The Most Interesting Scene in Clive Barker’s Nightbreed (1990)

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

Nightbreed (1990) is a visually striking movie with no shortage of provocative scenes: urban legend has it that at one time it was in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the most monsters on screen at one time.

Despite its striking scenes (or because of them), I’m of two minds on Nightbreed. On the one hand, it feels like a missed opportunity. On the other hand, I’m not the first to see that there’s something deeper going on behind the film’s gross-out monsters and cheesy gags.

Indeed, no less an authority than Chilean experimental filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky (whose best-known work was funded by John Lennon and Yoko Ono and is somehow still alive despite being like 100) praised Nightbreed, calling it “the first truly gay horror fantasy epic” and a probing examination of the “unconsummated relationship between doctor and patient.” 

While some have questioned Jodorowsky’s emphasis on psychiatry (while agreeing with the gay subtext, which it seems everyone acknowledges), it’s somewhat obvious that he has put his finger on a key theme. However, an often-overlooked scene indicates that the film’s examination of psychiatric power is even deeper than Jodorowsky recognized.

Film Overview

Nightbreed follows Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer), a factory worker who’s been having nightmares about a city called Midian that is populated by monsters. At the start of the film, Boone is working with Dr. Philip K. Decker (that’s gotta be a Philip K. Dick allusion, right?), played by the marvelous David Cronenberg.

At the start of the film, Decker convinces Boone he is a serial killer and drugs him with LSD. After attempting to kill himself while on the drug, Boone meets Narcisse, a disturbed man ranting about Midian, where he suggests Boone will be able to find forgiveness for being a murderer (after which he removes his own face with two knives—the film has an interesting preoccupation with the face; in one scene, Decker says each person has a “secret face,” which is interesting phrasing given that the face is the outwardly facing part of ourselves that we present to others—a more pedestrian choice of language would have been “secret life” or “secret desire”).

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

From there, the plot largely centers on Boone’s attempt to escape Decker (revealed early in the film as the actual serial killer) and join the monsters of Midian. As it turns out, the monsters are in fact remaining members of races that had been persecuted by humans to the point of extinction and were thus forced to form their own supportive community outside of the confines of normal society. The film culminates in a violent showdown between the misfit monsters and the town’s ignorant rednecks.

The Scene

The film’s thematic content isn’t subtle (“ordinary” people are the true monsters, we destroy what we envy, etc.). I’m sure it would surprise no one to find out that the film has a considerable cult following amongst people who identify as misunderstood outsiders.

The link to psychiatry that Jodorowsky points out is similarly overt given the confrontation between Boone and Decker. Nevertheless, one scene casts the film’s approach to psychiatric violence in a new light and with greater depth than even Jodorowsky seems to have acknowledged.

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

The scene I’m thinking of comes up at 51:48 of the director’s cut released in 2014. In the scene, Boone is engaged in a fistfight with Decker when Narcisse happens upon them, announces his desire to kill Decker, and says:

Remember me? Doctor? I was dying when you had your way with me. You made me give up my secrets when I was feeling particularly vulnerable. Now, is that a nice thing for a doctor to do?

As suits the film, Narcisse’s message here is not subtle (and certainly the phrasing of “had your way with me” is evocative).

There are a few ways to come at this, as the violence of the psychiatric relationship operates on a few levels. The first stems from the power asymmetry of the interpersonal relationship between doctor and patient. The psychiatric relationship inherently entails that one party divulge their secrets, which the other to varying degrees forcefully extracts. This style of violence is arguably inherent to the therapeutic relationship, though it can be mitigated to varying degrees. On this account, Narcisse’s phrasing can be taken to suggest the sense of humiliation and exploitation that can stem from the therapeutic exchange.

Moving on, given the film’s focus on the (homoerotic) outsider, an obvious rendering would be to see Narcisse’s remarks as communicating a more general anti-psychiatry message. Seen from this perspective, the film would present a critique of how the clinical relationship can enforce stifling conformity.

Anytime therapeutic practice aims to reconfigure someone’s psyche, the obvious question becomes why that is being done and in service of what goal. If the classic Freudian point is that all socialization entails some repression, then the question becomes which types of repression we tolerate and why. As Marcuse famously pointed out in his handling of psychoanalysis, some forms of repression might be necessary while others are not. The challenge is how to sort out one from the other.

Credit: Morgan Creek Productions. Distributed by: 20th Century Studios

The film’s queer subtext provides one register on which to digest this point: after all, homosexuality was treated as a mental health disorder up through the 1970s. However, the metaphor can be broadened beyond that to take on the question of mental health care for misfits more generally, and for that reason it has long served as the basis of the classic (perhaps facile) critiques of the sociologist Talcott Parsons’s functionalism. In a different form, the topic was of course taken up by folks like Deleuze and Guattari.

Conclusion 

There certainly are other ways to come at this, but the point for our purposes is that the scene with Narcisse we’ve just highlighted indicates the potential depth of the film as an examination of psychiatric violence.

Still, even its most interesting scene isn’t enough to make the film interesting in its entirety. In many ways, the tragic story of the film’s production and the compromises Barker had to make to get it made replicates the film’s theme of the oppressive effects of ignorance.

Depending on how you count, we currently have roughly four versions of the film. Maybe the next ten years will give us yet another version of Nightbreed, and perhaps the director’s cut of the director’s cut will be wise enough to give Narcisse the final word.