When I was a kid, I loved comics. Hell, I still do. For me is started reading comics strips; Garfield, Peanuts, and the like. I soon discovered Asterix and Tin Tin comics and then the amazing titles offered by Marvel and DC Comics down at the local newsagents. And my imagination exploded. Seriously, the walls needed to be clean.

There was something magical to me about the mixing of words and artwork to create a unique form of storytelling that set my young brain on fire. It was something that, even then, I knew couldn’t easily be replicated in animation or film. And while many filmmakers and studios get so very close, they still can’t quite get to that sweet spot. Even today with superhero blockbusters all but common place.

By the time I was twelve, my favourite titles where the X-Men titles published by Marvel. I devoured all of them I could, the energy filling up behind my eyes like the battery icon on your mobile phone. The Uncanny X-Men, X-Men, X-Factor, X-Force. They were my first addiction, unlike my first obsession in film. And while film was my happy place. Comic books and the world inhabited within their pages where the welcome treat for my troubled young mind.

The mutants in the Marvel universe are a stand in, in so many ways, for every discriminated minority, whether it be on account of race, religion, sex or sexual orientation, or gender identity. The characters and stories in the X-Men titles spoke to you and gave to hope that you would one day belong. Especially if Professor X and his students had your back. And for a teenager who felt he was different to everyone around him, these books were the reality I wanted to exist within.

Shunned by a society that doesn’t understand them and/or are afraid of them, they vow to protect the world from other mutants who would do harm. There was lots of grey areas and a lot of the times it was just a difference in ideologies that set people and groups at odds. They were examples of what kind of person I wanted to be. These characters taught me to look at things from a different point of view, to stand up for what you believe in and to care for others.

I never thought another story could ever do what this ongoing serial could do. That was until I stumbled on a VHS tape at my local video store with a cover that transfixed my teenage stare like an animal caught in headlights. The cover featured a group of characters in a pose that seemed to be part teen movie and part family drama setup. There was a rebel like character in the centre and he was surrounded by creatures, freaks and monsters. The title underneath said, Clive Barker’s Nightbreed. It was the same feeling in my chest as my first crush. I had to watch this.

The main character of the story is Aaron Boone, blue collar guy living and working as a mechanic in Canada with his girlfriend Lori. Boone has been dealing with a mental disorder, the specifics of which we are no privy too. But he dreams of monsters and freaks running from something and calling to him. They both frighten and fascinate him. He has been seeing a psychiatrist, Dr. Decker, to work through these dreams and the mental disorder. When we see him at the beginning of the story, he has been working with Decker for some time. Then one night he gets a phone call from Decker saying that he needs to see him.

Decker convinces Boone that the dreams that he told Decker under hypnosis are in actual fact a series of gruesome murders of whole families. He gives Boone medication to take the edge off his anxiety and tells him that after a 24 hours period he has to inform the police. The medication is not what it says on the bottle and Boone is off on a bad trip. And after seeing Lori preform at a nightclub, takes more of the drugs and is picked up walking in traffic and taken to the hospital.

Sleeping it off in a hospital bed, he is awoken by someone talking to his own reflection, and meets Narcisse, a drugged-out actor raving about a place called Midian. The same place Boone remembers from his dreams. Narcisse tells Boone about Midian, how to get there, and then literally tears most of his face off to show his ‘true self’ to Boone. The medical staff rush in as Boone leaves and runs into the police and Decker. He flees to Midian.

Midian turns out to be a huge graveyard, encircled by 15-to-20-foot stone walls, and guarded by a massive iron gate. Inside he meets two of the Nightbreed, the moonfaced Kinski and the bestial Peloquin. He is attacked, learns the truth that he didn’t kill anyone and is bitten by Peloquin, marking him. He flees again only to come out of Midian, face to face with Decker again and a whole squad of police. Decker betrays him and Boone is gunned down. Dead.

But Boone’s body goes missing from the morgue. He has been resurrected and returned to Midian, where, with the help of the recently resurrected Narcisse, becomes one of the tribes of the moon. He becomes one of the Nightbreed, led by Lylesberg, the keeper of the law.

