Last Updated on February 20, 2025 by Angel Melanson
By John DeVore, guest contributor
I recently spent hours in my mom's garage frantically searching for my secret journal, the one I wrote in as a teenager – pages and pages of lurid howlings scratched out in cursive.
I was visiting her from New York. As I slept in the guest room the first night, I dreamt the journal whispered to me, so I got up and followed the voice. This was not the house I grew up in, but it is where she and my dad moved to when he got sick and they decided to save some money.
For years, she had begged me to go through my belongings—junk she called it—while insisting she wasn't running a self-storage company. Fair enough. So I finally obliged her and started opening old boxes that had traveled from Northern Virginia to Austin, Texas, decades ago. Boxes I had hastily sealed with duct tape and abandoned. In those boxes were artifacts from my childhood: precious treasures. Toys, comic books, folded notes passed to me during class from High School sweethearts.
And notebooks. Dozens of notebooks: spiral, composition, legal pads. But I couldn't find the secret one dedicated to Nightbreed – erotic fantasies about supernatural misfits with crescent-moon-faces and forked tongues, tattooed devils smiling in the shadows. That journal was crammed with short stories, poems, and magick spells – a sad straight boy grimoire.
All inspired by a movie no one saw save for me. Nightbreed. Rated “R.”
In my stories, I am infected by Nightbreed, and I transform into a living shadow with fangs and claws, and tentacles. A creature that my mom would not recognize, an unholy beast who does what he wants. These stories were full of sex – orgies and orgasms and monsters fucking monsters. The kind of pornography only a virgin-raised Catholic could write – humid and ridiculous, threesomes with porcupine women and men with blue skin and horns.
One of the Nightbreed, a naked beauty, could turn into smoke, and I loved her.
I remember writing about biting my best friend, Fred, on the neck, not a vampire's kiss but a werewolf's chomp, I left a jagged, bloody hole, and he died. He died and came back to life as Nightbreed, and he joined me down in Midian, a mythical refuge for half-naked she-goblins and pig-faced abominations and other outcasts hidden deep underneath a graveyard. And the parties in Midian go all night because it's always night there, dark and warm and welcoming.
Into that journal went my secrets. My very breath. I confessed my sins to Baphomet, leader of Nightbreed, an old god. I made midnight vows to love recklessly as hormones oozed through my body like blood running down the edge of a knife. I turned my fears and desires into lurid fiction. I was angry and lonely, and I’d spend hours conjuring an underworld that embraced and tongue-kissed, chubby, awkward things like me instead of judging and mocking them. I never let anyone read those stories. I would have burst into flame if anyone had.
I had scrawled DO NOT READ on the journal’s cover—I know that—a foolproof security measure. Or so I thought at the time. I worried that my mom had, absentmindedly, donated the box with my journals to a thrift store and others marked XMAS DECORATIONS and MUGS. I imagined some nice, bespectacled Texan lady opening a composition book marked DO NOT READ and then gasping – who could write such smut?
***
Nightbreed was a box-office bomb, which was not my fault. I did my part. The movie was horror writer Clive Barker's highly-anticipated follow-up to his directorial debut, 1987's Hellraiser, an instant blood-soaked classic about S&M demons who live to punish wicked mortals.
I had not seen Hellraiser, but I went three times to see Nightbreed at the same filthy shopping mall movie theater. None of my friends wanted to see Nightbreed with me, so I went alone, just me and a bag of Twizzlers. Nightbreed was either too weird or not weird enough for popular consumption.
But I thought it was perfect—a big-budget creature feature about a family of freaks fighting an army of bigots. The movie had everything a fifteen-year-old me could want: naked boobs, arterial spray, fallen angels.
For months, I had seen advertisements for Barker's fantasy-horror on the back covers of my comic books, like DC's Swamp Thing and The Uncanny X-Men, Marvel's hit series about super-powered rejects.
The ad featured actor Craig Sheffer in his first starring role a few years before he’d get upstaged by a young Brad Pitt in the Robert Redford-directed period drama A River Runs Through It. The ad featured Sheffer wearing a leather jacket, a white T-shirt, and jeans, hands on hips, surrounded by Nightbreed, who all looked like club kids from a nightmare dimension.
