Every year, horror fans and aficionados attempt to take on the daunting task of watching a horror movie for each day in the month of October. Aptly named31 Days of Horror, the challenge usually consists of viewers watching a mixture of their favorite classics, recent releases, and popular genre staples that may be new to them. In celebration of the spooky season, we at MovieWeb have curated our own suggestions for the month, providing a plethora of favorites from our contributing writers and editors. Check out our31 Days of Horrorposts every day this October, and embrace all the freaky found footage, vicious vampires, and stalking slashers you could ever hope for. Today, we kick offDay Nineof MovieWeb’s31 Days of Horrorwith the dark fantasy superhero horror,Nightbreed.
Released in 1990,Nightbreedis based onClive Barker’s novel,Cabal. The film was written and directed by Barker, following his success withHellraiser. The studio thought Barker was going to make another body horror likeHellraiser, and they did not know what to make of the gothic monster movie Barker delivered. Nightbreed is about a woman searching for answers after the death of her boyfriend at a remote cemetery that she finds is home to the Tribes of the Moon, the nightbreed, which her lover has joined the ranks of. The nightbreed are a parallel branch of hominids to humanity, living underground and only surfacing at night. They are monsters and shape-shifters with their own laws and religion.
Nightbreedhas seen a resurrection in the last ten years. The 2014 HD release ofNightbreed: The Director’s Cutintroduced the movie to a new generation of viewers, and showed old fans, who only saw the film on VHS, a crisp vision of a movie that was always more ambitious and gorgeous to behold than they were allowed to experience. This is a movie that deserves to be dug up and brought back to life.
A Dark Fantasy Romance
Nightbreedcenters around two lovers, Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer), who only goes by Boone, and Lori Winston (Anne Bobby), who are separated when Boone is turned into a member of the breed and joins them in their necropolis, Midian. In the first act, Boone is haunted by nightmares of murders, the nightbreed, and Midian. Boone has been seeing a psychiatrist, Philip Decker (David Cronenberg), who calls Boone and asks him to come to his office to talk. Decker is quickly revealed to us to be a serial killer – the kind who lay out all of their knives and swords on a table at their home as if they were a modern warlord/warrior.
Decker has acted out Boone’s nightmares of murdered families. He shows Boone photos of the victims that he tells him the police brought to him. The thread about the police coming to him is invented by Decker. He actually shows Boone his own photographs of the victims. Decker convinces Boone that he has committed these killings. The implication is rather that Boone is capable of divination. He has foreseen Decker’s murders, and Midian is calling to Boone because he belongs to Midian. Boone is, evolutionarily, something else.
Boone, believing he is a monster, flees to Midian, and there, he is bitten by a shape-shifter. Boone escapes the monster who has bitten him, but outside the necropolis, the police are waiting for him and open fire, killing Boone. But Boone does not stay dead. The bite has made him nightbreed, and he rises from the autopsy table in the morgue and returns to Midian. After Boone’s death and his body is seemingly stolen, Lori begins her own quest, following Boone’s path to the cemetery he went to before being killed. There, she discovers the beast that her lover has become.
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A Super Hero Origin of a Different Breed
The studio seemingly green-litNightbreedwithout readingCabalor the script, because they were not expecting the movie Barker gave them. The studio wanted a scary movie, and they got something they had never seen before – a dark fantasy and superhero movie where the monsters are the good guys.Nightbreedtaps into the same subtext asX-Men.The breed are a vehicle for the other. The nightbreed represent social outcasts, racial minorities, and sexual minorities. Barker is homosexual, and his stories often contain subtext about homosexuality, taboo sex, androgyny, and gender-changing.
The nightbreed are everything we dream of being, as Rachel, a breed member who can turn into steam/mist, tells Lori, “To be able to fly, to be smoke or a wolf. To know the night and live in it forever… You call us monsters, but when you dream, you dream of flying and changing and living without death.” Rachel reveals to Lori that the breed have been hunted for centuries, cast as witches and demons by their persecutors.
Midian is prophesied to fall. Boone’s coming marks the end, but Boone’s destiny is to lead the nightbreed to a new home and protect them.Nightbreedis a messiah story. In the end, Boone is given the name of Cabal by the entity known as Baphomet, who called the breed together in Midian.Nightbreedserves as an origin story for Cabal. He dies and rises from the dead, he gains new physical powers, and he is given a new name and purpose.
An Overlooked Effects Spectacle
Nightbreed’s restoration and 1080p release on Blu-ray (and recently in 4K as of August) shows something besides new scenes. The cleaned-up picture impacts this movie.Nightbreedshould have been nominated for an Oscar for effects. The plethora of monsters and original design concepts is more than any monster movie you have ever seen.
