Clive Barker - bestselling novelist, film-maker, playwright, photographer and artist

The Clive Barker Archive collates Clive’s works in all media, including his working notes, papers and sketches for hundreds of projects – both published and unpublished – dating from the mid-1960’s to the present day.

Launched in 2016, the Clive Barker Archive offers a unique insight into the creative workings of a multi-media artist.

With plans in hand to create a permanent public gallery space in London, sections of the archive will also be presented online. The Clive Barker Archive will continue to create texts and publications exploring Clive’s work, documenting previously unpublished material and celebrating his influence on a generation of creative film-makers, artists and writers.

Phil and Sarah Stokes – authors of the Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy series and the Revelations website – are Clive’s long-time archivists:

“Phil and Sarah understand me better than almost anyone on the planet. They have an encyclopaedic knowledge of who I am and what I’ve done. My relationship with them is one of the great friendships of my life and the permanent placing of my archive with them is a natural culmination of this great, long relationship. They will display many of my works, including handwritten manuscripts, original art and much more. I am moved beyond words, and I’m pleased to no end to be able to make this announcement here and now.”

Clive Barker

Provocative

His name established, Clive has continued to inspire, shock, challenge and agitate in all media whilst mentoring and encouraging creatives around him.  His working methods, captured in his archive, reveal the influences and beliefs that have infused a lifetime of work.   

 Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds

We're delighted to announce that Abrams Books is set to publish Clive Barker's Dark Worlds, a wide-ranging book covering Clive's decades of creative work, as he celebrates his 70th birthday in October 2022.
Assembled with Clive's full input and assistance, drawing on his archive and covering all aspects of his work, this richly illustrated volume showcases a creative life unconstrained by genre or medium.

A deep dive into the creative world and personal archive of master of horror Clive Barker.

”I've seen the future of horror . . . and his name is Clive Barker.”
In the mid-eighties, Stephen King inducted a young novelist into the world of great genre writers, and since then, the genius creator has only continued to expand his field of activity, within and well beyond horror.
Created by his two closest collaborators and with the help of Barker himself, Clive Barker’s Dark Worlds spans his fantastical body of work, highlighting classic characters like Pinhead, an icon in the pantheon of horror cinema; the Hellraiser series; and cult films Nightbreed and Candyman. Barker’s anthology series Books of Blood and epic tales like Weaveworld, Abarat, The Thief of Always, and Imajica have made him a massive name in literature as well as film.
Barker has also created visual narratives for the worlds of comics, toys, and video games, while his art — his incredible paintings, drawings, and photographs, which fill these pages — has been exhibited in galleries all over the world.

Signed copies at Book Soup - Sold Out

Dark Worlds is also available for pre-order from your local book store and via the following retailers:

When you look at yourself through the lens of art, as opposed to the lens of biography, you realise they’re one and the same – yes? So when I started to read the book, I found myself overwhelmed by it... This incredible abundance, this incredible diversity. The fact that I am a singular mind viewing what seems to be a great plurality of minds is bewildering, actually, in a great way.
Every page is different to the page before it, and the page that follows; every one. And the material itself is always different.

Clive Barker

Volume 8 of the Imaginer series, the ongoing presentation of brand new digital capture images of Clive Barker’s astonishing artwork, has now been published by the Clive Barker Archive.

“If people want to know who I am or where I get my ideas from or why I write the things that I do, Imaginer is the answer to that question."

Clive Barker, The Hollywood Reporter, 2014

Phil and Sarah Stokes – authors of the Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy series and the Revelations website and Clive’s long-time archivists – are continuing the multi-volume publication of the definitive collection of Clive’s artwork in the vibrant colour and depth showcased in the first seven volumes.

“We’ve been happily involved with the Imaginer series since its inception and we’re delighted to be bringing the whole venture into the Archive project. Our goal is to bring the finest quality books and other materials to the many friends we’ve come to know through Clive’s works over many years. Our heartfelt thanks to everyone in advance for your support!”

Phil & Sarah Stokes

Volume Eight is available in two editions:

·      the regular edition (limited to 1,000 copies)

·      the deluxe edition, signed by Clive (limited to 100 numbered copies).

As with previous volumes, all copies also include an A4 mini-poster.

Read a new interview with Clive as he turns the pages of Volume Five with us…

Remaining Copies of Imaginer one to seven are available here

Building a working archive

The digitisation of the archive is an ongoing project with the intention of making it increasingly available for public viewing and study. The Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy series of books draws together many elements from the archive to describe the continuum of Clive’s artistic vision. The Imaginer series of volumes offers a view of Clive’s work in oil on canvas, employing specialised scanning to reproduce canvases with an incredibly high degree of fidelity.

Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy: The Works and Worlds of Clive Barker

Memory, Prophecy and Fantasy is the continuing project to document the evolving themes, concerns and passions within Clive's work. With full access to Clive's archives and invaluable contributions from his friends and closest collaborators, for the last fifteen years we have been piecing together fragments, scripts, sketches and ephemera to chart the successes, the failures and the what-might-have-beens, compiling the definitive and illustrated portrait of Clive's work.

What started as a personal exploration into the plays performed by the Dog Company in the years before Clive rose to prominence with his eponymous Books of Blood has blossomed into a multi-volume series that will ultimately cover all of Clive's works, all the way from those earliest plays through his more famous works and right up to the present day.

"I sobbed my heart out because there were so many things in there that I hadn't thought of before. Amazing. Breath-taking. And you have captured, or quoted, or found things I just would not have remembered in my life, you know? I think in some ways I was crying for a life that I'd forgotten. You know, my thoughts, and meanings: you are the keepers of those."

Clive Barker

"I sat down and read from page one through both of the books you did about my life and putting all those pieces in order with all those wonderful illustrations and, I have to tell you, the critical analysis that you guys did of all the material is second to none, it's absolutely breath-taking... Watching you summarise the plays and the stories and then draw it out in a very straightforward, clear fashion what the salient points are: breath-taking. I just wanted you to know that...
"And what the two of you have done with these books, what you are doing, is going to be - when all of us are dead, unfortunately! Certainly when I'm dead! - is going to be a matrix, a model for a way that people won't do things in the future. Just as people don't do things the way Cocteau did things - back in the Fifties there just weren't the models - people don't make art that way anymore and I think the models will have changed again. What you're doing is, doing for me, is what nobody ever did for Cocteau which is to preserve everything. We know almost nothing about his early drivers. We know them only as echoes of what Picasso was doing, we know what Picasso was painting and we know Cocteau's there because he's in a drawing but quite what he was doing there at the age of twenty... ? You know, he obviously was doing something of significance because he's in all the drawings and all the photographs, but nobody knows. And you've done that for me. You've filled in all the blanks."

Clive Barker

The Making of Hellraiser

by Phil and Sarah Stokes

The legacy of Clive Barker's movie, Hellraiser, has reached far into the minds and hearts of filmgoers and filmmakers in the years since its 1987 theatrical release.

It has spawned multiple sequels, inspired three separate runs of comic books, influenced fashion and culture, prompted academic texts and documentaries and added the iconic figure of Pinhead to the pantheon of great horror characters.

This full-colour companion book, scheduled for 2024 (put back due to the Dark Worlds book project overtaking it), includes unseen material drawn from full and exclusive access to Clive's own archived notes, drafts, sketches and screenplays which document his step into the world of feature filmmaking. Alongside these are materials from the archives of New World Pictures and from the archives of cast and crew of the film.

Documenting the journey from vision to page to screen and reflecting reaction at the time, it illuminates the creative passion and commitment from Clive and his collaborators in front of and behind the cameras - a shared passion that forged a landmark in horror movies.

This definitive volume covers:

• early film and theatrical projects from Clive and the Dog Company which pre-figure the themes of Hellraiser;

• the critical reaction to the Books of Blood and The Damnation Game, Clive's first published fiction;

• writing screenplays for Rawhead Rex and Underworld;

• writing The Hellbound Heart as the basis for a possible debut theatrical drecting project;

• collaborations with Christopher Figg, Bob Keen and others in the pre-production stage;

• Clive's first draft screenplay, with annotations and analysis of amendments to the shooting script;

• the detailed shooting schedule;

• pre-production and production artwork;

• casting

• set visits and contemporaneous press reports and cast and crew interviews;

• on-set and behind-the-scenes photographs;

• press and publicity material;

• critical reaction on release;

• the mythology and metaphysics of Hellraiser; and

• the birth of a franchise.

Much has been said about Hellraiser in the three decades since cameras first rolled in September 1986. Featuring exclusive new commentary from Clive himself, this lavishly illustrated, studio-approved, large format book draws out the thoughts and observations of those involved with the film - as they were making it.

The book will contain unpublished and rarely seen materials, such as this on set image, taken by photographer Steve Lyne (high quality prints of which are available at his site). 

For more images see the Archive Gallery.

Gallery Installations