THIRTEEN FOR HALLOWEEN: 2020 THE SON OF CELLULOID

As an example of how floridly bizarre Clive Barker's imagination is, you need look no further than the eponymous Son of Celluloid, from The Books of Blood.


Conceptually alone, the creature is strange beyond the most Jungian nightmares of most horror writers. Like most of Barker's monsters, it begins with humanity, its absurdity lent a certain wry wit and wider cultural resonance by its -extremely- humble origins:


Following a flight from police, wounded and bleeding, a convict finds himself trapped in the crawlspace behind a cinema's screen and the outside world. Sealed in, bleeding, unable to call out for help, he dies and is forgotten, never found.


Unbeknownst to the man himself, he wasn't terribly far from death anyway; a cancer was slowly growing in his body, a cancer which outlasts him, surviving where he does not, absorbing the raw emotion and inspirations that audiences project upon the cinema screen behind which it swells and gestates, becoming not only sentient, not only animate, but a thing of joyous and murderous miracles.


Freed from its parent flesh, it exhibits the miraculous capacity to make the dreams it has absorbed momentary realities, becoming silver-screen heroes and villains and monsters and lovers, even temporarily altering reality around itself to reflect those illusionary backdrops.


This is the manner in which it stalks and inveigles its victims; by granting them an instant of cinematic fantasy, even of paradise, before it plunges its tendrils through their eyes, feeding on the fantasies that spark in their brains, the stuff of human passion and imagination now all that can sustain it.


The Son of Celluloid establishes so many of the themes that will become common to Barker's creations in the years to follow; its sickly, human origins and gestation are redolent of the same process Frank Cotton suffers during his escape from The Cenobites in both Hellraiser and The Hellbound Heart.


Likewise, its capacity to give people dreams and fantasies that are, ultimately, ephemeral and instruments of predatory manipulation, will recur again and again in various stories, most notably in the magical jacket of salesman Shadwell in the novel Weaveworld.


As for The Son itself, it is an example of a monster that Barker himself clearly adores; a creature that is rendered in poetic, almost romantic terms, the fantasies it provides humanity, the murderous embraces it shares with them, rendered with the particularity and passion of love scenes. There is an intimacy and engagement to the act that both Barker and the Son itself understand, that is far more than mere murder or a predator seeking out prey.


The Son, like many of the monsters in The Books of Blood, is a dreaming entity, that seeks to understand its place in the world beyond what has been proscribed for it. In that, it is not dissimilar from the humans it simultaneously indulges and preys upon. Like many of Barker's antagonists and monstrosities, it is an eloquent and garrulous monster, that enjoys pleading the case for its existence to those it encounters, speaking to them through illusionary lips about its condition, their own; how they are reflections of one another, for better or worse.


A meta-textual entity, it is a creature born of stories, sustained by stories, that gives stories back to those it has been fostered and sustained by. It is keenly aware of the poetry of its existence, what its existence means with reference to the story in which it occurs. This lends the entity a unique flare of wry wit, despite its grotesquery and the sheer violence of its intimacies, that so many contemporaries of the era lacked.


Here we also see the beginnings of an extremely complex, ambivalent relationship Barker has with the medium of cinema; simultaneously enraptured by its power to move and bespell yet also supremely cynical regarding the processes and systems of its production, the casting of the very soul of cinema itself as a sentient, human cancer has more than a little satire about it, as does the fact that it is, ultimately, a parasitic, vampiric entity that utilises the fantasies it conjures to brutally feed upon those it enraptures. These themes would only escalate as Barker himself became enmeshed in those self-same cancerous systems later in his life, culminating in the novel Coldheart Canyon, which is the man's loving but trenchant satire on Hollywood and its entire industry.


Like so much in The Books of Blood, The Son of Celluloid is a creature of thematic infancy; the seed of concerns that Barker would elaborate on much more fulsomely later in his career. Even so, the entity stands apart from most in Barker's bestiaries as a truly unique creation, the like of which could so easily have been absurd to the point of risibility, but which Barker treats with sufficient tenderness and care as to be not only credible, but strangely compelling; as fascinating as it is horrific, as miraculous as it is grotesque.