This essay details a modest exegesis on Clive Barker’s gospels of the monstrous body. Read together, Barker’s novellas The Hellbound Heart (1986) and Cabal (1988) make a twofold argument: That the monstrous body is in fact monstrous, and that this monstrous body possesses a power which can’t be co-opted by hegemonic institutions. Rather than allow themselves to be used and discarded by the state, Barker’s monsters construct an alternative society: the mutantopia. Midian, “where the monsters live,” provides a model for monstrous liberation, a way for those of us who are queer and chronically ill to reclaim the inalienable power and pleasure of those selfsame bodies. 

Barker’s god is Flesh and what it’s capable of feeling. One can’t pinion Barker: He’s slippery, like flayed skin, and as Saint Bartholomew before him, he rebukes your grasp. Author, filmmaker, screenwriter, visual artist, game writer, comic artist, and playwright. He’s a creator who maintains a seemingly uninterrupted umbilicus to the Beyond. His “scarlet gospels” are more than just novels, instead abstracted into a self-knowledge for the deviant, the aberrant, the non-cooperative queer, the un-aesthetic body.

Barker’s stories and characters, especially the Cenobites of The Hellbound Heart and the Nightbreed of Cabal, resist social, political, and economic use-value. They exist in spite of these institutions and powers, as does the monstrous body of the chronically ill, queer individual.

This body is monstrous because society deems it so; its queerness is made dangerous by a desire for something entirely outside of gender. Desire, hunger, appetite for what is maintained as inedible. Desire, hunger, appetite for what is metaphysical, what is inanimate, what is an apparatus of oblivion. For example, the Cenobites—the Hell Priests of Leviathan and entourage of LeMarchand’s Configuration, the monsters at the center of The Hellbound Heart and its various adaptations and iterations—experience a vicarious ecstasy wherever pleasure crests into unbearable anguish, and pain becomes so eviscerating that the laws of science collapse.

The Cenobite Pinhead from the Hellraiser film franchise

This is the abject eros of Barker’s stories, of his characters. It is an underlying ethos of the worlds he builds: worlds that are initially abhorrent, full of unrelenting torture and profanity. But worlds which ultimately, through their horror, reveal a tremendous amount of sovereignty, of personal power, of self-acceptance.

This turn echoes the Cenobite Modus Operandi: brutalist hedonia, or the extreme, torturous, and punishing implementation of pleasure and pain, so much so that the two are indistinguishable from each other. The French philosopher Jacques Lacan calls this sensation jouissance: a pleasure that transcends mere enjoyment to reach towards something more real. Though the novella’s emphasis is on agonizing and mortifying activity, it is the pulsing current of aliveness facilitated by Desire’s love affair with Death that calls the Cenobites. We encounter more of this jouissance-in-action in The Hellbound Heart:

As it was, they had brought incalculable suffering. They had overdosed him on sensuality, until his mind teetered on madness, then they’d initiated him into experiences that his nerves still convulsed to recall. They had called it pleasure, and perhaps they’d meant it. Perhaps not. It was impossible to know with these minds; they were so hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous. They recognized no principles of reward and punishment by which he could hope to win some respite from their tortures, nor were they touched by any appeal for mercy. He’d tried that, over the weeks and months that separated the solving of the box from today. 

There was no compassion to be had on this side of the Schism; there was only the weeping and the laughter. Tears of joy sometimes (for an hour without dread, a breath’s length even), laughter coming just as paradoxically in the face of some new horror, fashioned by the Engineer for the provision of grief. (The Hellbound Heart 23)

Here, Death and Desire are indistinguishable from one another: a mutant and chimerical specter haunting the Frank Cottons, those unnatural-desiring-machines, of the world. It’s not a reach to consider that Barker, observing the HIV and AIDS epidemic raze the earth of the queer diaspora, would be impacted by these catastrophes. The thanatophilia explored within much of his work, but especially within The Hellbound Heart, reflects that painful reality. Frank asks himself: “how could he hope to articulate the nature of the phantasms his libido had created?” only have the unreality of his appetites realized by the Priests of the Gash, those “sexless things, with their corrugated flesh.” (The Hellbound Heart 5) By surfacing the jouissance within Frank Cotton’s transfiguration by the Cenobites, however, Barker problematizes the idea that the sexual deviant “gets what they ask for” as a form of punishment. Considering Barker’s thanatophilia as simultaneously a form of jouissance and a reflection of the immense stigma surrounding the AIDS epidemic allows for the reconsideration of that thanatophilia, that abject desire, as a space for profound power and liberation. One of my favorite quotes is spoken by the Cenobite Pinhead in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), the third film of the adaptation franchise: 

There is no good, Monroe. There is no evil. There is only flesh. And the patterns to which we submit it [...] don't flee from yourself; if you have a quality be proud of it. Let it define you, whatever it is. 

