History Film / Nightbreed

A [[MalevolentMaskedMen masked]] SerialKiller is stalking the families of the city, killing them brutally, and Aaron Boone (Creator/CraigSheffer) has been having nightmares where he sees the crimes through his eyes. In his [[PsychicDreamsForEveryone nightmarish dreams]] he also sees the strange, undergound city of Midian and its monstrous inhabitants, feeling a strange pull towards it. The nightmares are so bad he quit the force and had been seeing Doctor Philip Decker (Creator/DavidCronenberg), who is worried he's getting worse. After Dr. Decker's "lithium" nearly gets him run over by a truck, he meets Narcisse (Hugh Ross), a touched man who babbles about Midian, and claims to know where it is. Deciding to take the chance, Boone heads there and promptly gets killed for being suspected of being the serial killer.

* CanadaEh: Downplayed, though not to the extent that CanadaDoesNotExist. Characters acknowledge that they live in Alberta (specifically, Calgary, or "within driving distance"; Edmonton is mentioned to be close by, too) and Boone's Canadian passport is visible in an early scene. The landscape of rolling forests and mountains is also distinctively Canadian.

A [[MalevolentMaskedMen masked]] SerialKiller is stalking the families of the city, killing them brutally, and Aaron Boone (Craig Sheffer) has been having nightmares where he sees the crimes through his eyes. In his [[PsychicDreamsForEveryone nightmarish dreams]] he also sees the strange, undergound city of Midian and its monstrous inhabitants, feeling a strange pull towards it. The nightmares are so bad he quit the force and had been seeing Doctor Philip Decker (Creator/DavidCronenberg), who is worried he's getting worse. After Dr. Decker's "lithium" nearly gets him run over by a truck, he meets Narcisse (Hugh Ross), a touched man who babbles about Midian, and claims to know where it is. Deciding to take the chance, Boone heads there and promptly gets killed for being suspected of being the serial killer.

* CanadaEh: Downplayed, though not to the extent that CanadaDoesNotExist. Characters acknowledge that they live in Alberta (specifically, Calgary and Edmonton) and Boone's Canadian passport is visible in an early scene. The landscape of rolling forests and mountains is also distinctively Canadian.

* CanadaEh: Downplayed, though not to the extent that CanadaDoesNotExist. Characters acknowledge that they live in the city of Calgary, and Boone's Canadian passport is visible in an early scene. The landscape of rolling forests and mountains is also distinctively Canadian.

* CanadaEh: Downplayed, though not to the extent that CanadaDoesNotExist. Characters acknowledge that they live in the city of Edmonton, and Boone's Canadian passport is visible in an early scene. The landscape of rolling forests and mountains is also distinctively Canadian.

* HateSink: Captain Eigerman is a [[PoliticallyIncorrectVillain racist, fascist, homophobic]] RabidCop and all around JerkAss. He orders an assault on Midian — [[WouldHurtAChild including the children]] — verbally abuses and threatens Reverend Ashberry for calling him out on his genocide, beats up Boone in his cell, and even starts trying to shoot at the "sons of the free" as they try to flee. Not a very pleasant man, to say the least.

* AndThenJohnWasAZombie: [[spoiler:Villainous variation in the theatrical cut. The hateful serial killer Dr. Decker, who despises everything that isn't him and regarded the Nightbreed as vermin that he wanted to exterminate, becomes a Nightbreed himself in the SequelHook at the end when the priest revives him. Now he's an undead, superpowered serial killer more dangerous than ever.]]

A [[MalevolentMaskedMen masked]] SerialKiller is stalking the families of the city, killing them brutally, and Aaron Boone has been having nightmares where he sees the crimes through his eyes. In his [[PsychicDreamsForEveryone nightmarish dreams]] he also sees the strange, undergound city of Midian and its monstrous inhabitants, feeling a strange pull towards it. The nightmares are so bad he quit the force and had been seeing Doctor Decker, who is worried he's getting worse. After Dr. Decker's "lithium" nearly gets him run over by a truck, he meets a touched man who babbles about Midian, and claims to know where it is. Deciding to take the chance, Boone heads there and promptly gets killed for being suspected of being the serial killer.

** [[spoiler: Decker is resurrected in the theatrical cut of the film by Ashberry. However in Cabal, the Epic Comics adaptation, and the Director's Cut, he stays dead.]]

* VoiceOfTheLegion: How Peloquin talks.

* CreepyMonotone: Decker speaks in a calm, low, monotone register. He makes it seem like he does it because he wants to soothe his patients. He's in fact an unempathetic, murderous psychopath.

