Clive Barker Wanted to Direct ‘Candyman’ in Liverpool: “A Story From the World From Which I Came” [Exclusive]

Clive Barker wanted to direct Candyman himself, and his version would have brought the horror home to Liverpool.

During my exclusive interview with Barker celebrating Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, I asked which of his stories he wished he’d gotten behind the camera to adapt. His answer offered a fascinating glimpse at a very different Candyman.

“I really wanted to direct Candyman, and I would have loved to have had a crack at it by setting it in Liverpool, but I think Bernard (Rose) did a wonderful job with the original film so I don’t regret it,” Barker tells Dread Central.

“I would have stayed closer to the short story since it is a story from the world from which I came,” he added. “Bernard turned it into a story about race, which was absolutely legitimate, but I would love to do a film set in my native city.”

That personal connection is what makes this so interesting. Before Tony Todd became a horror icon in Bernard Rose’s 1992 film, there was “The Forbidden,” Barker’s story from Books of Blood.

The story follows Helen as her research into graffiti on a Liverpool housing estate draws her into a terrifying local legend. Its horror grows out of class divisions, neglected housing, and the dangerous distance between studying a community and understanding it. Rose relocated that foundation to Chicago’s Cabrini-Green, bringing racial violence to the story’s heart.

Barker has previously explained that the move also involved financing. In a 1995 interview with The Dark Side, preserved on , he recalled agreeing that an American-financed adaptation would need an American setting. He supported Rose making the material his own.