The Cenobites, Hell Priests of Leviathan, from Hellraiser (1987)

This purposeful jailbreak from a Christian morality, used to perjure queer individuals, used to justify why their death-en-masse was a righteous and furious punishment from God, becomes all the more vital for one seeking to deprogram themselves of the shame they’ve consumed by societal osmosis. Frank reflects, “Yet since he had come to believe in nothing at all it was not so difficult to put the tyranny of verifiable truth out of his head.” (The Hellbound Heart 22) Through this cosmology, Desire and its dance with Death becomes a revelation: it is not good, it is not bad, it simply is Desire, and therefore it cannot be wrong because it is true. It is a true, even holy, ambition for which you should not assign shame. 

And what a remarkable, radical precept that is: The body, whose desires risk abjection, is a powerful conductor of pleasure. Freedom and power beckon us, shaking us loose from self-policing. As Michael Sean Bolton asks in “Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic”: 

[...] the source of dread in the posthuman Gothic lies not in the fear of our demise but in the uncertainty of what we will become and what will be left of us after the change [...] but what if the Other is not inhuman but posthuman? What if the “fearful unknown” is our future selves?”

Barker does not see the unknown and its terrors as something to be avoided, but rather as something to be embraced: a domain of sensation and therefore knowledge.

Beyond the event horizon of monstrosity (surviving and absorbing its infection), there arises more-than-humanness. In The Hellbound Heart, Frank, in his monstrous, viscerated state, reflects on his captivity on the other side of the Schism, under the domain of the Cenobites. The surgeries and transformations he experienced did not leave him bereft of either survival or escape: “He had been lucky. Some prisoners had departed from the world without leaving sufficient sign of themselves from which, given an adequate collision of circumstances, their bodies might be remade.”

In Cabal, Boone, our nightmare-laden protagonist fleeing from suspected murder, mutates after being bit by Peloquin, one of the monstrous Night Breed:

Peloquin and Kinski, two of the Nightbreed from the 1990 adaptation of Nightbreed, directed by Clive Barker

Yet his system, traumatized as it was, didn’t fail. There was a vigor in his muscles he’d not felt since he’d done violence to himself, a thought that repulsed him now as it had never before. Even the wound, throbbing beneath his hand, had its life, and was celebrating it. The pain had gone, replaced not by numbness but by a sensitivity that was almost erotic, tempting Boone to reach into his chest and stroke his heart. Entertained by such nonsense he let instinct guide his feet and it brought him to the double gates. The latch defeated his blood-slicked hands so he climbed, scaling the gates with an ease that brought laughter to his throat. Then he was off up toward Midian, running not for fear of pursuit but for the pleasure his limbs took in movement and his senses in speed. (Cabal 45)

Maximilian Breckwoldt’s tremendous exegesis on the relationship between Hellraiser, monstrosity, and the at-risk-body culminates in a vindication of the monstrous. He states, “Monstrosity, then, can be understood as combining distinction in itself and thus problematizing the structures that uphold society.” We recognize the queer and ill “infection-chain” (a body both infected and capable of spreading its infection) of the monstrous body is defined by its unnaturalness to the confines of society, and that subsequently, its power to disrupt social homogeneity and subjugation grows in equal proportion to the repulsion and alienation it experiences. Cabal, and its monster/mutant race, the Nightbreed, offer a vision of queer/chronically power that exists outside of those disciplinary and exploitative political apparatuses that Michel Foucault terms “biopower.”  

Cabal is often classified as fantasy over horror. The story has no scarcity of monstrosity, of the grotesque, of the effervescing demimonde that characterizes Barker’s characters, narratives, and the Nightbreed (the humanoid but chimerical and monstrous species of which our protagonist, Boone, finds himself becoming). But it is a fantasy as in the psychoanalytic sense of phantasy: the imagination endeavoring, desperately, to materialize conscious and unconscious unfulfilled desires. Simply put: a phantasy is a wish fulfillment, and that is the tender heart at the center of Cabal, replete as it may be with Shuna’s porcupine spikes or Peloquin’s bestial canines. “The un-people, the anti-tribe, humanity’s sack unpicked and sewn together again with the moon inside” engulf our protagonist Boone into the mysteries of the monsters, inviting him into the community which has taken up a cathexis within and beneath the cemetery: Midian. (Cabal 163) Again, Desire and Death flirt with each other, but one thing is made very clear: The “natural world” has no space for the monster within it. The world of the monster, the mutant, the chronically-ill queer body, is an invisible world.

In Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, he proposes the term “biopower” to communicate, “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.” Biopower, in other words, uses the apparatuses of the states to harness the productive and generative capabilities of the human body. It stands to reason that a body which is unproductive, considered incapable of generating value for the mechanisms of power, would be a body without value, a body which is powerless. This “anatomo-politics of the human body” is represented in all milieus, from the military to medical institutions and academia. (Foucault 139) The body is a machine. A machine which does not cooperate is decommissioned, is disassembled, is left to rot in a warehouse, or is scrapped for parts.

