John Harrison

(In French, On Cable TV, March 2021) Films adapted from Clive Barker’s stories are not assured of greatness, and so there’s a meta-textual suspense element to a film daring to tackle Barker’s celebrated Book of Blood series: Will it do justice to it? As it turns out, writer-director John Harrison’s Book of Blood is nowhere near perfect, but it just about inches its way across the “not bad” finishing line. Substantially more stylish and moodier than other comparable horror films, it does delve into Barker’s usual mixture of body mutilation, violent eroticism, free-flowing blood and supernatural scares. After what seems like a lengthy set-up, the film finally gets going in its last twenty minutes or so, finally unlocking the post-mortem horror that it’s been building toward. A few of the film’s main ideas don’t make sense: the scars and inscriptions “telling the story of the dead” are not quite convincingly executed on-screen, and the film does overreach by going both for exploitative gore and for uplifting afterlife expiation at once. Still, as far as tone and execution are concerned, there have been some much, much worse movies to come out of Barker’s work and Book of Blood is intermittently interesting from time to time. It’s not a big success, but it’s better than many similar movies and that’s already not too bad.