Toying With Torture

Clive Barker wants to play with you.

Camille pointed the way over a carpet of corpses to a dank corner of the immense chamber, where Talisac awaited them.

He looked, to the Generals' astonished eyes, like one of his own victims; a terrible, implausible experiment in the extremes to which a human carcass might be put.

He hung by his mouth from a device whose purpose was beyond the Generals' comprehension, his mouth hooked up, as though he were a fish. In his perversity, or his genius, or both, he had created some kind of external womb for himself. A semi-translucent bag hung from the lower portion of his abdomen, down between his spidery legs. There was life inside.

Such visions of horror are nothing new for novelist, film director and painter Clive Barker, whose Hellraiser films (six and counting) have probably done more to bring sadomasochism to mainstream America than any other work of popular culture in recent memory. But it's one thing to write detailed descriptions of mutilation in a horror novel, a comic book or even an R-rated film. The particular vision of horror that Barker writes about above, on the other hand, is a toy.

Yes, starting as early as next week, Talisac and five similarly gruesome characters could be arriving at your local independent toy or comic book store, and perhaps even at record and specialty book retailers as well, in an action figure line officially known as "Clive Barker's Tortured Souls: Animae Damnatae." And when you buy Scythe Meister, an assassin with his facial skin flayed, stretched out and held to a steel halo with nails; or Lucidique, a seductive female with large piercings in places you don't want to even think about; or any of the other, equally disturbing characters, you also get a new piece of Barker fiction, a short story ranging from 1,300 to 3,100 words. Collect all six, and the stories form a longer narrative that will not see publication anywhere else (it's officially described as a "pamphlet" so as not to infringe on Barker's major publishing deals, but it's closer to a novella). Similarly, the packaging from all six can be combined to form a large image that you might not feel safe with in the dark.

Though action figures have been heading in more graphic directions for at least five years now, thanks to both improved sculpting techniques and a growing specialty market among young adults, Barker's figures set a new standard for gore. And he's very happy about that, stating that his goal is to create "images" that really grab hold of people. "Leave them with an impression, leave them with something they couldn't get anywhere else," he says. "I like messing with people's minds. Intensity messes with people's minds."

His partner in this enterprise is Todd McFarlane, the renegade comic book publisher whose eponymous company will release the toys (and has also made figures based on The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Species, among others). McFarlane's goal with the Barker line was similar to the author's: "We tried to make the most evocative, disturbing toys we could," he tells New Times. Mainstream retailers like Toys "R" Us have shied away from the gorier McFarlane products in the past, and are highly unlikely to stock these -- which only makes them more collectible and brings more business into specialty stores that have no qualms about such things.

McFarlane's initial contact with Barker came several years ago, when he hoped to get the license for a series of figures based on Barker's seminal first Hellraiser film. That $900,000 movie, directed by Barker himself and followed by sequels of ever-decreasing author input, put lead monster Pinhead -- a sadomasochistic, supernatural torturer with his face carved into a checkerboard and nails inserted at every corner -- into the pantheon of popular horror imagery alongside Friday the 13th's Jason and A Nightmare on Elm Street's Freddy Krueger. A Pinhead toy might seem like a natural, but in 1987, when the character first appeared, no one involved with the film even conceived of the idea that anyone might want to see it in toy form. "So the contract doesn't actually specify who owns this merchandise," says Barker, "and so nobody's been able to define who can sell it to Todd," though he's certain that little plastic Pinheads will eventually exist, once all the paperwork has settled.

Barker and McFarlane were too alike in sensibility -- they share a love of the gruesome and a desire to push boundaries -- not to work together someday, so some sort of collaboration was inevitable. And thus, working from Barker's six-page description, McFarlane and his design team created the Tortured Souls (who look not unlike Hellraiser's Pinhead and his cohorts, the similarly pierced and scarred Cenobites), then let Barker tweak the designs until he was satisfied. Only then did Barker come to the conclusion that to be truly effective, the characters needed a back story. And so he tells the tale of a mythical ancient city called Primordium, which he describes as "a place of darkness, just darkness, moral darkness, depravity." The desert outside the city is haunted by a godlike being named Agonistes, who gives wronged victims of the depravity a chance to gain revenge by turning them into Tortured Souls. It's basically Hellraiser meets The Crow, and should please fans of both. And if you like the story, there's even better news: Both Barker and McFarlane now claim that a Tortured Souls movie is "more than a possibility."

