Barker is always listed high among the big names in horror that have been strongly inspired and influenced by Lovecraft, right up there with Stephen King, Guillermo del Toro, and all the others. And as I have lately been doing a lot of research into the impact of speculative fiction on the world (not just in the sense of how earlier authors inspired later ones, but in a much larger context, which I will not go into here), I decided to also look into Barker, to see what he had said about Lovecraft and the possible impact of Lovecraft’s fiction on his own work.

I didn’t really find anything.

Except a few comments here and there in obscure interviews that took quite a bit of digging to find online. Such as the following (the text of the interview seems to be gone, but the relevant bits are archived here):

Arthur Machen is wholly neglected in this country and I’m afraid in England, too. He is, to my mind, easily as important as Lovecraft. He’s certainly a better writer, no question, and infinitely subtler in his effects. Infinitely more humane in his philosophies and completely untouched by the anti-Semitism and misogyny, which to my mind is so strong in Lovecraft that it makes the work odious…

…

I’ve never had a taste for Lovecraft. Never understood why anybody would have a taste for Lovecraft.

This is so unoriginal and so predictable that it is not even worth refuting it for the umpteenth time. But not only that, Barker also seems to be on the “Lovecraft is a bad writer” bandwagon:

Lovecraft methodology was to continually hit at the presence of vast unnameable and indescribable forces, which as far as I’m concerned gets a little old after a time. There’s only so many occasions in a book when the author can tell me that the monster was so terrible he doesn’t have words to describe it before I become irritated.

Right from the beginning of my career as an imaginer, I’ve always taken great delight in presenting the reader, or in the case of Hellraiser, the spectator, with precisely imagined and elegantly photographed villains. I’m not interested in a beast that the creator claims he can’t show me.

It is amazing to me that the much lauded Barker seems not to understand the first rule of great horror, and much of great speculative fiction in general, for that matter, which is that you should never reveal too much. As the great Sir Arthur C. Clarke once said, “There are things that are better left to the imagination – which is why so many ‘horror’ movies collapse when some pathetic papier-mache monster is finally revealed.”

No wonder Barker’s films are garbage.