7 Questions: Clive Barker

Clive Barker is a builder of subterranean worlds, territories both enveloping and grotesque. In his fiction, paintings, and films—most famously his movie Hellraiser—he turns our primal fantasies against us. And he claims it's for our own good.

How does one create a state of horror?

Suspended disbelief, obviously. And the replacement reality has got to be one where the subconscious rules, filled with the visceral stuff that's been with you since you were a child and that you put to the back of your imagination but keeps coming up anyway—the stuff that wakes you up at three in the morning in a cold sweat. And you need a story with great simplicity. In Poe's stories, the state of horror is entered immediately. You don't have a sort of mental breakdown or some backstory.

Why do people enjoy being scared?

It empowers them. The burning Twin Towers have appeared in front of us as living, vital images that say, "Be afraid—be very afraid." And how do you deal with that in your daily life? One of the ways you take hold of the things that frighten you is to grasp as you grasp the nettle, very tightly, so it doesn't sting. Horror is a debased form, but people are seeing movies and reading books in unprecedented numbers because it's speaking to our anxiety.

Do you see trends in horror?

The Hostel and Saw movies are one extreme: physical maiming, untouched by the supernatural. Which to me isn't terribly interesting. I want to slice the umbilical cord that connects us to reality and tell the audience, "You can let go; I've got you."

So a reader or viewer really has to trust you?

I'm sure you've been to a horror movie when it just hasn't worked and people laugh. There's a very fine line between the ridiculous and the terrifying.

Do you scare yourself when you're writing?

F**k no. I arouse myself. I feel that charge in the air. The possibility of release but the unlikelihood of it.

What kind of person does it take to invent a fictional world?

Someone who is profoundly disappointed in the real one.

Are you in pain?

In trying to make something useful for my fiction, I probably remain more naked than it's in my best interest to be.