"I needed a hero I could sleep with," rasps Clive Barker, icon of the horror genre, about his first foray into computer games. "So we came up with this guy – a big guy, nice head of hair, goatee."
Then, with a hint of mischief in his eye, he adds, "You know, he looks kind of like you."
Barker has spent more than two decades pushing people's buttons through a seemingly endless torrent of books, movies, plays and paintings that test the limits of the gruesome, the erotic and the fantastical. Now, he's bringing his provocateur's instincts to bear in the production – and promotion – of "Clive Barker's Undying," the just-released gothic shoot-em-up PC game.
Barker discovered early on – while growing up in the bombed-out, economically morose remnants of 1950s Liverpool – that he had a knack for goading people on.
"Kids access this kind of stuff early on," he explains. "Maybe I'm not the star athlete, but with a ghost story, I can scare the f*ck out of every kid. It's empowering."
"I certainly knew from an early age ... how to tell stories; how to create pictures in other people's heads," Barker writes in The Essential Clive Barker, a compilation.
That imagination became intertwined with the fright trade as he watched one of Liverpool's few diversions for children – the violent "Punch and Judy" puppet plays.
"When a crocodile came, (Punch) beat it savagely, when a policeman came, he hung him, and when Death came for him, he killed Death. It was an incredibly vivid experience for me – one that has always stayed with me," Barker said.
Barker's own puppet plays were no less brutal. His efforts were "really grisly ones, with the ubiquitous skeleton," designed to get a rise out of his mates.
Barker's productions got bolder as he grew older, and real actors replaced the puppets in his dramas. One play from the early 1970s, Frankenstein in Love, has a memorably gut-wrenching moment, when a dark Cardinal recounts his wicked ways:
"It pleased me, watching him silence their complaints, sluice out their minds with agonies. I'd put my finger, sometimes, into their hotheads, buried in thought up to the knuckle, and see their lives go out a little further with each prod."
As he progressed into paintings, short stories, novels, and eventually movies, Barker continued to provoke, continually asking, "Am I getting to people? Stirring them up?"
By the mid-1980s, the answer was obviously yes. His intricately crafted, brutally gory short stories, The Books of Blood, led Stephen King to call him "the future of horror." His 1987 fantasy novel hit Weaveworld and the cruel film Hellraiser ("A little family saga with the devil thrown in," he cracks) helped him break into the big time. Within a few years, his thriller book for kids, The Thief of Always, was selling in the millions. Even his paintings came into demand.
But Barker's knack for finding his audience's pressure points was sorely tested in his first experience in gaming. "Undying" was already well underway when Barker joined the project in early 1999.
Over the next 18 months, he'd make sketches and suggestions, looking for ways to implant emotional energy into an otherwise standard-issue shooter.
"Before, the hero was this bald, tattooed sort of wrestler ('rassler,' he pronounces it). He looked like a bouncer from an S&M club," – cool-looking, but not exactly empathic, Barker explains.
Similarly, Barker helped shift the game's final villain from a gigantic monster – "just about the least scary thing in the world," he quips – to a mother-type figure that would have some connection to the player, and to the game's larger story.
Barker also tried to inject his taste for sexual imagery into the game. For example, his idea of overcoming the "mother" by shooting her in the birth canal was nixed. But others remained, like the one where a monster kills the hero by "clamping down on his c*ck and b*lls," Barker grins as puffs at the stub of his cigar.
"Undying" staffers, for the most part, were appreciative of the suggestions. And they understood the "fiscal necessity," as Barker puts it, of having a star involved.
Gaming firms have made sporadic efforts in recent years to enhance sales through celebrity association. Sports games are the most frequently endorsed – think "Tiger Woods PGA Tour," "Madden NFL," and the like. But publishers have also been trying to make the game designers themselves into the celebrities, with titles like "American McGee's Alice" and "Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri."
Barker's place in "Undying" seems to lie somewhere between muse and marketer. It's ironic that he's involved with a computer game at all, because Barker is a self-admitted Luddite who writes his books in longhand. "We had to cart a computer up to his place in Beverly Hills" in order to run a demo, recalls Dave Nash, one of "Undying's" level designers.
The dalliance with technology is only one in an array of changes Barker's been making lately. He's also steadily shifting away from the bloodbaths that made him famous. He's just turned in a novel about Hollywood. Last year, he inked an $8 million deal with Disney – based solely on 250 of Barker's oil paintings – for a Harry Potteresque series of young adult books.
"Maybe it's because my father died a few years ago. Maybe it's because I'm now 48. But I'm not content with 'boo' anymore," he says. "I've got deeper journeys to take. Metaphysical journeys. Journeys to see Christ. Shaman journeys. It's what I've been elected by God to do."
