YMMV / Nightbreed

• Anvilicious: Humans have a shocking capacity for hatred, and that is a Bad Thing.
• Awesome Music: None other than the fabulous Danny Elfman working at the top of his game.
• Broken Base: While for the film itself the base is pretty strong. The broken part comes about mainly over the releases of the Director's Cut and Cabal Cut. These have been pretty harshly divided on whether the parties involved were doing Baphomet's work or were pandering to only part of the wider breed base.
• Complete Monster (the comics can be found here):
  • Dr. Philip Decker is far eviler than any of the actual monsters in the film. He masquerades as a renowned psychologist, but is actually a masked, bayonet-wielding Serial Killer who butchers families—including the children—women he comes across; and anyone else he can get his hands on. He sees himself as a Death-like figure on a mission to stop the continuation of mankind. After Decker's psychiatric patient Aaron Boone tells him his dreams of the Nightbreed civilization, he frames Aaron for his crimes and gets Aaron killed by the police. When he learns of Aaron's resurrection and the existence of the Tribes of the Moon, he tries to exterminate the civilization of magical creatures as the ultimate extension of his mission to cleanse the world.
  • Director's cut: Police Captain Eigerman is the worst humanity has to offer alongside Dr. Decker. A Glory Hound who cares nothing for the truth of Decker's murders, Eigerman later leads his forces into the city of Midian with intent to slaughter the Tribes of the Moon. Initiating a brutal purge of even the Nightbreed women and children, Eigerman uses explosive charges, flamethrowers, and guns on Nightbreed civilians, gleeful about the chance to butcher as many as he possibly can before demanding the transformed Reverend Ashberry follow him in murdering the survivors.
• Creepy Awesome: In a movie full of deformed monsters, Decker is the scariest character by far. Not that that's a bad thing.
• Cult Classic: It's fallen under the radar compared to some of Clive Barker's more well-known efforts, but still has a devoted fanbase.
• Evil Is Cool: Dr. Decker, even those who aren't members of the Breed fandom have called him the clear highlight of the movie.
• He Really Can Act: Fans of the film tend to really enjoy David Cronenberg's turn as the murderous Dr. Decker, though his legitimately creepy mask is doing a lot of the heavy lifting, and his flat, weak voice could only work as a creepy psychopath.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Shuna Sassi impales with her quills a soldier named Kenny.
  • Also, some of the Midianites look like the sewer mutants from Futurama.
• Ho Yay: None of which is likely accidental, given that Clive Barker is openly gay.
  • Peloquin's... hunger for Boone carries a metric ton of Does This Remind You of Anything?.
  • Leroy Gomm and Lude are...rather close. Apart from all the shoulder-touching, during Boone's dream there's a blink and you'll miss moment after 0.28, where Lude falls on the ground and Leroy looks around for him. If you slow down the video, you'll see that when he bends toward him, their faces touch.
  • Also, Narcisse complimenting Ohnaka's tattoos and touching his chest (much to Ohnaka's dismay)
  • The film is notable in that Clive Barker originally wrote Cabal while still not publicly out - critics have noted Midian being a safe haven for the outcast Nightbreed being incredibly similar to the real-life trend of gay men in the 70s and 80s holing up in gay-friendly enclaves like San Francisco, NYC, or gayborhoods like Chicago's Boystown or Fire Island. Alejandro Jodorowsky would later publicly call the film the "the first truly gay horror fantasy epic".
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Eigermann crosses it by declaring war on the Nightbreed. He was always a sociopathic Glory Hound with no concern for Decker's victims, but he really acted on his inner cruelty once he decided to take vigilante action and start killing the monsters indiscriminately, children included, going well beyond his duties as Captain, even going as far as shooting at a deserter who had second thoughts about the lynching.
  • Likewise, Decker was way past this by the beginning of the movie. He had already claimed at least 15 victims, all of them families with children. Although he crosses the line from serial murder into the outright genocide of the Nightbreed after his encounter with an undead Boone, which he followed up by torturing and killing an old man to coax him into telling him the 'Breed's weaknesses so that he can tell the fascist Eigermann what he needs to know about them to hasten his insane mission to cleanse the world of "filth".
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The Director's Cut, ironically enough. While it's true the manner of bringing Decker back to life in the original film did ruin the character of Ashberry, the idea of him coming back to life still makes sense. He had been impaled along with Cabal, and could logically have been infected with his blood.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: Oddly enough, the more human-looking Midians (ie. the guy with the crescent-shaped head) are much creepier than the ones who look just plain demonic.
• Unintentional Period Piece: The Nightbreed all have some sort of monstrous aspect to their appearance... except for Ohnaka, who just has tattoos and nipple rings. In 1988, tattoos and body piercings were a lot "edgier" than in modern times, so someone with a few tattoos would look bizarre enough to fit in with monsters.

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