bedspread. Sooner or later, you could see the way that the patchwork connected together and made it one single covering. You couldn't hop from one to the other because it would look random. What we tried to do is take some of that randomness and say, "There's a method behind this."

Sarah, did your ideas of what should go in the book differ from Phil's ideas? How does that process work as two creatives putting your work into one book?

Sarah: We had a lot of those conversations, and to be honest, it threatened to derail us a bit. At the beginning, it was a real challenge. We then went back, and we said, "If we're the average reader, whoever that might be, they're going to expect certain things." There's "Hellraiser," "Candyman," the "Books of Blood," "Weaveworld" — all of those things. 

We put those in as way points and then looked at what Clive have been doing in between them. How can we show the journey? What was going on in the background? How can we fill in, if you like, between these big sort of milestones, creative milestones for him? We both had things we wanted in, and we both had things that there wasn't room for.  

Phil: We both fight for things and when it really comes to an impasse, Sarah wins. [laughs]

I had the great fortune to chat with Ashley Laurence recently, whose work with Clive goes back, of course, to 1987 and the first "Hellraiser" movie. How helpful was she in your work on "Dark Worlds" since she and Clive have stayed great friends and collaborators over all these years?

Sarah: We're great friends with Ashley.

Phil: She had no involvement in "Dark Worlds. In fact, she's one of the people who will get an early copy of the book because we are really keen to share this with all the people who Clive has collaborated with over the years, because they're all in there! We've tried to celebrate all of the collaborative working relationships that Clive has had. He's always had this mentality that it's a pretty big sandbox, and people can come and play in the sandbox. 

He thrives on other people's input to creative projects. There's Ashley, Nick Vince, Simon Banford, all of the Cenobites, and anyone who's worked with Clive in a creative capacity, plus all the comic book artists. There are some huge names in there. All across the board, if you started to look at his Rolodex, you'd be going and going and going.

What's really cool about Ashley is that she's not only an actor, but like Clive, she's an artist. She's a painter and has her own set of impressive works. Do either of you sit back and think, "There's a reason why Clive and Ashley's friendship and their creative partnership has endured. They have similar artistic sensibilities. Essentially, they get one another."

Phil: It's a great relationship, and both of them are very open to similar creative spirits who are unconstrained. Great creative people like Clive thrive off other great creative people. They're more than the sum of the parts. When you have that sort of working relationship ... Clive will look back over the fact that he's worked with Mick Garris for 40 years. He's worked with people like Nick Vince for 40 years. Some of those relationships endure a long time, and it's because there's a mutual respect for each person who sits in the relationship. There's no such thing as a bad idea, and all of the creativity is celebrated in all media.

Since Clive did the introduction and afterword for the book, is that the ultimate validation to have him write about what you two created?

Phil: I'm glad he doesn't hate it! [laughs] We are pleased, he's pleased, but we did it without him  over our shoulder saying, "Put this in, put that in." We're pleased he's pleased, but we're mostly pleased for ourselves that it's telling a story that has been a very important part of our lives, and his friendship is an important part of our lives. If that comes across and he's been happy enough to write about it in his afterword, we're delighted.

There's nothing more exciting than seeing a character that you never could have imagined before. Recalling first time you saw Pinhead on screen, what's your most vivid memory of that time?

Sarah: It's music because it's such a dramatic entrance, but it's carried by the score. It was a, "What is this? What am I looking at?" moment, but the way it was given drama by Christopher Young's score is what led you, that said to you, "This isn't the point where you run away, and you are scared. This is the point where you look more." There's drama here. That's my overriding overarching memory.

Phil: My first encounter with him wasn't the movie; it was in some of the press that came ahead of the movie. What I think the marketing team did a great job of was showing you something that was about to arrive rather than being coy about, 'There's a movie coming out and we're not going to give you any of the really great stills from the movie in advance." Because it was a low-budget movie that was being shot in London in a single house, it's almost like a "Three people in a house get together and bad things happen" story.

To give it a sense of importance beyond its budget [that's why they were] sharing those stills in advance. I would see them in [the magazines] Fangoria or Starburst. It really drew me in to say, "Something different is happening here." This doesn't look like some of the comedic horror films that were coming out at the same time. This one isn't tongue-in-cheek, and this one is going to push you. That striking image was my entry point into the movie to make me even more excited about what I was going to see.