A new episode of The Mystical Underground is live! “TMU – 0159 – Alexis Brooks – Contact Encounters And Everyday Life”:
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Alexis Brooks is an award-winning broadcast journalist and host of the podcast Higher Journeys with Alexis Brooks. She is the author of Conscious Musings. A veteran of broadcast journalism since 1986, Alexis was simultaneously pursuing a track that would lead her to an intensive study of metaphysical, spiritual, and consciousness-related subjects – areas of inquiry that stemmed from her own extraordinary encounters that began as a child. Alexis has also become recognized for her work within the field of UFOlogy, with emphasis on the ET contact experiencer aspect.
Alexis will be a featured guest at Contact In the Desert June 2-4, 2023.
While I was familiar with Strieber’s and King’s major pop cultural works and life stories from mainstream media, I wasn’t aware of Barker’s until this year.
To be honest, I’m not a fan of Barker’s movies, but they have had a big influence over the pop culture of horror and probably influenced many novelists and screen writers since the mid-80s.
King admits that he gets a lot of his story ideas from dreams (the collective unconscious?) and I would imagine that Barker does, too.
When he was three, Barker witnessed the French skydiver Léo Valentin plummet to his death during a performance at an air show in Liverpool and fall into a cornfield about 20 feet away from where his family were watching the airshow from.
His father was the first to get to the dead man.
He later alluded to Valentin in many of his stories.
I find it interesting that Barker’s movie business took over the ‘Children of the Corn’ movie sequels, since they originated from the King novel.
Did Barker have unresolved childhood trauma from witnessing a man fall to his death in a cornfield?
Could King and Barker be “experiencers” without even knowing it?
King has written a lot of alien themed novels since and Barker’s hell monsters could easily be a more nightmarish version of Whitley’s “visitors” from who knows where?
It honestly wouldn’t surprise me if King was an experiencer. I don’t know about Barker. I’m not all that familiar with this work.
I added a bit more to my original post when I read that Peter Jackson (who would go on to make the Lord of the Rings movies) was asked to direct ‘Hellrasier 3’ but turned it down.
Jackson made an alien movie in New Zealand in 1987, the year the novel ‘Communion’ was released, and if you take a close look at the cover of ‘Communion’ (which I highlight in that post) there is what looks like to me like an image that resembles Jackson’s alien’s head … or am I just seeing things?
I should have written that Jackson’s movie was released in 1987, as he would have been writing and planning it before Whitley’s book hit the bookshops in 87.
Going back to take a look.
It’s synchromystic that you mentioned the clown phobia and Stephen King’s novel ‘IT’, as I have just written a post about Whitley’s novel ‘Communion’, King’s novel ‘IT’ and Clive Barker’ s novel ‘Hellrasier’ coming out around the same time, and then the movies/TV series coming out soon after –
https://brizdazz.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-imagination-of-clive-barker-and.html
I had not watched Barker’s movie ‘Hellraiser 3’ until this week and I was surprised to see on Wikipedia that this movie was released on 9/11 1992 and takes place in New York with many shots of the Twin Towers in the background.
The main character (apart from Pinhead) is a TV reporter who buries the cube in fresh cement in the foundations of a building that seems to be very much like a WTC type building when they show the closing shot of office workers entering the foyer and heading for the lifts.
In all three novels mentioned these creatures are visitors from somewhere else other than Earth terrorizing humans.
I just wonder how much influence these three novels/movies had on people’s thinking and fear of aliens/clowns/demons from the mid-80s onward?
I’ve wondered the same thing, Daz. I suspect the influence was huge. Clowns are achetypally creepy!
Here’s my latest post about Mick Garris the director of ‘The Stand’ (1994) and ‘The Shining’ (1997) and his podcast ‘Post Mortem’ where I found an interview with Clive Barker –
https://brizdazz.blogspot.com/2023/05/the-post-mortem-of-ghosts-and-plagues.html
Garris is friends with both Barker and King having worked with them both before.
Interestingly Garris is making a movie about UFOs and a government cover-up next with working titles of ‘A Noble Lie’ and ‘Invasion’ –
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2081151/?ref_=nm_flmg_unrel_1_dr
“A journalist investigating the UFO cover-up learns too much and becomes part of the conspiracy when she witnesses a meeting between the President and aliens.”
Good research, Daz!