It’s close to midnight and the voice down the phone line from Los Angeles is hoarse and faint but full of warmth. “My husband and I don’t embrace now,” says Clive Barker. “We walk around with masks on. We’re both nervous and anxious.” 

Barker, the wild child of Eighties British horror, is seeing out the coronavirus in his mansion high in the Hollywood hills. He’s still recovering from the toxic shock that sent him into a coma in 2012, which is why he and his husband, Roman, must take every precaution. And yet, if understandably cautious about his health, he is upbeat too. 

“It feels as though after illness and silence I’m finally back… back where I was,” he says, his accent hovering somewhere between Beverly Hills and his hometown of Liverpool. “It’s been a tough time. But I’m well now. And strong now. And writing like crazy. 

Before his accident Barker, 68, was horror’s ultimate bad boy. Many horror writers, even doyens such as Stephen King, have a weakness for the schlocky and the quaint. They are, in their own ways, asking us to gather around the campfire, where ghost stories will be shared. 

Barker isn’t interested in spooky tales. He is punk to his core and greatest hits such as the Hellbound Heart (adapted into Hellraiser) and the Books of Blood ripple with taboo imagery. 

His goal is not to gently unsettle or bring on cosy, pre-bedtime chills. He wants to make you sit bolt upright and, occasionally, cause your stomach to clench. In the Eighties his work was categorised as its own genre of “Splatterpunk” – defined as “hyper-intensive horror with no limits”. Then and now a transgressive electricity runs through his writing. 

That isn’t all he is about, to be sure. Barker has penned magical children’s books (The Thief of Always, The Books of Abarat) and urban fantasy (Weaveworld). Indeed, it is possible to be a fan of Barker and completely skip the gruesome bits. 

Still, it’s the bloody stuff that turns people on. In the movie Candyman, which began as Barker’s short story The Forbidden, for instance, an urban legend with a hook hand disembowels his victims while breathing sweet nothings in their ears. The Scarlet Gospels, his bestseller from 2015, opens with his famous “Pinhead” villain disembowelling, at great length, a gathering of sorcerers.

 “His face was stripped of skin and the three deeply embedded hooks in his chest and stomach pulled out heart, lungs and entrails all at once,” goes one passage. Barker at full gory gush is like Maradona bearing down on goal. Nobody else does it quite like him. 

Barker has been comfortably out since his late teens. Nonetheless, he has encountered prejudice in his career. He recalls editors asking him to turn queer characters straight. This happened early on, with his 1984 short story In the Hills the Cities, about a gay couple from England who stumble upon ancient horrors in Yugoslavia. But also at his commercial peak and the 1995 novel Sacrament. 

“I’m a gay man who made creations of which my family did not approve,” he says. “Creations in drawing form and writing form that were not looked upon kindly by my father, or my mother. And then when I got into publishing books I found there was a prejudice. I was told, especially with In the Hills the Cities, 'do not publish this –  if you publish this you’ll destroy everything you have'. That was simply not true.”

He was even more affronted over the feedback on Sacrament, about a gay wildlife photographer documenting animals facing extinction (perhaps even more relevant today than 25 years ago). By 1995 Barker had sold millions of novels and was arguably the world’s best known horror writer after Stephen King. And still, his publishers pushed back. They wanted Barker to turn hero Will’s lovers from male to female. 

“Just make it straight. It will be fine. You won’t need to give us the money back. We’ll publish it. Just change the pronouns. Where you see a 'he', put a 'she'”.  That’s bollocks. It is deeply demeaning. It takes me two years to write a book. You don’t think that I didn’t think, every day that I wrote, about what I was doing there? When a publisher comes along and tells you you can’t tell that story it is deeply painful. It angered me greatly. 

“They were very afraid that coming out or speaking positively about homosexuality would be destructive to my career,” he continues. “Which is balls. Absolutely balls.”

He has strong options, perhaps unsurprisingly, on JK Rowling and her tweets about transgender people. “Obviously I admire her work,” says Barker.  “I just don’t believe, in the time that we are in at the moment, with so much dissension and hatred in the world, that she needs to add to it.” 

“There’s a lot of pain amongst the transgender people that I know,” he continues. “They have a lot of issues in the world as it is, without a famous author opining on the subject. It just seems redundant. It just seems unkind. Does that sound wussy? Unkind. 

“It really just seems redundant for a woman as successful, as validated in the world, as Ms Rowling, to be negative, to be disruptive if you will, to a very beaten up subculture. These are human beings. She has no right to opine, I think, upon the lives of human beings that she does not know.” 

"I feel very protective of people who are on the edge of our culture as gay people still are. And certainly transgender people are on the edge of our culture. And here you have one of the most successful people in the frigging world – Ms Rowling. Going after a very emotionally vulnerable portion of our culture. It just seems unnecessary and unfair.” 

Barker may have survived his 2020 coma. Yet he hints darkly that his career nearly didn’t make it. By the time he recovered he was aghast at the state in which his affairs had been left. Barker talks, slightly mysteriously but with real anger, of betrayal, of people he trusted taking advantage.

“By and large artists are cursed by parasites,” he says. “And I’ve had my share of parasites, believe me…When I came out of that coma, I had a lot that I owned removed. And by my friends… by people I [trusted].  Everything I had, had been taken. “

He plans on publishing a number of new books over the next year or so, including a new anthology, a novella and a collection of poetry. There will also be a full novel, Deep Hill. He describes it as his “darkest” since Books of Blood, the thrillingly grotesque anthology that forged his reputation in the Eighties as essentially the Martin Amis of no-limits body horror. 

