This is the manner in which it stalks and inveigles its victims by granting them an instant of cinematic fantasy, even of paradise, before it plunges its tendrils through their eyes, feeding on the fantasies that spark in their brains, the stuff of human passion and imagination now all that can sustain it.

Unbeknownst to the man himself, he wasn't terribly far from death anyway a cancer was slowly growing in his body, a cancer which outlasts him, surviving where he does not, absorbing the raw emotion and inspirations that audiences project upon the cinema screen behind which it swells and gestates, becoming not only sentient, not only animate, but a thing of joyous and murderous miracles.įreed from its parent flesh, it exhibits the miraculous capacity to make the dreams it has absorbed momentary realities, becoming silver-screen heroes and villains and monsters and lovers, even temporarily altering reality around itself to reflect those illusionary backdrops. Sealed in, bleeding, unable to call out for help, he dies and is forgotten, never found. Like most of Barker's monsters, it begins with humanity, its absurdity lent a certain wry wit and wider cultural resonance by its -extremely- humble origins:įollowing a flight from police, wounded and bleeding, a convict finds himself trapped in the crawlspace behind a cinema's screen and the outside world.

As an example of how floridly bizarre Clive Barker's imagination is, you need look no further than the eponymous Son of Celluloid, from The Books of Blood.Ĭonceptually alone, the creature is strange beyond the most Jungian nightmares of most horror writers.

Son of Celluloid by Clive Barker