This film “The Forbidden” belongs to the unspoken dilogy of amateur-student productions of Clive Barker and his theater troupe The Dog Company. The first work was called “Salome”, by the way.
Cinematic short sample shot on 16 mm film requires two approaches to consideration. The first and most popular is from the viewer watching a number of almost incoherent sketches, grotesque scenes, visual flashes and other finds of the performance of prepared metaphors, flavored with sound effects reminiscent of chaotic loud dissonance without claims to musical rhythm or any structure at all. All this in the translational mix affects the development of feelings, emotions, associations in connection with the influx of irrational “pictures” that strike the eye with the technique of changing black to white. That is, when the positive gives way to the negative. The frames are grotesque, scrupulous, bold and naturalistic, in fact, on what the company from The Dog grew on the stage, creating in the genre of Grand Guignol. Before us are crazy sets of incomprehensible symbols, close-ups of disparate objects, a silhouette in a monster mask, cutting a person into the details of the body, a virtuoso game of shadows and light (perverted, if you remember the move with the total power of negativity) and much more that can happen in the head of Barker, who always referred to himself as a fantasist, and books, painting, films and other things are just a set of subordinate tools that help to throw out images of the subconscious.
Actually, the total short meter provides a kind of horror spectacle in the key of the art house. However, there is another view of the work, belonging exclusively to admirers of the work of the Grandmaster with an obligatory knowledge base of his screen and literary works. That’s what I wanted to tell you a little bit below.
Although “Forbidden” is a complete visual series, it is also a sketch, a draft, the foundation for a number of subsequent works by Clive Barker. Almost in every scene and image you can see the obvious (as yet awkward and foggy) background for the birth of a part of the mass cult in the horror genre. For example, a scene of cutting a person in parts, naturalistically showing footage of a still-living silhouette with no skin and bare muscle ligaments, will later firmly enter Hellraiser to develop further. The famous Senobite monster Pinhead will also appear here, but on an associative level in the form of meticulous even rows of hammered nails, whose delineated network of crossroads will be explored for a long time by camera work, as if a madman worships impeccable lines of refracted light from metal spires. The subject is not alive, but it is presented clearly spiritualized, at least for the benefit of considerable directorial attention. The theme of the forbidden, hidden from the ordinary world, but necessarily somewhere melting the secrets of other terrible spaces and dimensions, whose guiding thread is looking for a man obsessed with finding - is also well known for its similarity with the frequent plot of Barker in literature or cinema. Or let us say the very core of the current story about the individual gradually in the course of timekeeping, absorbing a comprehensive knowledge of himself and his surroundings, regardless of the laws of physics and logic - is this not the transcendent "pleasures" that the demons-senobites from the cult book and film give? And this is a couple of references among others, which are better to guess personally, pleasantly finding the protagonists familiar to the creations of the writer’s imagination.
As a result, for viewers who love atypical cinema, "Forbidden" is another curious creation with a number of interpretations, but for viewers who love unusual cinema and are fond of the work of Clive Barker - an extremely entertaining journey into the mind of a young artist of horror and dark fantasy, where weak sprouts of his future endeavors appeared. I belong to the second category, so I am very happy to view, and for you, I hope, opened the dualism of the screen “picture”.
8 out of 10