Barker is like a proud parent as he thoroughly examines the first Tortured Souls prototype, shipped straight from McFarlane Toys' headquarters in Tempe, Arizona. It's a character called Mongroid, who resembles a nude man walking backward on all fours, decked in bloody hooks and chains, with a massive bite wound where genitalia should be and a large gaping orifice in his chest that resembles nothing so much as Freud's vagina dentata. "I think this is like the first time Hieronymous Bosch might have designed a toy, and I think it's neat, in its weird sort of twisted way," he says. "They're beautiful things, I mean, they're really elaborate, baroque sort of creations." So satisfied is he that he's already starting to think in terms of future collaborations, including a return to Primordium if those creations sell well.

The figures, which McFarlane refers to as "quasi-niche mass toys," beg the question: Is there anything left that you can't do in an action figure line? The toymaker, despite his express affection for "gore, entrails and blood," still has one or two taboos: "I don't know that I'd ever do a nude figure, or a sound chip with out-and-out cursing," he says, adding the qualifier that if said cursing were from, for instance, a miniature rendition of the drill instructor from Full Metal Jacket (which will indeed be a 12-inch talking doll later this year, but not from McFarlane), a profane sound effect might be appropriate. And one of his mass-marketed creations, based on Adam Sandler's Little Nicky, uttered the phrase "You love acting, I love pissing," while his Austin Powers model, clad in nothing but underwear, would ask consumers, at the touch of a button, if he made them horny.

Hellraiser aside, Barker is best known as a novelist. Toy buyers are not always known for their literacy, so the idea of giving them something to read -- especially since many of them won't even open the packages to get to the text inside, preferring to keep it "mint in box" for greater collectible value -- is an odd marketing device. He's hoping, however, that those who know him only as a writer will also appreciate the toys. "It's going to be a test," Barker says. "My fan base and Todd's fan base overlap, [but] the people who like the big fancy novels, I think we're going to have to educate them a little bit." In other words, while those who like epic chronicles of fantastic worlds like The Great and Secret Show may not be aware that similar imagery is now appearing on toy shelves, they might be interested once they do find out, especially since it's the only way to get the newest piece of Clive Barker fiction -- and you have to buy them all for the complete story, though each section can technically stand alone. When read as a whole in the right order, he says, "the stories are about how a group of individuals fall in love and find redemption in this dark place. It's actually, in a weird way, rather optimistic."

They seemed to be hybrids; one third human, one third metallic, one third the no man's land between flesh and devices made to strip it and slash it and scour it. They bled as they rose from their nuptial sheets; but smiled, kissing one another's wounds as though they were inconsequential, as though these flaps and sores and gougings were proof of devotion.

When one can find beauty in images of such pain, it's hard to imagine anything being scary anymore. But there is a movie Barker consistently cites as the scariest he's ever seen: Pinocchio, with its visions of children being turned into donkeys and beaten. Seems the master of darkness is an avowed Disney fan; he cites Fantasia as one of his all-time favorite films ("It takes my imagination and just blows it right over"). So perhaps it shouldn't be as much of a surprise as it is that Barker, in addition to overseeing a $40 million Warner Bros. movie based on his book The Damnation Game, is in the midst of a massive collaborative undertaking with Disney. Called Abarat, it is set to involve 400 original Barker paintings, four books, at least one movie, a theme-park ride and yes, more toys. "They'll be very different from these," he promises.

In other words, they'll actually be safe for kids to look at and play with. Some would argue that all toys should be so. Not Barker, who says of the Tortured Souls, "I think the question is where these things belong: They don't belong in a six-year-old's hands, and I think that's very plain. They're toys for adults, really." He labels them as "PG-13," which indicates a very generous assessment of the PG-13 movie rating, one none of the Hellraiser movies has ever been tame enough to attain.

Since 1996, McFarlane Toys has labeled most of its figures as suitable for ages 13 and older. But while video games, movies and, to a lesser extent, comic books and CDs have ratings, no one has yet thought of applying a uniform system to toys. If any line could provoke talk of such a code, Tortured Souls is the one. Buy 'em while you can.