The Repressed Paganism of ‘Rawhead Rex’
Clive Barker blew the Splatterpunk movement wide open when his Books of Blood turned him into an overnight success. These days it’s almost impossible to conceive of anyone becoming an overnight success over a short story collection, but in 1985 it was incredibly possible. Some of the most renowned horror authors at the time began reading, sharing and commenting on Barker’s stories — including the likes of Ramsey Campbell and Stephen King. Barker blew up and of course he was immediately contacted for film adaptations.
Looking at the stories collected within The Books of Blood, it’s easy to see why. There’s scarcely a single one under forty pages, they’re all cinematic and often explore classic horror tropes, both relying on them and subverting them in equal doses. The Midnight Meat Train is very much a slasher of the era. It feels so similar to the likes of Maniac and The New York Ripper, but in pure Clive Barker fashion, the hero winds up not escaping or even defeating the killer, but taking his place instead. Every Barker story is the tip of an iceberg, a gateway to a larger mythology waiting to be unearthed.
That’s no different in Rawhead Rex than any of his other stories. But what might be most interesting is that, more than any other story in The Books of Blood, Rawhead actually plays out like a traditional horror movie for the most part. This demon is not as tragic or sentimental as so many other creatures Barker has created over the years. He is not the misunderstood Nightbreed nor even the regal Cenobites of Hellraiser. He is a hungry beast; purely and simply a monster of the Old World. And that is entirely the point.
Rawhead is an ancient pagan demigod, a monster leftover from a time before Europe was reshaped by Christianity and shackled by modern society. This is Celtic land, his land, that a church and a village of churchgoers have been built on top of, whilst he has been buried and forgotten. This is a film about the Old World rising up to devour the New. There are no strict rules and guidelines with Rawhead, as the church deems so necessary. He has no commandments. He’s a being built only of appetites and indulgences. He lives in service to no God but his own hungers. That’s where the Barkerian aspects of the story truly come to light. There’s no sympathy for Rawhead, nor empathy, but in his uniquely un-conservative rampage he evokes something almost like envy.
That might not be true for the poor people forced to watch Rawhead eat their loved ones, especially the poor protagonist who loses his young son. But for the priest, Declan, there’s absolutely something like love for the brute. At the very least, there’s an obsession. He quickly becomes Rawhead’s makeshift Renfield, renouncing his own God for the sake of a God who can indulge desires that Declan has no doubt always felt the need to keep to himself. This change of faith is completed with a baptism in which the beast urinates all over the priest’s head.
Scenes like that are what make Rawhead Rex so interesting. It absolutely goes for broke, going over-the-top at every possible turn. Even if it’s not the ideal adaptation of the story that so many people wanted — or even still want to see — it’s done in a way that very much fits with the nature of these themes. It’s about breaking down the doors of repression and eating that repression raw.
In Barker’s original story, Rawhead is essentially, as the author has often described, a phallus with teeth. One can definitely see the glee Barker would have in letting a giant, unrestrained penis monster loose on the English countryside, here relocated to Ireland. Unfortunately, a creature of that sort just wasn’t really something the producers thought would fly, so they had to take the monster’s appearance in a very different direction. Which is silly to some degree, because that sort of design had clearly worked for the Alien and had just been done a few years prior to Rawhead Rex in The Deadly Spawn, in a much less subtle way.
The movie design for Rawhead himself looks much different. It keeps all of those important elements that are crucial to the story, it has a very distinctly Celtic appearance and screams of a pagan demigod — but perhaps a pagan demigod that could also serve as Dokken’s bouncer. There’s something so distinctly ’80s hair metal about the monster, even elements of sexualization as well, in the shirt ripped open to expose the creature’s bare, muscled chest. He’s Pumpkinhead on the cover of a romance novel. That might not be a design that anyone thought they needed, but it’s one for which we should all be grateful.
Even if the monster looks as cheap as he probably was thanks to the largely static mask, there’s an undeniable appeal to Rawhead Rex. It’s grainy, grimy, unpolished and that’s exactly what it should be as a movie that is essentially lashing out against the polished.
While Rawhead might not be a literal penis in the movie, he still represents everything the character represents in the book. He’s a monster representative of every desire that’s been deemed unacceptable, been pushed down and down — to the point where he’s literally buried in the earth — until it can do nothing but break free and lash out at everything around it. Rawhead is a monster from a time before modern comforts, be they peaceful farm homes or run-down trailer parks. Each of these quiet, cozy places clearly make him sick and he proves to be more than willing to eat people right out of their own homes — it’s nothing more to him than peeling open a can of sardines.
There’s also an underlying homoerotic subtext that seems as though it would have to be intentional on Barker’s part. Rawhead’s one weakness, literally the only thing that repels him, is womanhood, particularly depictions or reminders of a woman’s fertility. This is not by any means separate from the rest of the movie’s themes, because Rawhead is lashing out against a family structure invented by the church that did not exist in his time. Rawhead is not just attacking random people, he’s attacking families. He’s attacking parents and children and essentially demolishing this enforced societal view of the “traditional” nuclear family. For a gay man growing up in a conservative time in a largely conservative country, there had to have been a very specific appeal to that for Barker, and it would hardly be the last time he would explore those themes.
Rawhead Rex might be flawed but, in truth, it should be. It’s messy, mean-spirited and, well, Raw. And that’s why it simply refuses to go away, and why — as much as its protesters may try — it will always refuse to stay buried.
