Clive Barker

Clive Barker (born Liverpool, 1952) is a British writer, filmmaker and visual artist who became one of the most influential names in horror and fantasy. He rose to prominence in 1980s Britain, and his work spans fiction, theatre, painting and film. Much of his wider American audience came through the screen adaptations of his stories.

The son of a painter mother and a personnel director father, he studied English and philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Before turning seriously to prose he spent years in theatre. In 1978 he co-founded The Dog Company with former schoolmates, and he wrote and directed several plays, among them The History of the Devil and Frankenstein in Love. That stage background shaped his sense of bodies and spectacle on the page.

His breakthrough came with the Books of Blood, a series of short stories published in 1984 and 1985 that stood out for their rawness and inventiveness. The Damnation Game (1985), a Faustian novel, followed, and then The Hellbound Heart (1986), a novella that became the basis of the Hellraiser franchise. Weaveworld (1987) and, above all, Imajica (1991) took him toward large-scale fantasy without abandoning horror.

Recurring traits in his work include a hidden world coexisting with our own, the role of sexuality in the supernatural, and intricate, carefully built mythologies. Barker resists being filed under horror alone, and he has said he increasingly thinks of his writing as fantasy. His stated influences include Poe, Ray Bradbury, William Blake and Jean Cocteau.

In film he moved from screenwriting to directing after being unhappy with how his material was handled, and he directed Hellraiser in 1987. The short story 'The Forbidden', from the Books of Blood, provided the basis for Candyman (1992) and its sequels. As executive producer, he took part in Gods and Monsters (1998), which won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

His legacy is twofold. He renewed British horror with a stranger, more imaginative sensibility, and his characters have spread into comics, toys and television projects. Stephen King praised him in a line that became famous. His young-adult Abarat series, begun in 2002, shows his imagination reaching younger readers too.