Lori sets out to find Boone, or at least his body and who took it. She is followed by Decker who has an obsession with Midian and what lies beneath the graveyard. Boone breaks the law to save her, forces an audience with Baphomet, the maker of Midian, and Lylesberg lays down the law and banishes Boone to the natural world with Lori.

Decker kills a whole hotel’s worth of people and frames Boone. Decker, a racist police captain, Captain Eigerman, the whole backwoods gun toting police force and other gun happy locals head to Midian to kill the freaks. Boone and Lori return to help save the Breed and stop Decker and Eigerman. All hell breaks loose. Boone is the mythical hero of this story, to prophesied Cabal,  destined to save the tribes of the moon from persecution and death at the hand of human beings.

This is a gross simplification of the story. To give a full rundown of the story would take to long. I suggest you watch the film or read the book Cabal on which it is based on. But I think you get the general idea of the film. This is a story for everyone who has ever felt like ‘the other’ or has ever had sympathy for the monsters in popular fiction.  

The film is an allegory for the disenfranchised. For anyone or group of people that is, or has been seen, as outside the ‘normal’ status quo, very much like Marvel’s X-Men before it. But delivers its story through the lens of the horror genre. It is a rich and beautiful story, with great characters in Boone, Lori and the Nightbreed, and even the villains of the piece. The naturals as the Breed calls them, humans, being the true monsters of the story willing to destroy all that is different and that it doesn’t understand. And who better to deliver the story than Clive Barker. Novelist, filmmaker, Producer, playwright, actor, painter and artist.

Now Clive Barker didn’t start out as a director. He took up the task after film adaptations of his stories were made to less than stellar reviews and book office. Anyone remember Rawhead Rex? And Barker himself hated them. So much like Thanos, if you want something done, do it yourself. And he did, with 1987’s Hellraiser, based on his novella The Hellbound Heart. The independently produced horror classic gave us the Cenobites and their priest leader Pinhead and launched a franchise that is still going today.

His second go round as director was Nightbreed. Filmed in England’s Pinewood Studios, with an amazing cast which included Graig Sheffer (Boone), Ann Bobby (Lori), cult director David Cronenberg (Decker), Charles Haid (Eigerman), Hugh Quarshie (Detective Joyce), Hugh Ross (Narcisse), Malcom Smith (Ashberry), Oliver Parker (Peloquin), Nicholas Vince (Kinski), Simon Bamford (Ohnaka) and the great Doug Bradley (Lylesberg).

It also marks the first time there was major interference by a studio in a Clive Barker directed movie. In this case Morgan Creek, who didn’t understand the material. It was reedited, new scenes added, major story elements removed and repackaged as a slasher film. Something it was never intended to be. And while the theatrical release of the film was the one that I fell in love with all those years ago like many others did, the film was incomplete. And watching the theatrical cut, it does feel like it. A fact that I began to see the more I watched it. Between the film and the original novel Cabal, I knew what the was and should be, but the film was still one of my favourites.

When rumours about there being other cuts of the film out there, my interest was piqued. My obsession to see them grew and twisted in my little hellbound heart. I needed this in my life. But the Cabal cut of Nightbreed was a reedit using old VHS film transfers of the deleted material. And was poorly created even though the people who put it together had great love of the source material and Clive’s original vision. But not all was lost.

A few years ago (don’t ask me the exact details here, I can’t remember) the lost footage, the negatives, where found. Praise be to Baphomet. And filmmakers, along with Clive Barker reconstructed the film with all the lost footage and removed what the studio added. We know more about the backstory of our heroes and their relationships to each other, there is more Nightbreed, Decker somehow is creepier, Narcisse’s fate and the original ending from the novel are now restored. I loved it so much, I had to watch it a second time in the same sitting.

The edition of the film I found was the Arrow Video Blu-ray release, which has both versions of the film and an extra disc full of Special Features, complete with new awesome cover art which would not have been out of place in the video store shelves in 1990.

Like I said at the beginning, this film is very close to my heart. And while we never got the sequels I yearned for, I now have two versions of this film (along with the book Cabal) that both have become cult classics that this ostracised horror geek is so very, very thankful for. And something I have rewatched and reread more times than anything with X-Men in the title, in case you were curious.