* WhiteMaskOfDoom: The serial killer wears a full head white mask with [[EyelessFace button eyes]], made even more chilling by his soothing and reasonable voice.

* CanadaEh: Not so much, actually. It takes place in Edmonton and points north, but beyond mentioning that fact, the setting has no effect on the story and nothing stereotypically Canadian is used or even mentioned.

* {{Flanderization}}: Ashberry in the new comic series. In the original film he turns evil after being burned by Baphomet but prior to that he was halfway decent and even tried to stop Eigerman from massacring the Nightbreed. In the comics even before meeting them he's shown as a full-blown religious zealot (whereas in the film he didn't even believe in the existence of Satan) quoting Bible scripture and murdering people. Likewise in events taking place after the film he's still depicted as such even though the film shows him removing his priest's collar before encountering Baphomet.
%%* FirstEpisodeResurrection
* FourEyesZeroSoul: Decker. He's more of a monster than every being in Midian combined, and he's the only character in the movie with prominent glasses.
** Also Eigerman, the fascist police captain of Shereneck County. He loses the glasses at the end, though.

* [[LastOfHisKind Last of Their Kind]]: Midian is a whole city of this. Strange beings nearly hunted to extinction and one-of-a-kind freaks all find refuge there.

* OurVampiresAreDifferent: All of the Nighbreed are vampiric to some extent. They crave blood and flesh and the sunlight hurts them. But the variety of their appearances and individual traits are vast. Aaron Boone is the closest to "your average vampire" in his Nightbreed form. He's more or less a [[Series/BuffyTheVampireSlayer Buffy-style]] vampire with an increased resistance to sunlight.
* PhysicalGod: Baphomet, the creator of Midian. What it IS though, seems to be a mystery even to the Breed.

* FamilyExtermination: Dr. Philip Decker is a SerialKiller who is obsessed with exterminating the human race. His EstablishingCharacterMoment shows him breaking into a family's home to kill them all, and later scenes indicate that this is his ''modus operandi''.

With a music score by Music/DannyElfman very reminiscent of ''Film/{{Batman}}'', ''Nightbreed'' is a gorgeous, disgusting movie with a captivating mythical mood. The titular Nightbreed aren't quite monsters, and the humans aren't exactly saints either.

* PsychoPsychologist: At first Dr. Decker seems like a concerned psychologist who feels obliged to report Aaron Boone to the authorities for all the apparent murders that Boone committed during his blackouts. He prescribes Boone some medication to keep him from having another episode until he turns himself in. Turns out that the drugs are actually hallucinogens, Decker is the real killer and has framed Boone for his own crimes.

* DarkIsNotEvil: The Midians... though definitely ''not'' harmless. And definitely not all of them if the ImAHumanitarian tendencies of Peloquin are anything to go by.

* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: The protagonist gets a sword through the back, pinning him to a card table. Being semi-undead, he removes the table and continues fighting with the sword still in place and a card stuck on it. [[spoiler:He finally kills his enemy by hugging him, impaling him on the sword as well.]]

* AdaptationalVillainy: [[spoiler: Ashberry in the novel ends up crippled, and spouting prophetic gibberish Eigermann intends to decrypt to aid him in his revenge on the Nightbreed. In both versions of the film, he's the one intent on hunting them to extinction. The Boom Comics series even goes so far as to make him secretly a zealot SerialKiller.]]

The film production saw quite a bit of ExecutiveMeddling, most prominently resulting in a FocusGroupEnding, which deviated quite a bit from the original novel's ending. Clive Barker was vocally unhappy about the studio interference, and for years afterwards, he longed for the recovery of the reels so the film might be re-edited. Russell Cherrington, a film scholar at the University of Derby, was eventually able to get his hands on a couple of different workprint cuts of the film through various sources, recompiling them in 2012 into a 159-minute cut (as opposed to the studio approved version's 102 minutes) that was much closer to Clive Barker's original vision, called ''The Cabal Cut''.

The release of the ''The Cabal Cut'' generated much renewed interest in the film, leading Creator/ShoutFactory to obtain the license to the film in 2013. Shout! Factory was eventually able to recover the original film reels, allowing Clive Barker himself to put a official ''DirectorsCut'' version (clocking in at 122 minutes), which was released in 2014.

The release of the ''The Cabal Cut'' generated much renewed interest in the film, leading Creator/ShoutFactory to obtain the license to the film in 2013. Shout! Factor was eventually able to recover the original film reels, allowing Clive Barker himself to put a official ''DirectorsCut'' version (clocking in at 122 minutes), which was released in 2014.