Clive Barker
Clive Barker
Main page
2325315

Clive Barker

logo
Community Hub0 subscribers
What are your thoughts?
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Be the first to start a discussion here.
Clive Barker

Clive Barker (born 5 October 1952) is an English writer, filmmaker, and visual artist. He came to prominence in the 1980s with a series of short stories collectively named the Books of Blood, which established him as a leading horror author. His work has been adapted into films, notably the Hellraiser series (the first installment of which he also wrote and directed) and the Candyman series.

Barker's paintings and illustrations have been shown in galleries in the United States, and have appeared in his books. He has also created characters and series for comic books, and some of his more popular horror stories have been featured in ongoing comics series.

Barker was born in Liverpool on 5 October 1952. His mother, Joan Ruby (née Revill), was a painter and school welfare officer; his father, Leonard Barker, worked as the personnel director for an industrial relations firm. He was educated at Dovedale Primary School and Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool before joining the University of Liverpool, where he studied English and philosophy. At the age of three, he witnessed the infamous death of French skydiver Léo Valentin, who plummeted to the ground during a performance at an air show in Liverpool. He would later allude to Valentin in many of his stories.

Barker's involvement in live theatre began while still in school with productions of Voodoo and Inferno in 1967. He collaborated on six plays with Theatre of the Imagination in 1974 and two more that he was the sole writer of, A Clowns' Sodom and Day of the Dog, for The Mute Pantomime Theatre in 1976 and 1977.

Barker co-founded the avant-garde theatrical troupe The Dog Company in 1978 with former schoolmates and up-and-coming actors, many of whom would go on to become key collaborators in his film work; Doug Bradley, his long-time friend and former classmate at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, took on the now-iconic role of Pinhead in the Hellraiser series while Peter Atkins wrote the scripts for the first three Hellraiser sequels. Over the next five years Barker wrote nine plays, often serving as director, including some of his best-known stage productions, The History of The Devil, Frankenstein in Love, and The Secret Life of Cartoons.

From 1982 to 1983, he wrote Crazyface, Subtle Bodies, and Colossus for the Cockpit Youth Theatre.

His theatrical work came to a close as he shifted focus to writing the Books of Blood.

Barker is an author of horror and fantasy, although he has said that he thinks of his writing less and less as horror. He began writing early in his career, mostly in the form of short stories (collected in Books of Blood 1–6) and the Faustian novel The Damnation Game (1985). Later he moved toward modern-day fantasy and urban fantasy with horror elements in Weaveworld (1987), The Great and Secret Show (1989), the world-spanning Imajica (1991), and Sacrament (1996).

See all
User Avatar
No comments yet.