The film pulled all the familiar Barker obsessions together into one glowering, eroticised whole and provided scenes of mayhem so shockingly realised and brutally explicit that the whole world took notice, making the film a massive commercial and critical success. His first feature film, Hellraiser, 30 years old this month, was similarly game changing. Barker took a genre that was becoming boringly familiar and injected it with heavy doses of irony, proletarian anger, humour and raw sensual threat that, while hinted at by his predecessors, had never been so openly and seductively explored. His Books Of Blood collections pointed towards a myriad of previously unexplored directions for fantastic fiction, and went on to influence – consciously and unconsciously – pretty much every practitioner that came after. When Clive Barker arrived on the horror fiction scene in the early '80s the effect was seismic and instantaneous.
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