SOURCE: McDonagh, Maitland. “Darklands Here We Come: Future Shockers.” Film Comment 26, no. 1 (January-February 1990): 60-3.

In the following essay, McDonagh discusses Barker's foray into filmmaking, drawing parallels between Barker's career and that of cyberpunk writer William Gibson.

The Greenhouse Effect, computer viruses, nuclear winter, bioethics, tabloid television, space debris, AIDS, dying oceans, serial murderers, the Survivalist Right, crack wars, the population bomb, televangelist scandals, biological warfare, the Rapture, genetic patents. … How did real life get to sound like a scary movie, and what are we going to do about it? Well, maybe we aren't going to do anything about it. But Clive Barker and William Gibson, cutting edge writers who've plunged headlong into film, are. The question is, are we ready for what they have in mind?

Once upon a time we dreamed utopian dreams, relentlessly optimistic fantasies predicated on the notion that the imperfection of this world was...