In the HD versions, we can see the details that were washed out on VHS. When Boone shape-shifts, the lines that form on his face like Polynesian facial tattoos flare open like gills.Nightbreedis a fascinating film to just study with your eyeballs. It is 33 years old, and its monster makeup looks better than most of the effects we get today. One can imagine how Boone’s transformation and splitting flesh might be rendered unimaginatively and lifelessly with CGI in a movie today.
Nightbreedintroduces us to a menagerie of monsters that are familiar but different. We have shape-shifters like Peloquin and Boone, but they are not werewolves. Rachel, a member of the breed who is sensitive to daylight and wears a cloak to shield herself, exhibits the power to turn into steam like Dracula, but she is not explicitly shown to be a vampire. Imprisoned deep in the bowels of Midian are the berserkers; mad giants with calloused, bony plates covering their faces and chests.
The berserkers are mindless and ravenous creatures that are uncontrollable monsters to the monsters of Midian. In no other horror movie are we introduced to so many completely new and original monsters. Barker and the effects team invented more new monsters in this film than we saw birthed onto the screen for the first time in all the period of black-and-white horror in the golden age. HadNightbreedbecome a franchise, it would have been a wellspring of a new generation of boogeymen to haunt us.
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A History that has Become Hollywood Legend
The confusion of the studios about how to sellNightbreedto horror audiences led 20th Century Fox and Morgan Creek to re-edit the movie, chopping off large pieces of it. It would be 20 years before a VHS was uncovered with cut material. This footage was assembled into what was titledThe Cabal Cutand shown to fans at events, and it created enough buzz for the studios to dig up the reels forNightbreedand work with Barker on the 2014 release of theDirector’s Cut, adding almost 20 minutes to the run-time.
The Cabal Cutwas given an ultra-limited release in 2017, with only 200 copies made available for purchase.The Cabal Cutruns 145 minutes, but still anUltimate Cabal Cutwith a runtime of 198 minuteshas found its way onto the internet.Nightbreed’s growing garden of alternate cuts is only rivaled byBlade Runner.
The Ultimate Cabal Cutis our best view of what the studio originally saw. This version goes dark. The studio was not just scared;they did not know how to market this movie. They had a movie with content they still will not release, and if they did, you likely would not see it on mainstream streaming services as you may with theDirector’s Cut, which is available for free on multiple platforms currently.
The reason you probably will not see this cut ofNightbreedget a wide release on Blu-ray is because the siege by the Christian militia, Sons of the Free, at the end is much longer, more violent, more everything. TheUltimate Cabal Cuthas so much shooting, that you will actually sit up and take notice that you have not seen any movies with this amount of gunfire before (Burt Gummer’s interests would be aroused).
The assault by Sons of the Free, lasts an entire hour. The body count of both nightbreed and Sons of the Free is through the roof here. Sometimes, when you see a movie that never got distribution or never turned up on the shelf at the video store, you find out why. There are just some things that are too shocking for audiences, and definitely too shocking for studios.
TheUltimate Cabal Cutincludes several significant differences from the other cuts. There is a subplot about a psychic connection between Lori and the child nightbreed she rescues – allowing Lori to see what she sees. Decker’s mask, Button Face, speaks to him. The cut uses the original voice work by the actress who plays Rachel (Catherine Chevalier), whose performance was dubbed over by a woman with a deeper voice and Eastern European accent. The most questionable scenes that remain cut from theDirector’s Cutand which are restored inThe Ultimate Cabal Cutare those involving Detective Joyce (Hugh Quarshie). Detective Joyce’s whole arc is virtually gone in both the theatrical andDirector’s Cut.
A Second Coming
In 2020, it was reported that the director ofTrick ‘r Treat,Michael Dougherty, would be directing a remakeofNightbreedas a TV series for SyFy. Thelast time we heard any mention of the projectwas in the summer of 2021 from writer Josh Stolberg (Spiral: From the Book of Saw). Since then, everyone has been quiet. The series might have been shuttered after the consecutive production obstacles of the COVID-19 pandemic and ongoing Hollywood strikes.
WhetherCabalis adapted a second time as an episodic series or a theatrical film, the project needs more diversity in casting, and it needs to sidestep the trope of the white savior. Cabal’s characterdesign by Clive Barkeris inspired byPacific Islander facial tattoos, similar to how Barker drew inspiration from body piercings for his Cenobites inHellraiser. To avoid cultural appropriation with the Polynesian motif, the character of Boone/Cabal should be played by an actor of Pacific Islander descent (possibly Jason Momoa or Cliff Curtis).
Otherwise,Nighbreedis a daring, entertaining, and imaginative film that deserves to be mentioned in the same breath asHellraiser. You can watch the movie for free on Tubi, and it’s available on prime Video, Peacock, Sling, and The Roku Channel.
Check out our unholy advent calendar of sorts for MovieWeb’s31 Days of Horrorbelow, and watch along with us:
