The Cabal Cut of Clive Barker’s monster action film Nightbreed, starring body horror king David Cronenberg, has been offically confirmed for a Blu-ray release by Shout! Factory and Morgan Creek.
Barker’s adaptation of his novel Cabal was notoriously cut to ribbons by the studio on its release in 1990 and for years there were rumours of lost footage that gave the film more dramatic heft and more scenes of Cronenberg’s terrifying Dr Decker, as well as helping the plot make sense. The footage was finally pieced together by Phil and Sarah Stokes, Russell Cherrington, Jimmi Johnson and Mark Miller, word was put out at Occupy Midian, and the long lost cut was screened in the US and the UK last year at festivals like FrightFest.
For those unlucky enough to miss it on the festival circuit, Shout! Factory and Morgan Creek are finally giving Nightbreed a proper restoration (much of the lost footage was seriously degraded) and a loving Blu-ray treatment, and Barker couldn’t be happier.
“I had a dream about the tribes of the moon. They would live in a city called Midian and, though they were monsters of every shape and size, they would be the heroes of a movie called NIGHTBREED. However, when I made the movie, the studio was not comfortable with this inversion of the classic structure. They wanted the monsters to be simple-minded scare machines, while I wanted them to be the dark side of all of us, mysterious and misunderstood. Finally, with this new version of NIGHTBREED, which contains over forty five minutes of previously unseen material, my original vision has been realized. Come with me to Midian, the city of monsters. The tribes of the moon await us.”
