In the late 1980s and early 1990s Clive Barker was the new face of horror and praised highly by the likes of Stephen King himself. Hellraiser (1987) and Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) were both stand out movies done on a modest budget with Clive Barker hailing as the driving force behind the two films. Nightbreed (1990) was next in line to receive the cinematic treatment based on Barker’s popular book ‘Cabal‘.
Where the first two Hellraiser films gained cult status and plenty of freedom in writing, filming and the final edit – unfortunately Nightbreed was not awarded a director’s final version of the film and much of Clive Barker’s vision had been left on the cutting room floor. Thankfully the fine folks at Scream (Shout) Factory have put together an excellent new transfer of Nightbreed completely endorsed by Clive Barker and released it on Blu-ray and DVD.
Nightbreed The Director’s Cut is a re-edit and re-master of the film from original footage with the supervision and blessing of Clive Barker who states the DVD release was ‘beyond my wildest dreams of realization’. The new version contains both new footage and original footage omissions – it is now 20 minutes longer then the theatrical cut but contains over 40 minutes of new and altered footage.
Nightbreed basically shows monsters as the victims and humanity the antagonist. The movie never found a large audience as it was difficult to market upon release. For those who were fans of the book or the original movie you will want to check out this version of the release. It’s clear the post production team has worked extremely hard to restore old footage and painstakingly render a new version of Nightbreed almost 25 years later.
Nightbreed The Director’s Cut Blu-ray/DVD has a new cover and the packaging is nicely done. The additional features are incredibly robust and include an introduction from Clive Barker and Mark Alan Miller (who also does a running commentary) and new interviews with original cast members including Doug Bradley who is most famous for playing Pinhead in the Hellraiser series. The new interviews were clever and fleshed out how the cast and crew came together and even divulged much info on Clive Barker’s life in theater prior to writing and directing for the screen.
Highly recommend checking out Nightbreed The Director’s Cut – the only faults we can find 25 years later with the film is some poor decisions on using stop motion animation (which never look good) and in a strange way we somehow wish the original theatrical version was contained in this package just to be able to compare the two versions.
Nightbreed The Director’s Cut
https://www.shoutfactory.com/film/fantasy/nightbreed-the-director-s-cut