Clive Barker 1971-1980 Experimental Horror United Kingdom

Clive Barker – Salome (1973)

adminAugust 9, 2021

0 2,084

Salome (1973)

Clive Barker wrote:

These are home movies, they are movies that were made in people’s cellars and people’s front rooms, with a lot of passion and no money. I think they are interesting little films, almost a thing prophetic about them in a sense, particularly in ‘The Forbidden’, the atmosphere of dread and anxiety that hangs over the movie and obviously the erotic elements and the nails in the nail board. These definitely prefigure what we see later in the Hellraiser movies. I think they are an interesting artefact, and I am glad they have found their way to video. Just for the average filmgoer, they wouldn’t mean a whole heap. For people who are really familiar with my whole mythology and my approach to things I think they are an interesting piece of insight in to how these images and ideas developed over the years.

I made two films which went on to be put on video: Salome, which I did when I was 18, and The Forbidden, which I did when I was 19. Both short, dark pieces. Salome is seven minutes long and shot on 8mm; The Forbidden was shot on 16mm, but we printed it in negative because we didn’t have the money to print it in positive. We designed the whole thing to be shot on negative. I was quite surprised to see how many people got something out of them on video. I mean, they’re 25 years old. God help us – 25!

[These films] are technically extremely crude and their story-lines obscure: Salome vaguely follows the biblical tale of lust, dance, martyrdom and murder, but only vaguely; The Forbidden, though derived from the Faust story, is steeped in a delirium all of its own. Notwithstanding, the images still carry a measure of raw power some two decades on, in part perhaps because the context is otherwise so unsophisticated.
[Kenneth] Anger’s films, with their mingling of homosexual signals, impenetrable occult symbolism and sheer cinematic brio mesmerized me. They formed in my mind a bridge between work I might attempt myself (they weren’t technically very polished), and the more mainstream films that I had an appetite for: horror, science-fiction, biblical epics and musicals. Here was a cinema of hallucination, lushly stylised and perversely metaphysical. What more could I want by way of a model?