Doug Bradley

I choose to put myself in in this prof profession and we choose to put our work in front of the public. If the public likes what you did nearly forty years ago, I last played the character uh twenty twenty plus years ago, but first played the character this year, forty years ago, the movie was released forty years ago next year. That's something, you know? And it tells you all the time, wow, you did something right.

Are you interested in angels, demons, ghosts, spirits, and monsters? Are you curious about their origins, tales, and influence upon history and on the present day? If so, then sit back, relax, and welcome to Seven Demonology, the podcast that explores all of this and more.

Hey everyone, welcome back to another episode of the Wandering Road Podcast. I'm your host, Chris. Co-hosting me with me today is Mr. JJ, the host of the Southern Demonology podcast. And joining us today, a very special guest. Been working on this for a few months, ever since I met him at Steel City Con. I'm a big fan of his films that he starred in as Pinhead. Yes, you heard that correctly. And if you're watching this, the horror icon, Mr. Doug Bradley, is joining us on the show today. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Hi guys. Hi, Chris. Good to see you again. And nice to meet you, JJ.

Hi. It is an honor to have you here. I have been I I can't tell you how excited I have been for this night.

Yes, listeners, if you've noticed Doug Bradley said, you know, talking to me again. If you like football, aka as the Americans call it, soccer, he was on the Let's Get Footy podcast. Footy. I'm sorry, Doug. Not footy, footy podcast. Footy. Footy.

To talk uh you gotta gotta soften that T and get it into a Liverpool accent.

Yeah, footy. I gotta go stay in uh Liverpool for a little bit. That that is one of my goals, like to make this podcast my main source of income so I can get a season ticket, stay over in Liverpool, and just go just go to the game.

I'm not gonna say anything, Chris, because you we we said we will not mention football.

No, no, yes, correct. Yeah, yeah. J poor JJ will be out of his death here with that one. So that wouldn't be accurate. But yes, folks, we have Mr. Doug Bradley with us here today. I'm very excited for this episode. It's been in all my years, well, all my three years doing podcasting. If I would have told myself three years ago, hey, you're going to have a podcast with someone that was friends with and acted with Chris Farley in Brandon Morgan, and you would have Doug Bradley, a horror icon who played the famous pinhead character in the Hellraiser movies on your podcast again.

And I would have told you, you're crazy. Weirder things have happened. For today, Doug, I know you've done multiple interviews, and I know a lot of them have probably asked you about the pinhead character and the Hellraiser movies. We're gonna touch on that a little bit, but what I'm really interested in is your thoughts on the paranormal. Before we started recording, you said you've done some investigations yourself. You had you said that you're an atheist, you were interested in Skinwalker Ranch and Stonent Day theory and all these other topics.

So I would love to dive into your perspective on the paranormal world for today's show.

I don't remember a time when I wasn't intrigued by it. And as a kid, it was particularly ghosts, which I couldn't get enough of, but which scared me silly. The idea of them scared me. I grew up in in a religious family, Methodist, church every Sunday and Sunday school. And and as we you know, as time time went by, I disengaged myself from that. I I got as far as going to membership classes for the church, that would be probably when I was about 15, and uh a fledgling Hittie.

And we spent the first few weeks talking about what is God and just throwing ideas about what we thought God might be around. And I was, you know, getting into mystical ideas and all that kind of stuff, getting interested in in UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster and mythology, and so that was all very cool. And then after a few weeks, the assistant minister was young and a bit hip. He later was forced to leave the church in disgrace because he was found to be having an affair with what his per married parishioners.

Anyway, uh he's he said, So we've we've spent these weeks talking about God and what we think God might be, and I think it would be safe to say that we've reached the conclusion that that we don't know. And I thought, hmm, I was expecting the big reveal. I was expecting, you know, that you would pull back the curtain and and tell me. Because you, you know, you're a you're a man of the cloth, you wear the collar, you're a man of God, you profess to understand all this. And I'm I want you to tell me, because I don't.

And his conclusion was we don't know what God is, but it doesn't matter that we don't know what God is, it only matters that we believe that God is. And I m my reaction to that was really? Said it? Is that all is that is that all you've got? Because if you're saying you don't know what God is, then you're acknowledging that you think he might not be, which seemed seemed to me kind of weird. So I checked out and moved by degrees from agnosticism to atheism. But I call myself a religious atheism atheist, and I know that will sound contradictory. It's fine, it's contradictory.

In terms of strict Christian theology, you know, the the creation, the the Genesis story and Jesus, the Son of God, born of a virgin, and love and all of that, I'm emphatically an atheist. And I think I lean rather towards a Lovecraftian view of the universe, that it is rather cold and rather distant, and fundamentally it doesn't give a fuck about me or us. And I don't see the need or the evidence for a god anywhere. Now, after all, if it if it if it hadn't been for the the asteroid landing in the Yucatan Peninsula, chances are this would still be a planet of dinosaurs.

You know, it's only by accident that the mammals got a foothold and developed to where we are now. And I think we're very anthropomorphic in our theological views. We you know we we we all know the model of i if you compress the history of the earth into a year, you know, the the the dinosaurs disappeared somewhere around December the tenth, and we appeared about ten seconds to midnight, and that's the the sum total of human existence, and I think it's very presumptuous of us to think that we're in any way special.

If I were to go to a purely mechanistic view of the world and us and the universe and love, life, death, and the whole damn thing, like Dawkins kind of mechanistic view of it all, it seems to me that it throws a lot of the baby out with the bathwater, and I'm too steeped in poetry and uh literature and imagination and the life of the imagination to be able to to to step away from all of that entirely, nor do I want to.