A blitz of TV movie adaptations and spinoffs is also in the works. The most prominent will be a new, Jordan Peele-scripted Candyman film (its release now pushed back to August 2021) and an HBO reboot of Hellraiser directed by David Gordon Green (Halloween).

Already out in the world is a feature length-retelling of Books of Blood. Co-written with Brannon Braga, who has worked on Star Trek and Mission Impossible: 2, it recently debuted on the Hulu streaming service in the US (a UK release has yet to be announced). 

This new Books of  Blood is a remix rather than a straight adaptation of the source material. It features two new stories and one loosely based on a pre-existing tale. The cast includes Britt Robertson and Anna Friel as a psychologist struggling to come to terms with the death from leukaemia of her seven year-old son. 

“If we were going to do this I wanted to reinvent it,” says Barker. “Doing something that’s been done before is a very safe way to do things. And though it may be safe, by god it’s boring.”

But it's Deep Hill, currently going through its final draft, that he’s most excited about. “It’s very dark. It’s set in a small town in Pennsylvania, which has been subjected to a strange invasion. This is a dark, loopy twisted narrative with a lot of rage in it about the way our culture is in decay. And about fighting back against that decay – intellectual, moral, creative deal. We have to stand up. Next time we talk, we’ll know who is President.”

Barker is clearly no fan of Donald Trump. And with America and the world at large more divided than at any time in living memory, he is often asked if horror fiction has been rendered redundant. Hatred and insanity on social media, wildfires sweeping California, Coronavirus. As a horror writer isn’t there a danger he might be out of a job? 

“I’ve been asked that question since I first published,” he says. “Why would you want to add to this [the sum total of terror in the world]? My answer is because we want it.”

He feels strongly that horror isn’t just about wallowing in darkness and that it can be optimistic. His work is ultimately a celebration of perseverance in the face of evil. That’s true of even gristly pieces such as Hellraiser, the 1987 movie that, even more than his six collections of Books of Blood stories, established his reputation. 

Hellraiser is about a society of masochistic demons, the Cenobites, who dwell in the liminal zone between pleasure and pain. They are summoned via a mystical puzzle box, The Lament Configuration  – a sort of abominable Rubik’s Cube. 

The best known Cenobite is Pinhead, a human pin-cushion with an air of Shakespearean sadness. “Pinhead”, it should be pointed out, is a name bestowed by fans: Barker prefers to refer to him as the “Hell Priest”. 

Whatever we are to call him, he is a singular creation. Doug Bradley, a friend of Barker’s since his days writing for the stage in the Seventies, portrayed the character as Laurence Olivier in fetish-gear. He might be here to tear your soul apart. But he goes about it with immaculate politeness.

“There were two sources for Hellraiser,” says Barker “The first was punk, obviously. At that time, punk was piercing everybody. The other was S&M culture. I wrote it in 1984 and at that time S&M had not come out of the closet. That culture was not really talked about.”

Hellraiser’s blend of high tragedy and bone-and-sinew horror was instantly iconic. The movie earned $14 million on a budget of just $90,000. It also spawned nine sequels (of admittedly hugely varying quality). And now Barker is working with US network HBO on a series-length sequel to the original film. 

He has fond memories of flying by the seat of his trousers directing Hellraiser in a dilapidated house in north London. Not that there weren't moments of stress. He recalls his unease when he learned executives from New World Pictures were flying to the UK to keep tabs on him. 

“My heart sank,” he says. “I’m a fairly polite bloke. I’m not confrontational. I realised I had a fight on my hands. They were coming over. Without any shadow of a doubt – once they came over they wanted to control what I was doing. 

“Yes Hellraiser was a cheap picture. But it ended up making a lot of money. Once they realised there was that possibility –  the last thing they wanted was to allow me screw it up. The only way they could do that was by being there.”

The solution that his cinematographer Robin Vidgeon came up with was to have the executives attend one of the shoot’s goriest sequences.

“They’d all arrived in their new Burberry. Robin said, “let’s get really bloody”. We shot a scene that was not planned to be shot, where we throw blood everywhere. It was the “hammer murders”. The set was tiny – 12 x 10. It was something we built – we had to have Frank’s corpse come up from the floor. We had three guys over from New World. 

“And we said, “why don’t you just stand in that corner there? We’ll try and keep the blood off you. They didn’t last very long. They were more concerned about their Burberry. That was a piece of trickery Robin had seen other directors play.” 

Five years later, Hellraiser was arguably eclipsed by Candyman. The film, directed by Bernard Rose, is about a hook-handed urban legend on the rampage in the Chicago projects. It was adapted from Barker’s The Forbidden, set in a Liverpool flat complex. One of the inspirations is a story Barker’s Belfast-born grandmother told him when he was five about a man who hung around public toilets cutting stranger’s genitals off. 

 “She had no compunction about sharing it with me,” he says. “It is a very Liverpool story. There are things about England, about the texture, the language, the behaviour, which got lost when the Candyman movies went to America. Something new was gained. But I always feel The Forbidden is the essence of the narrative. Because it goes back to my own childhood.”