Rawhead Rex by Clive Barker

So Clive Barker, in an interview, once said that this story was about “A twelve foot tall phallus that is defeated by a symbol of womanhood. Monster on a rampage stories are about the phallic principle. Large males run around terrorizing women.”
I’ll admit that when I read the name of the story, I did kind of wonder about it, and there are some descriptions of Rawhead that enhance that impression.
But we’re going to ignore that for the moment and talk about the monster. Barker didn’t invent the word ‘Rawhead’, it’s half the name of a creature that’s referred to as Rawhead and Bloody Bones, an English monster that sits in the under the cellar stairs or in the cupboards under the stairs (Watch out Harry Potter!).
When an unsuspecting child would go down into the cellar, the creature would reach through the gaps between the risers and grab the kid by the ankle and pull them through the gap and have a little snack.
Barker takes this idea of child snatching and adds a level of last monster alive to the story. Rawhead Rex is the last of his kind, a throwback to an earlier age when his race owned the land the town of the humans is now built on. He reminds me a bit of Grendel from Beowulf, though Rawhead has no mother to mourn his death, he’s alone.
While I’m not sure I feel sympathy for a creature that eats children and baptizes people by urinating on them (I can only imagine what Communion or Confirmation would be for his worshippers) there is a feeling of melancholy when the villagers smash in his pumpkin-looking head.
The crazy thing is, if this story had been set in medieval times, there never would have been an ounce of sympathy for the marauding beast. But because the story is set in a modern era, it adds a sense of being out of place to Rawhead. Like we say of people who have inappropriate thinking for 2010, Rawhead Rex is a “product of his time,” and somehow that makes the reader feel a bit sad for him. Maybe not when he’s eating children, but he’s just trying to survive the only way he knows how. I feel like he’s also taking revenge for his own slaughtered people too, and that’s an understandable motivation.
One of the easiest ways to stop your enemy is to destroy their young. In Rawhead’s case, this might have worked better if he’d been more than just one lone monster, but I guess in some situations you just have to go with what you know. Child eating does sort of bring me back to Barker’s quote in the beginning of this post, because in most cases, threatening a child causes more fear for parents than actually threatening them does. In nature this is mostly done by the males.
Does all this add up to Rawhead Rex being an effective monster? I think so.
But I have a bit of pity for him as well. In a time before cars and TV and guns and modernity, Rawhead Rex was enough of a terror that they sealed him away instead of killing him. They feared him so much that they didn’t even consider destroying him as an option. When he’s let loose in this world, it doesn’t take long before the villagers band together and take him down. You have to wonder if he was sorry he ever climbed out of that hole in the field in the first place.
Rawhead “Rex” is a king with no subjects or kingdom. Everything he used to have has been stripped away. Now there might have been good reason (the whole child devouring thing), but I still can’t help but feel a bit sad for him.
There’s a really terrible movie made of this story, but if you’re a Clive Barker fan, then it must receive a lot of love despite its awfulness. It was the hatchet job they did on this story that made Barker decide to direct his own movies, and the firstborn child of that decision was ‘Hellraiser.’
All hail Rawhead Rex!