It’s Your Birthday: Clive Barker

Today is famous master of horror, Clive Barker’s birthday. He turns 57 today. He was born on October 5, 1952, in Liverpool, England.

Clive Barker is an English author, director and artist who dabbles in fantasy and horror fiction. Barker is responsible for the Hellraiser series, and the character known as Pinhead, based on his novel, The Hellbound Heart. A number of other films have been based on his novels and short stories, and he himself has written screenplays and gotten involved in other capacities in other projects. He’s involved in many different forms of media or multimedia.

Out of all his novels, I’ve read Imajica, and that was a few years ago. It was truly weird and yet I couldn’t put it down. I would sit there wading through this large novel in to the early hours of the morning, and I was still in high school. I probably didn’t get much sleep, and I had to wake up early to catch the bus to school.

Other than novels, he has also been involved in video games, having been the “creative director” as it were, of Clive Barker’s Undying, and Clive Barker’s Jericho. Undying has to be one of the scariest and creepiest games I’ve played to this day. It was not just frightening, but it made my skin crawl. He voiced the character known as Ambrose. Over the years, and I noticed this in Undying, his voice has become gravelly and coarse, and he claims it is due to polyps in his throat, not cancer.
I remember once going to the library, thinking that Undying was based on a novel, but after a while, I read an old preview/interview of the game where it was stated that the game wasn’t based on any written material by Clive. I even wrote several chapters of a fan-fiction piece that was based on Undying, although I’ve haven’t published it anywhere. I’ve still got it though.

Jericho was a squad based horror game which I must admit wasn’t what I expected, and it was bloody difficult. I never managed to finish that one. There was also a third game called Demonik, which I was looking forward to, but that ended up being cancelled, unfortunately.

It’s Your Birthday: Clive Barker