Rawhead Rex

Rawhead Rex
by Clive Barker

Saturday night I read the short story Rawhead Rex, and Sunday morning I surfed around a little and found/watched the 1986 film by the same name. Both left me with the same question.

Why does Rawhead do what he does?

It isn’t necessarily that he lacked motivation. It was that the motivation was part and parcel of his existence. Rawhead’s only purpose in existing is to rape, kill, and destroy. In Barker's words: "He lived in the eternal present of his hunger and his strength, feeling only the crude territorial instinct that would sooner or later blossom into carnage." He’s not fulfilling needs by doing it. He defiles whatever he comes across, unless it is a lady having her lady-time.

More on that later.

The name for the creature seems to come from a figure in British folklore dating back to the early 1700s, which was used as a boogey man to frighten children. But the figure from the book has little in common with this incarnation - instead, Rawhead more closely resembles the giants from Welsh mythology. He is effectively immortal, hugely powerful, brutal, and eats children. Or, to be more accurate, he prefers children: he’ll eat anybody.

Rawhead is kind of unusual in that his lack of meaningful motivation is part of his character - it is intentional. There is an image that crops up for me in fantasy settings quite a lot. The evil king, sitting on his throne made of skulls, killing his lieutenants every so often and turning the countryside into a desert. What bugs me about that kind of character is that there’s never any reason to do those things - it’s just a way to show they are evil, like wearing black or having a spooky helmet. A basic thing about thinking creatures is that we all think what we’re doing is justified. Even if we’re doing something awful, we think deep down that it is the right thing to do in the circumstances. That’s why we do it. Those characters don’t have internally consistent motivations, and neither does Rawhead. But where I find it annoying in other circumstances, here it works. Rawhead doesn’t think in those terms because he’s a force of nature, not a rational creature. For this type of monster it doesn’t occur to ask “why am I breaking everything in the house? I could use some of this stuff”. He breaks it because it’s there.

Rawhead is sort of the ultimate monster - he’s a weird blend of animal and man with a totally foreign way of thinking. Presenting him is a balancing act - but it’s done well, and I think he is a compelling figure. Making him a figure out of the past helped enormously with distancing his thinking process from what we’d think of as ‘normal’.

Now that’s not to say the story was perfect. Making Rawhead afraid of menstruating women was an odd choice, at least to me. I understand Barker was setting up a parallel for women as ‘creators’ to be the opposite of Rawhead’s pure destruction, but it just seemed like a reach, considering his willingness to perform rape and his food of choice. I also objected strongly to the way some characters responded to Rawhead, particularly Declan. Setting Rawhead up as a figure that people would worship pulled me out of the story. It is an idea that comes up in many of the stories in Books of Blood, and each time I have been bothered by it. I can’t fathom of someone seeing a horrible monster and thinking the best course of action is to pray to it. Especially if that involves being peed on.

Interestingly, that scene was in the film version. I thought sure when I found out there was a movie they’d do something else to show the ‘baptism’ of Declan. And in a way, they did - the scene was shot in such a way that it looked more like Rawhead was . . . er . . . doing something else. I think it was mostly because of the noises the actor was making.

On the subject of the film, holy rusted metal, Batman. I don’t think there was a single scene with Rawhead’s face in it that didn’t make me laugh - he looked like a horse and a dog had a baby and dressed it up like a hell’s angel. The clearly fake rippling torso was just as bad. And they didn’t even try to make him seem bigger than a normal man. There were a few changes to the plot: family man Ron doesn’t save the day, his wife does (the statue is only effective if held by a woman - which actually made more sense than the story ending), and the priest played a much smaller role in the film. The story was thought provoking, but the same cannot be said of the movie.