Clive Barker's "Salome" and "The Forbidden": Two Short Films (1973)
It is hard to reconcile the young, chipper, handsome Clive Barker, the horror author and film fantasist of an undeniably boyish countenance, who held the sway of even the venerable Stephen King (who declared him the "future of horror" in the late 1980s) with the ravaged, haggard figure we see in contemporary photographs. Barker, despite whatever health problems and personal demons he has wrestled with over the decades, has maintained an output often bordering on brilliance; a steady, if underappreciated oeuvre of chilling depictions of man's possession by infernal forces, his exploration, and capitulation to these dark shades of desire and pain; his seeking out of doorways into Hell, pathways into darkness parallel to our own.
