“The dead can be heard all around these abandoned streets.”
I promise I’m trying with Clive Barker. His sense of horror might run parallel to mine, but works like The Thief of Always, The Hellbound Heart, The Damnation Game, and Imajica are formative works of literature for a lot of people I respect, so he deserves my consideration at the very least. I went into Books of Blood fully prepared to like it, hoping that an anthology film would allow me to absorb Barker in smaller doses in a way that might make him more approachable for me. Sadly, this didn’t work, because Books of Blood indicative of all the things that turn me off of Barker in the first place: paper-thin characters, an overabundance of gore, and failed attempts at metaphor and meaning. Plus, it’s not scary.
BoB’s cold open has us in a bookstore that’s closing up for the night (filmed at The Last Bookstore, in Los Angeles, if you’re ever curious to go). The old bookseller hears noises as he’s shelving books, and before long spies Bennett (Yul Vazquez, giving the film’s best performance by a mile, even if that performance is “Elias Koteas and no second thing”). Bennett is an enforcer for a loan shark, sent to kill the old man. The old man barters for his life and tells Bennett about a book supposedly worth millions: the Book of Blood, found in a desolate old town called Ravenmore (what a subtle Poe reference – this Barker guy really knows his stuff!). Bennett slashes the man’s throat and heads to Ravenmore. From here, Books of Blood unfolds as a triptych, so for the sake of convenience I’ll do the same.
“Jenna”
The first of BoB’s three loosely connected stories follows Jenna, a neurodivergent girl living in solitude with her parents. Mention is made of an incident with a boy at school and a treatment center called “The Farm,” but we get precious little in the way of details – until dinnertime. This is where we find out that Jenna suffers from misophonia, an aversion to any type of sound, which director Brannon Braga decides to depict in the most disgusting fashion possible. The chewing is so loud and intrusive that the scene becomes unbearable to watch (think of the notorious eating scene in The Return of the King and multiply it by a lot), and it’s unfortunately telling of the film’s quality as a whole. Here we are, not fifteen minutes in, and Braga resorts to one of the most tired, hackneyed tropes of the horror genre, one that all but screams that you’re in the hands on an unimaginative director who can only rely on squelching and chomping to discomfit. Anyway, Jenna overhears her mom (who, if not played by Diane Lane in an uncredited cameo, is played by an identical actress in an uncredited cameo) talk about sending her back to the Farm, so she decides to steal some money and light out for Los Angeles.
In LA she shacks up at a boarding house run by the kinds of people you only meet in Stephen King stories, an overly welcoming and solicitous retired couple named Mark and Ellie (the latter played by Freda Foh Shen, also known as the lady in the drive-thru who keeps saying “And then?” in Dude, Where’s My Car?). There’s also another boarder, Gavin, played by Kenji Harrington, who is so bad at disguising his Australian accent that he makes Sam Worthington look like Daniel Day-Lewis. It’s not worth going into the specifics of the story, because once I mentioned the kindly elderly couple, you knew immediately that they were evil. They want to entomb Jenna in the walls of their house, where they have several similar victims, which would be more of a threat if Jenna weren’t so deeply unlikable. She makes her escape, which should be a good thing, but for reasons to convoluted to go into finds her way in a car that drives off of a cliff. That’s Clive Barker in a nutshell: once you’re done with the blood and guts and bugs and eyes sewn shut, there’s nothing left to do other than throw your protagonist into a quarry.
“Miles”
BoB’s second story follows Mary Florensky, a professor (of what, we’re never told) who is famous for debunking fraudulent psychics and other mystics, which is not something you can be famous for past the 1920s (to be fair, “Miles” pointedly takes place in 1993, which is pre-Masked Magician, so there’s a remote possibility of this making sense). She’s approached by a man named Simon, who doesn’t present himself so much as a psychic; he says in plain words that the dead speak through him. Despite her misgivings and her scientific background, Mary is intrigued by the chance to speak to her dead son. Before long, she’s testing Simon’s abilities (while he’s nude, naturally) in a sterile chamber. The lights go out and when the power returns, the walls are covered in horrific, profane writing. Say, that sounds like Hellraiser!
When Simon reveals himself as a con artist, Mary vows revenge, which results in one of the few good scenes in Books of Blood. She coerces him into doing a demonstration for a group of onlookers, before feeding him to a room full of angry ghosts, she whispers, “You’ve made them very angry.” Anna Friel, as Mary, is great in this moment, brief as it is. “Miles” ends as unceremoniously as “Jenna,” once the ghosts have attacked Simon and left him covered in the same terrible writing (leaving him looking not unlike Frank from, you guessed it, Hellraiser). Once the blood and guts are over, the story is over, because to Clive Barker the blood and guts are the story.
“Bennett”
The final nail in the coffin brings back Yul Vazquez as Bennett. He and his partner, Steve, are going to Ravenmore to obtain this priceless book they’ve heard about. Bennett and Steve are by far my favorite part of this movie; they have a fun, easy chemistry, and they genuinely seem like friends. Little touches, like Steve calling Bennett “B” or apologizing for having to swerve while driving, give their relationship an easy, lived-in vibe sorely lacking elsewhere in the film. In the cold open, it’s established that Ravenmore is a pretty rough town, but what Books of Blood doesn’t prepare you for is that Ravenmore is the most haunted place in the world, apparently. Steve even explicates this, remarking to Bennett, “Everybody knows this whole neighborhood is haunted.”
It’s not worth going into too much detail about what transpires in “Bennett,” because if you’ve ever seen a movie you’ll be able to predict every second of Books of Blood. There are some occasionally interesting lines or images, and there’s a revelation about Jenna in the film’s coda that really makes you re-evaluate her. And the movie at least looks good – every cent of its budget is up there on the screen. There’s a baseline of competency behind Books of Blood, but when your source material is Clive Barker, competency can only get you so far.
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