AdapNation: Nightbreed Remake

In which I make the case for film and TV adaptations, sequels and remakes.

I've always found it unutterably odd that the justification for and against remaking a movie has always been exclusively tied to its past success.  Movies like A Nightmare on Elm Street get remade because the first one was awesome to begin with while movies like Nightbreed get a pass because they tanked.

Shouldn't that be the other way around, though?  I mean, I get why studios would want another pass at making Friday the 13th money - and even why audiences would want another pass at seeing teens get carved up with a machete - but I can't help but feel that this is actually opposite the way that remakes should actually be used.  They shouldn't be used to resuscitate movies that were already great the first time around, but to retool stillborn franchises that, for one reason or another, simply never worked.

Few movies fit this criteria better than Nightbreed, the 1990 adaptation of Clive Barker's novella Cabal.  If you remember this one, I have to imagine that it wasn't fondly.  Nightbreed was supposed to be the first of a trilogy of movies that Barker described as being "the Star Wars of horror movies," but was such a commercial and critical failure that the others were never made.

The idea behind Nightbreed is as darkly imaginative, ambitious and full of horrific potential as any of Barker's other movies.  It could more accurately be described as "the X-Men of horror movies," ditching its grandiose hero narrative for more deformed monsters with awesome superpowers.  Just take stock of the characters that we already have to work with.

We have a woman whose entire body is covered with poisonous quills, which she can launch at people like darts.  There's a woman who can transform into mist, which can be used to enter into peoples body, reform inside of them and kill them.  There's a girl with retrocognition, which can be used to great effect while sleuthing around.  There's a guy with a pair of barbed tentacles that extend from his stomach.  Our protagonist is virtually invulnerable while others feature varying degrees of superhuman strength, claws and fangs.

And that's just what we already have to work with.  Given the varied nature of their physiology - and their connection with the horror genre - their power sets could be virtually anything.  What if ol' Quillface's barbs weren't just lethal, but could induce hallucinations, induce vomiting or cause any number of unspecified ailments?  What if other Nightbreed resembled werewolves: all claw and fur and teeth?  What if others were bat-like humanoids, with massive, demonic wings that they could fly with?  What if others possessed pyrokinesis, hydrokinesis, aerokinesis, geokinesis or cryokinesis?

Only unlike Marvel's mutants, you can abandon any hope of passing for Human.  The Nightbreed are a horrific menagerie of deformity and grotesquerie. Never mind their peaceful disposition: they would be pegged on sight as inhuman and eradicated with as much prejudice as Humans are capable of.

What's more, is that the base concept of the franchise would fit perfectly into the modern blockbuster business model of shared universes: endless crossovers, spin offs, team ups and square offs among countless sequels.  Some Nightbreed could split off from the main group to get their own solo movies (ie, Wolverine).  Others could stay with the main group and go on their merry way to find a new Midian (ie, X-Men).  There could be prequels exploring the origins of the Nightbreed (ie, X-Men: First Class).

What's more, however, is that they could crossover with the Hellraiser remake that's been in the works for years (even spawning Hellraiser: Revelations in an attempt to retain the film rights to the franchise while they work out the details).  It's even already established in Barker canon, as the Nightbreed (representing chaos) are established in the Hellraiser comics to be the ancestral enemies of the Cenobites (representing a profane sense of order): the obvious parallel here is the X-Men  vs the Brotherhood of Mutants.

So why did the movie fail to find an audience 25 years ago?  Simple.  The movie sucked.  For all of its imagination, ambition and cinematic potential, the movie failed to be anything even resembling good.  Barker is a much better author than he is a director - a fact that was obvious even with Hellraiser - and his frenetic vision for the franchise never coalesced into a single, workable story.

Nightbreed's core conflict was its titular band of freaks against the inhumanity of mankind.  That story, however, was supplanted by some randomly insane psychologist serial killer in a button-eyed mask (as if intolerance against those different from us wasn't interesting enough).  The Nightbreed's own quest for acceptance in a world that both hates and fears them is undercut by the fact that their dungeons overflow with even more greatly deformed creatures (the Berserkers).

Boone's - and others' - connection with Midian was never really explained, and just hung their as some nebulously defined, plot-progressing concept.  The ability to transform Humans into Nightbreed - one of the film's central premises - was a concept that I never really bought in on, preferring status within the Breed to be a matter of birth, rather than fate.

And although the movie's $11 million budget was a massive improvement over Hellraiser's $2 million, it obviously wasn't enough to make the effects as convincing as their scale necessitated them to be.  That doesn't mean that a remake would need an X-Men-sized budget, because it certainly wouldn't be making X-Men-sized profits.  A relatively modest budget, a top-notch team of makeup artists and the right creative talent is all that it would need to be a franchise-spawning success.

Nightbreed has all the makings of late October blockbuster.  Its connection with the horror genre - and yet its status as a pseudo-superhero movie - would give it a seasonal release without much in the way of competition.  Its connection with other Barker-based franchises and its own potential for spin offs gives it the perfect segue into the highly in-demand shared universes framework.  And owing to its predecessor's lack of focus, it comes equipped with recurring villains as part of its narrative DNA: Dr. Decker (the franchise's William Stryker), the Cenobites and mankind itself.

So would you want to watch a remake of Nightbreed?  Would you want to see Doctor Decker as a

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