The Hellbound Heart Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Jay McRoy

Critical Essay by Jay McRoy

SOURCE: McRoy, Jay. “There Are No Limits: Splatterpunk, Clive Barker, and the Body in-extremis.” Paradoxa, no. 17 (2002): 130-50.

In the following essay, McRoy categorizes Barker's The Hellbound Heart, Hellraiser, and Nightbreed as examples of the splatterpunk sub-genre.

I. Introduction

In his introduction to the 1990 horror anthology, Splatterpunks: Extreme Horror, Paul M. Sammon locates the authors that comprise his collection as “outlaws” in the tradition of the Marquis de Sade and William S. Burroughs. They are writers, he states, that know “no restraints” and recognize “no boundaries” (xv - xvi).¹ Although ultimately slipping into a discourse of transcendence and “sick”ness, recuperating what he sees as the “essential contradictions of human nature” (emphasis mine), Sammon's positioning of splatterpunk as a genre concerned with disrupting traditional expectations of the human body presents a useful point from which to launch an investigation of three texts by Clive Barker, one of splatterpunk's best known practitioners.