Clive Barker found joy in painting at the age of 45, two years after the release of Lord of Illusions , his third and last feature as a film director. The narrative attempts both to fuse and to subvert both film noir and horror, playing on and then undermining the audience's expectations of these genres and their ephemeral pleasures, drawing in and pushing away in the same gesture. Barker has stated in interviews that his intention in creating Harry D'Amour was to give audiences a protagonist who was basically good, a real hero. Lord of Illusions is almost the antithesis of 'The Last Illusion'. In his analysis of the film, Jonathan F. Bassett observes that Lord of Illusions is centrally concerned with death anxiety, and notes that in this very scene what Nix does is force Swann to confront the reality of the human condition.

Clive Barker's works frequently invoke fundamental elements in the gothic tradition. To reveal Barker's invocation of fundamentally gothic conventions, this chapter uncovers the gothic excesses in his early and seminal novel(la)s. They are The Damnation Game , The Hellbound Heart, The Thief of Always, and more recent novels Coldheart Canyon and The Scarlet Gospels, each of which are indebted to the Faustian pact. The Faustian pact is a key strategy for Barker to explore the corrupting nature of desire and the twisted path towards the sublime. Barker frequently entwines the invocation of the infernal with the desire for immortality, a pact with the damned that confers humanity's deepest wishes, all the while revelling in its nightmarish and often visceral consequences. Barker's novels, The Scarlet Gospels, continues in the vein of voyeurism and witnessing miracles beyond the call of human understanding.

In the context of contemplating representations of history and histories of representation in the changing Northern Ireland, there are numerous works by artists that struggle with testing means of recording or seeking evidence, investigating archives and exploring the 'potentiality' of testimony. This chapter considers the examples of speculative history-making in the work of two artists Daniel Jewesbury and Aisling O'Beirn, who have been engaged with the effect of the past on the landscapes of the present. It focuses on the work of two artists whose work with film and video has engaged quite differently with historical narratives in the north of Ireland. They are Glasgow-based, Dublin-born artist Duncan Campbell, and German-born, Irish-based artist Miriam de Búrca. Campbell's film-making method heightens the tension between what we perceive to be 'real' and what is more obviously 'constructed' through the mediating process of documentary.

This chapter presents close readings of works by the London-based Nigerian expatriate Yinka Shonibare, Delhi-based British expatriate Bharti Kher, and Vietnamese-born Danh Vo, who grew up in Denmark and then became a resident of Mexico City. It describes that Amelia Jones specifically refrains from devoting herself to interrogating the relationship of identity politics to developments in contemporary art. She reminds us that Art is always about identification. Identification evolves as a dynamic and reciprocal process that occurs between viewers, bodies, images and other kinds of visual representations and media. The chapter traces some of the ways in which the altered experience of subjectivity has begun to shape identifications differently, so that older ways of thinking about identity in terms of binary oppositions no longer resonate in quite the same way.

Clive Barker first came to international prominence with Books of Blood, a collection of thirty stories of which only one might be said to adhere to basic protocols of bourgeois realism. In breaking out of what threatened to become a comfort zone marked 'Horror Fiction', Barker displayed rare courage and integrity. Even as he became a dark imaginer, a practitioner of something wider than horror, Barker shut himself off more and more wilfully from other possibilities. The rise of the Whitehead pharmaceutical empire and the Kennedy-by-any-other-name Geary commercial empire, with all the capitalist thuggery enforced along the way, could have given Barker a brace of gripping realist premises. On an uncomfortable number of occasions, Barker distracts from his dearth of ideas by fetching up tedious action sequences, facile bio-metamorphics, and 'edge'-lending violent and sexual content.

This chapter presents a narrative and formal comparative analysis of two short stories of the Books of Blood, that is 'The Midnight Meat Train' and 'Dread', and their comic and film adaptations. Clive Barker was involved as a producer in the making of both films. With all the tribulations surrounding the theatrical release of The Midnight Meat Train and the limited release of Dread, these two endorsements for the films' home distribution remain one of the best ways to prompt people to see them. Instead of focusing on the character's emotional state, Barker carefully expresses Leon Kaufman's fear and horror through repetitive references to his gaze. This chapter shows how the comic books and cinema were able to exploit the full potential of their own features in order to render Barker's powerful writing style and strong imagery.

This chapter focuses on Clive Barker's Tortured Souls and Mister B. Gone, which shows a sustained engagement with the body and continues to escape the boundaries of classic horror to form its own elaborate mythologies. The Cenobites, characters who straddle the line between the torturer and the tortured, are possibly Barker's most famous creation; their stories have developed over ten films and an equally impressive number of comics. Like Hellraiser, Tortured Souls proposes a new carnal mythology introducing a pantheon of transmogrified superhumans. Mister B. Gone opens with a three-word exhortation: 'Burn this book'. The experience of reading Mister B. Gone is framed around finding out more about terrific deeds and losing one's mind in the process. Mister B. Gone is more than a straightforward horror novel chronicling the life of a fictional demonic memory.

This chapter is informed by responses to the chosen films by female viewers and considers these responses in relation to the aesthetic qualities of the films. Fan communities, thus privilege particular kinds of cinematic horror. Thus, Barker's films might be held up as great examples of splatterpunk in fan communities that are interested in the gory and explicit imagery. Certainly, many female fans of gothic horror still chose to view examples of body horror and find pleasure in them. Passionate feminine sexuality is positioned as monstrous in the narrative, but this is never quite that narratively straightforward in Barker's work. In terms of the appeal of Barkerian films, certainly in respect of Barker's imaginative stories and themes, this goes back to their predominantly negative feelings about the formulaic aspects of much of the horror genre.

This chapter underscores the sexually charged nature of Agostino Brunias's West Indian paintings, probing in particular, the pronounced confluence of colonialism and the fetishisation of the mixed-race female body evident in these works. Like the Caribbean fruits and flowers with which the paintings identify them, they are simply rewards of the colonial enterprise. The chapter analyses two prominent eighteenth-century constructions of mixed-race female sexuality evident in Brunias's West Indian pictures: the Venus and the Vixen. In addition to the obvious references to Venus imagery, Brunias also employs the Roman myth of Actaeon and Diana as an iconographic and ideological model for the painting. Like the figures in William Blake's unquestionably imperialist and unequivocally erotic continental allegory, Brunias's brown Venuses posit an implicit analogy between female flesh and physical geography, reinforcing British power over both.