In addition to the anatomo-politics of the individual body, Foucault theorizes a “bio-politics of the population,” which operates on people, “not to the extent that they are nothing more than their individual bodies, but to the extent that they form, on the contrary, a global mass that is affected by overall processes characteristic of birth, death, production, illness, and so on.” (Foucault 139) The bio-politics of the population focuses upon what Cisney and Moyar call, in Biopower: Foucault and Beyond, a “species-body.” Species-bodies that are prone to higher rates of illness, disease, poverty, and other interstices—such as those found within marginalized populations—are less able to generate what the “mechanisms of power” require. The anatomo-politics of the human body and the bio-politics of the population are both sites for  disciplinary measures of biopower. Cisney and Moyar continue:

It is for this reason that sexuality, situated at the juncture of these two domains, becomes such a politicized issue in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (and, arguably, the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as well). It is something of a nexus in which these two, the health of the body and the health of society, discipline and regulation, fuse into one... 

The literary motif of the mutant or monster represents the subversion of biopower by problematizing both the anatomo-politics of the human body and the bio-politics of the population. The mutant is abjured when it does not create value within the mechanised and disciplinary regimes of biopower that society enforces; when the mutant rebels, their innate and inalienable anatomo-power is freed up to be assimilated into their own mutant populus, as opposed to governmental institutions. 

The underground city of Midian, from Nightbreed (1990)

Beneath the sprawling, desolate expanse of a neglected cemetery and its cobwebbed mausoleums, a city of infinite passageways and subterranean textures exists: Midian, the city of monsters beneath the soil. Here, those who cannot exist amongst the “normals” have co-created an imperfect but sacred sanctuary. The phantasy of Midian is a community of the abjured Other, a functioning tribe of the exiled, co-creating and co-operating as a society unto themselves with unique positions contingent upon their specific mutations. It privileges the churning of power from the inside, a place where what is aberrant is recognized as essential skill instead of liability to production. Midian, “where the monsters live,” can therefore be read as a pseudo-topia, or what I have called a mutantopia: a close approximation of utopia for the monstrous body. Midian is a model for co-opting and liberating energy from the extortion-machines harnessing biopower, and restoring it to the mutant-class. 

Midian is not ideal: the Monsters are always on the run from the “naturals”; they exist in the places where the “naturals” do not care to haunt. And even then, hunted and prosecuted and in pursuit of freedom, they move ever onwards towards an incongruous horizon, a point on the map which only exists when the Monsters create it, but never as a thing-in-itself.

As we queer, chronically ill individuals and our communities consider the political trajectory various nations are so publicly turning in, with waves of unethical punitive and punishing laws impacting transgender people, reproductive rights, genocide, human trafficking under the guise of deportation: we are witnessing our de facto negative-valuation by the state. Each consecutive executive order signed by the US administration re-enforces our “unworthiness of life.” The more the disciplinary mechanisms seek to consolidate and reify biopower, the more the monstrous body is not just figured as expendable, but also meriting persecution and eventual extinction. 

My most earnest hope for the future of monstrous bodies is that, in the face of greater alienation and oppression, the phantasy of Midian becomes a phenomenal thing, and not just a numinous utopia in the monstrous collective imagination. May we build our refuge in the worlds which hide in plain sight, may what is unnatural about us become a benediction of our strength, and may our subversion of biopower become a weapon against the ruling class. “When the sun goes out and there’s only night, we’ll live on the earth. It’ll be ours,” Barker writes in Cabal. (Cabal 89) May we recognize the worlds, the ontological maps, and the ways-of-being which the philosopher-priest Clive Barker has revealed for us, and may we follow them to our freedom. 

Bibliography 

Barker, Clive. The Hellbound Heart. USA: Dark Harvest, 1986. (Accessed online)

Barker, Clive. Cabal. USA: William Collins and Sons, 1989. 

Bolton, Micheal Sean. “Monstrous Machinery: Defining Posthuman Gothic.” Aeternum: The Journal of Contemporary Gothic Studies, 2014.

Breckwoldt, Maximilian. “Transforming the AIDS Monster: Tearing Apart the Human(E) in Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II Through Gothic Becoming-withs.” Cine-Excess 6 (January 2025). 

Cisney, Vernon W., and Nicolae Morar. Biopower: Foucault and Beyond. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. Volume 1, an Introduction. . Translated by Robert J. Hurley. Vintage Books Edition. New York: Vintage, 1978. 

Hickox, Anthony, dir. Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. 1992, Miramax.

Editor: Anneke Schwob.

Copy Editor: Copy Editing Department.