Nightbreed movie has become a cult classic, but upon release, a misguided marketing strategy helped sink it at the box office. Barker is of course a giant figure in horror genre history, but it's a bit hard to quantify whether his long, fairly prolific literary career or his short but impactful film career made a bigger overall impact. While his writing should probably win out, at the same time, Barker gave the world the Hellraiser movie franchise, one of the most famous in the world, and statistically, more people watch movies than read novels.
That too actually curves back toward Barker's writing though, as Hellraiser was based on a novella called The Hellbound Heart. Like all three of Barker's directorial efforts, 1990's Nightbreed was also based on an existing work, that being a novella called Cabal. In an odd bit of trivia, Barker actually ended up changing the names of all three of the books he adapted as writer/director, with 1995's Lord of Illusions being based on a story titled The Last Illusion.
Nightbreed took a long time to catch on with horror fans, even Barker diehards, as the movie changed quite a bit about the book. It also took a financial nosedive at time of release, which can't be chalked up entirely to bad marketing, but it certainly didn't help.
Why Nightbreed's Marketing Hurt The Movie's Chances At Success
The biggest opponent of how Nightbreed was marketed is, unsurprisingly, Clive Barker himself. In an interview with Fangoria back around when the film was released, Barker lamented the fact that the marketing department at distributor 20th Century Fox had no idea what to do with it. Barker tends to write stories that are hard to neatly classify under a genre heading, and Nightbreed is no different, blending horror trappings with dark fantasy. The marketing team saw this as a hurdle to overcome, with the original trailer shown in theaters being entirely unrepresentative of the material.
Instead of the complex tale of Midian's monsters, Boone's journey into their ranks, and their collective struggle against the prejudice and fear of man, the original trailer reduced Nightbreed to what appears to be a standard slasher film with David Cronenberg's Dr. Decker as the slasher. It gives no indication that the Nightbreed are the good guys, shows no real clear footage of the fantastical monsters, and generally provides no context whatsoever for the characters or plot. It just looks like the standard late 80s-early 90s Hollywood horror movie, and quite frankly, utterly forgettable.
Thankfully, Nightbreed did eventually find its audience on home video, and another injustice was rectified when Barker was given the opportunity to restore his original director's cut for Blu-Ray. The suits at producer Morgan Creek had done a number on the original edit, another reason the movie wasn't an instant success. Finally, Nightbreed will soon get a second chance to become a franchise via a TV show coming to Syfy. It took decades, but Midian is getting its due.
