Unfairly maligned upon initial release as the result of a faulty advertising campaign and extensive studio tinkering, Clive Barker's ambitious follow-up to the breakout success of Hellraiser (1987) remains a remarkable fantasy epic that never fails to intrigue despite its undeniably distracting shortcomings. Based on Barker's Cabal, this mythical tale of physical transformation amidst an underground world inhabited by an ancient race of monsters was pitched to audiences as a low-rent slasher film, a campaign which served as a box-office death knell following a series of mind-numbing Friday the 13th and Halloween sequels. Add to that the fact that distributor cut the film by roughly 25 minutes, and it's hard not to see that the film was doomed to failure. Weighing in on such heavy issues as questions of mortality and violent xenophobia that alluded to historically significant events like the Holocaust, this story demanded a much wider canvas than Barker, a master of complex storytelling on the written page, was capable of translating given external desires for a commercially acceptable film. With the tables turned and humans portrayed as villains incapable of living with creatures whom they choose not to understand, Barker used a technique of placing real-world issues in a fantasy context in order to create a marked and safely removed social commentary. In this respect, Nightbreed uses the horror genre as it is most effective, and one can only speculate on the potency of this message if it had reached audiences in its pure form.