Main cast: Britt Robertson (Jenna), Anna Friel (Mary), Rafi Gavron (Simon), Yul Vazquez (Bennett), Freda Foh Shen (Ellie), and Nicholas Campbell (Sam)
Director: Brannon Braga
Books of Blood is actually the name of a six-volume anthology series that made Clive Barker a household name among fans of horror fiction. Now, you may think this means that there are many good movies to be made out of Mr Baker’s work, but well, his stories can be on the hard-to-make-into-a-movie side. In the stories of this anthology series alone, quite a sizable number of the stories are perverse, obscene, and even pornographic. Good luck turning those stories into moving pictures!
Well, that doesn’t stop some folks from trying. Books of Blood is an anthology-ish movie, in that it features three stories that will be intertwined at certain points of each story, and each story is only superficially similar to the source material.
Okay, in order to give everyone a coherent synopsis, I am going to explain each story in a way that makes most sense. This means that I am explaining things in a different chronological order to the scenes in the movie.
The story that feels like it takes up the most screen time is that of Jenna. She is a young lady from a very wealthy family, one that live in a big house by the side complete with transparent walls so that anyone walking by can see Jenna’s parents shagging on the first-floor bedroom. I wish I’m kidding. Jenna has some kind of PTSD after the suicide of her boyfriend, one that leaves her deeply disoriented and even in pain from listening to jarring or loud sounds around her. She also draws plenty of morbid stuff, the kind that looks like they are painstakingly created by actual artists but instead are somehow drawn in one minute by characters in a movie.
After one too many loud evenings at home, she runs away and eventually finds her way to a bed and breakfast run by the warm and welcoming elderly couple Ellie and Sam. Jenna soon discovers that these two have a dark and morbid way of keeping their guests happy. In a dark kind of irony, this macabre kind of hospitality may be the very thing she is seeking in order to escape her inner demons.
I think this is an original story, as I don’t recall reading any story of this sort by Mr Barker. Do correct me if I am wrong. If I am correct, this is a weird kind of irony in that this is the most effective and thoughtfully put together segment of the bunch. There is proper build-up without relying on lazy jump scares, some pretty good character building, and a haunting pay-off. In a way, this also makes sense, as Mr Barker’s stories can be tough to be made into proper movies, so perhaps an original story not by him being the best one here feels right.
Then we have the story of the origin of the Book of Blood, which by right should have been the most important story here, given the title of the movie. However, it seems like the screenwriters put the most thought on Jenna’s story and then give up on everything else.
Mary is a professor distraught over the death of her young son Miles, which makes her easy prey to Simon, a smooth-talking and attractive younger man that claims to be able to contact the dead. He puts on a show of reaching out to Miles on her behalf, and the two soon fall into a professional partnership as well as a more intimate collaboration, with Mary using her connections to raise funds in order to finance future investigations into the spirit world using Simon as the conduit to these spirits. However, there is more than meets the eye here: it’s pretty obvious early on that Simon is more of a con man than a genuine psychic, but he will soon realize that you don’t mess around with spirits without them messing with you back.
This one is pretty dire in that it turns Mr Barker’s original, darker story into some revenge and comeuppance tale complete with bad and lazy CGI. There is no nuance, dark poetry, nothing here. In the original story, there is a beautiful kind of terror to be had from the way the spirits dispassionately breaks and twists living folks solely to be “heard”, but here, the spirits just want to help Mary get back at the meanie.
Still, Rafi Gavron shows everything but the frontal bits here, so there’s that.
Finally, the third story. Bennett is a loan collector of the shady sort, and when he tries to collect from a bookseller, the bookseller tries to stall things by telling Bennett that he knows where a valuable Book of Blood can be found. Bennett kills the bookseller and then decides to find the book anyway. This one has minimal similarities to the original story this one is supposed to be based off—The Book of Blood (a postscript): On Jerusalem Street—because this time around, it has been changed into a hokey, stupid jump scare-heavy segment that does away with that chilling, memorable ending in the original story by Mr Barker.
So, there is only one good horror story in this Books of Blood, and the remaining parts of the movie feel like a lazy effort to replicate a rushed, low-budget Blumhouse Productions formula. When the highlight of the other parts of the movie is an almost entirely naked Rafi Gavron, or maybe his body double, that’s how dire things can be. Watch it on streaming and feel free to barely pay attention to the boring parts but try not to pay to watch this thing if you value your money. This is another run-of-the-mill horror film that is designed solely to fill up slots on a streaming service, with additional ability to inflict insulting wounds on folks that are very familiar with the original source material.
