The fact that Clive Barker’s Nightbreed didn’t spawn a franchise of at least four or five sequels is one of the great injustices in horror history. Based on Barker’s novella, ‘Cabal,’ Nightbreed was the story of one man’s journey to Midian, where an outcast tribe of monsters and dark things live in peace. It also featured David Cronenberg in an exceptionally creepy turn (even by Cronenbergian standards) as a serial killer.
The movie had its issues during production, and it was only recently that a new expanded cut of the movie made it out for public consumption. Still, there has always been tremendous potential in the Nightbreed world, and the prospect of finally revisiting it is an appealing one.
So, good news! Clive Barker and Josh Stolberg are developing a Nightbreed TV series for Syfy. The bad news is that they’re doing it quite slowly, but we won’t let that take the air out of our balloons.
Barker recently had a chat with his Official Website about the project, via BD, and offered fans an update about the series’ current status:
Nightbreed is moving forward at quite a rate with a couple of very well-known directors showing a great deal of interest in it. I am on board to provide mythologies and ideas and hopefully put the Barkerian weirdness on the material. At the moment, we’re putting the team together: we have a writer, director, producers and now that the New Year has begun we’ll all get together and start to plan the long-term narrative, not just the opening narrative which is what we’ve done so far.
I have the sense that, if all the things that I’ve been promised come true, there is a real passion for matching the tone of both the book and the film.
We’ve got our fingers crossed that this will start moving again in the next few months.
Nightbreed story
It sounds like this is a reboot that will start from scratch (to be fair, by the time this makes it to screens, the movie will be 30 years past). If they follow the path of the movie and ‘Cabal’ it’s easy to see how that story alone could be stretched out over the course of a season, and then we can get future adventures with the monsters of Midian.
“This story has been near to my heart for many years,” Barker said in a statement when the series was first announced (via Deadline). “I’m at beyond thrilled that SyFy and UCP are taking this journey with us, and I cannot wait to see it brought to life on the screen.”
“There has never been a more relevant time for us to turn to one of the genre’s great cult classics from our movie library to impact the national conversation with bold, compelling and unconventional storytelling,” said David Robinson, President of Morgan Creek Entertainment Group. “The team at Morgan Creek is very excited to partner with Clive Barker, Syfy and Universal Cable Productions on Nightbreed for a unique, trenchant and no-holds-barred exploration of race relations in today’s society. As a sophisticated twist on the classic graphic novel form, Nightbreed pits ‘Humans’ against persecuted monsters, using metaphor and parable to take on bias and prejudice with real-world consequences.”
Nightbreed air date
More on this as we get it. Unlikely to be 2019.