I stared at the cover. Studied it. One looked like a dragon, another like a zombie version of the lead singer of The Pixies. They all looked cool. Supermodels from hell. Sexy. Scary. I was a goth-curious theatre kid who read comic books with the words “suggested for mature readers” printed on the cover because while I wasn't a mature reader and didn't really know what that meant, I was still desperate to be a mature reader. And Nightbreed looked mature.
I'd like to think the world was simpler back then, but that's the first sign of middle age. The beginning of the last decade of the 20th Century wasn’t much different from the preceding ten years: the country was ruled by a mighty wave of right-wing optimism. It was a dark time for outsiders and a non-stop Fourth of July cookout for those in power. One of the signs of youth is you're convinced the world is divided into suck-ups and underdogs, and I was no phony.
As far as I was concerned, at that moment, you were either Nightbreed or one of the ‘naturals,’ which is what they called mortals. I did not want to be natural. Oh, I was certain I was unnatural.
Or, at least, I hoped I was.
I was alone in my fandom – none of my friends had wanted to see Nightbreed. I did my best to spread the good word, but not one teen was interested, not even Fred.
Is Nightbreed a good movie? Depends on who you’re asking. A critic? There’s plenty to dislike, I suppose. The movie is melodramatic, but who isn't melodramatic? I was. I used to scribble Nightbreed over and over in the margins of my proper school journals as if doing so would summon a friendly succubus. Danny Elfman's score is derivative and overwrought – it's not his best. And some of the Nightbreed looked like their costumes were bought off the discount rack of a Halloween store.
So I get it. I get it now and then. But I still occasionally rewatch Nightbreed and find Barker’s ambitions inspiring. I was a prude, a suburban virgin, and he knew I was out there, sitting alone in the dark, sucking on candy-red licorice. His Nightbreed crawled towards me on all fours, slid down my throat, and wore my skin like a tracksuit.
So, yes, it’s a good movie, especially paired with a bag of Twizzlers. Possibly the greatest movie ever made. For perverts only.
In Nightbreed, Sheffer plays a retro-50s rebel without a cause named Boone, who dreams about a place called Midian, a city where monsters are welcomed and absolved of their sins. Boone has a girlfriend, a manic pixie rock and roller played by Anne Bobby, and a psychotherapist – the worst psychotherapist in the world. Like most classic horror movies, Barker asks, “Who is the real monster?” It's man, but in Nightbreed, specifically, it's also psychotherapists.
Director David Cronenberg stars as Boone's shrink, a sophisticated, smooth-talking urbanite who is also a serial killer. Cronenberg gives one of the most underrated performances in horror canon as Dr. Decker, who looks like an insufferable yuppie except when he's murdering innocent people while wearing a hideous homemade mask that resembles Batman's nemesis The Scarecrow.
Decker's big plan is to frame Boone for his grisly murders, and he would have gotten away with it had he not picked the chosen one. And Boone is chosen, but first, he's bitten and then shot to death by cops.
Thankfully, Nightbreed are undead and come for you in your dreams. Boone is reborn and searches for Midian, which is exactly where you'd imagine such a place: rural Canada. Meanwhile, his girlfriend suspects her boo isn't a ghost. She’s got guts and hunts down Boone’s new bogeymen besties. The movie climaxes with a tragic fight between rednecks and cops and super-powered Nightbreed. Unstoppable death ogres are involved.
I swooned as Boone and his newfound family fought desperately for their survival. I wanted to be Nightbreed, to be brooding and sensual and dangerous. I wanted to shapeshift like them, to rearrange my flesh at will. I wanted to melt away in the darkness, to escape who I was and to dance past midnight. I remember these words I wrote in my secret journal in black ink like black blood – an invocation, a wish. “I am Nightbreed.”
I suppose she could have thrown my secret journal away in the trash – she also admitted boxes had a way of disappearing from her garage. But I like to imagine they came in the night on cloven hooves and whispered in my ear, a tendril of smoke sneaking under garage doors and stealing my journal, then, later, in Midian, a single talon flipping pages as red lizard eyes read the promises I made to myself so long ago by moonlight.
