RAWHEAD REX is the second film written by Clive Barker (the first being TRANSMUTATIONS) and the first of many films based on Barker’s seminal BOOKS OF BLOOD stories, which turned Barker into a monumental voice in horror pretty much overnight. It is absolutely rough around the edges and not a movie by any means beloved by its creator. But the original short story was designed to be Barker’s own take on a late night monster movie, and the film absolutely succeeds in being exactly that.
Rawhead Rex is an ancient pagan demigod from a time before Christianity took over the Western world. He was buried beneath what has become a devoutly Catholic village in Ireland, and when the stone keeping him trapped in the earth is disturbed, he returns to run amok. He is aided, in a sense, by a rambling mad priest who takes one look at the monster and renounces God, to pledge his allegiance to the Beast. The power dynamics, as if often the case with Barker, are not subtle. In one of the movie’s most infamous scenes, Rawhead “baptizes” the priest, Declan, by urinating directly onto his head.
That’s exactly the kind of thing you’re getting from RAWHEAD REX. But make no mistake, it delivers plenty of monster carnage, and goes to lengths I think not many people would expect. I won’t get into details, but in one of the film’s other most shocking moments, the monster kills a kid. This is still considered a taboo in horror, and felt especially off-limits to cheap, fun ‘80s monster movies. Yes, a kid died in PUMPKINHEAD, but that was the setup for the entire plot. This, essentially, just happens. That’s the harrowing thing about it.
What makes that moment so effective is that earlier in the movie, there is another kid who gets attacked by Rawhead and survives. That was a random kid in the middle of Rawhead’s rampage through the forest. So of course we expect (SPOILER) the protagonist’s son to make it. It’s not even really brought into question. There’s even a fake-out with the daughter just before, to really lay it on thick that the children are safe. And they’re not. It happens in broad daylight, as blunt as a car accident.
RAWHEAD REX is a schlocky monster movie with a creature that looks like Pumpkinhead on the cover of a romance novel, if he was a member of Dokken. But it’s also an impactful slice of folk horror, about paganism versus modern religion, and that repressing primal nature only causes that nature to return and run wild, unchecked and insatiable.