But also I I give it that title in a way to to want to reclaim the religious impotence impetus, the the sense of the numinous, because a lot of my rejection of of religion is is rejection of the monotheistic religions, specifically Christianity, Judaism, and um Islam, all the the children of of Abraham or Ibrahim, the children of the book, which is only, you know, again, a few thousand years of history. And we're a lot older than that, and our experience is much older than that.

And so it's to go back, you know, to a time in a sense where there was no distinction between the sacred and the profane. Everything was sacred, everything was meaningful, everything was powerful. That's where I tie up that contradiction of calling myself a religious atheist. Obviously, being an atheist, I don't I don't think I believe in life after death, which is a bit of an issue when you go ghost hunting. I've had plenty of strange experiences that I can't explain. But I've never seen a ghost. I get bothered when people easily talk about the spirits.

Everybody assumes they're talking to the spirits, the spirits of of the dead, and I don't know that I have evidence that that is true. It may be, it may not be. I I don't know. I think a lot of assumptions are made about what's going on with experiences of the supernatural, a lot of which I think may actually be very natural. But that's so that's a kind of a kind of nutshell summary, if at all makes sense. No naturally follows that if I don't believe in God, I don't believe in the devil, with apologies to the southern demonologist.

I don't I d I don't think I believe in demons other than what goes on inside our heads. But I don't know that I believe in an external reality of that. No doubt you will be able to tell me of experiences that that will refute that point of view, but that's that's my basic belief.

Well, I mean it's better to profess that belief as someone who doesn't believe in Christianity as opposed to a Christian who firmly says that they don't they don't believe in the devil or hell or anything else, because it's a little contradictory in that front. But I I can respect that.

Well much of much of that is man-made anyway, isn't it, JJ? I mean, you know, the the the devil is barely mentioned in the Bible. I believe the the Old Testament word in the Hebrew is is shaitan, which means only uh the enemy.

Or really it means it's a legalistic term that means the chief prosecutor. Okay.

Wow, okay.

Yeah, and it's not the which is the chief prosecutor. So it's in the Hebrew Bible, there's only one word that can be kind of known as referring to a demonic thing, and that is Shair, which is like a fawn-like or goat-like entity. But other than that, there's only illusions in the Hebrew Bible, and it only gets you only find like true development of that within later times. If you don't know, I'm I'm an academic when it comes to like Second Temple Judaism and angelogy and demonology from a textual perspective, not a practical perspective. Uh and I kind of delve into all of that.

So I I can I can go off the deep end on that front.

So I'm not trying to So that's like a that's like a like a pan-like figure. Like it is, Pan. Right. And what what I think is interesting about that is is that the the the figure of Pan very much reflects nature and ref it seems to me, and reflects nature as both a beneficent and a malevolent force. You know, nature holds us and feeds us and nurtures us and keeps us warm and makes us happy and all of that. And it will also wipe us out in a heartbeat with floods or you know, lightning or famine or or whatever, and Pan seems very much to reflect those two extremes.

I guess like Kali, the great the great goddess figure of Hinduism, she is she is the nurturing mother and the destroyer simultaneously. Whereas Christianity particularly tends to bifurcate all all the time. It it it always wants to be in a in a in a white hat, black hat universe. It, you know, this is good and this is bad, and these things can't be the same thing at the same time.

Which is a fascinating development because ancient Judaism was there there was no duality. It was right everything comes from God. If it's a lying spirit, it came from God. If it's a good thing, it came from God. And it's only in Second Temple Judaism do you get that kind of Persian Zoroastrian influence that creates this search for the devil, which takes around 300 years to complete. And it's only by consensus is it actually kind of settled on later on. But we assume that whatever we receive is kind of written out in the Bible and you're good to go, and that's not the case whatsoever.

No, it's a very confused and confusing document, it seems to me, especially the Old Testament. I suppose to some extent, are we going there to the problem of of Job and you know, Job's question? I've been I've been a good and faithful servant all my life, and why do you do this to me? And the question of if God is omnipotent, then where does evil come from? But to be simplistic about it, where does childhood cancer come from? If God is omnipotent, then he must have the ability to make that make those things not happen. He must have had the ability to not let evil exist in the world.

So th there are two choices. Either God is omnipotent and chose to let evil and childhood cancer and so so on and so forth exist in the world, which rather raises the question, why? If you if you had the option of not doing that, or the forces of evil are forces that God can't control, in which case he's not omnipotent.

Well, and Job is an interesting case study as well, just beyond those questions, because that story has been it was it it it predates the Hebrew Bible by a very long time. It was an old Persian tale that was adopted into the Hebrew Bible. Okay, and then later it gets a Hollywood ending where you know God grants Job a new family and everything else, which doesn't answer any of the questions, of course, that you just raised. It's just well, he didn't get his family back, he got a new family. Is that the same? No, no, no. A few a few plagues along the way as well. Yes.

It's one of the reasons why students that study Hebrew don't they're not really allowed to even touch Job from a uh from a study perspective until they have five or ten years of experience under their belt because it's so complicated.

Really? And Carl Gustav Jung wrote an entire book on the question of Job.

Doug, you said something that I wanted to touch on towards the beginning. You said you had quite a few interesting experiences. With regards that uh I'm assuming you would consider them eerie or paranormal. One thing I always like to say is that the reason all of us like horror and the paranormal and UFOs, ghosts, demons, whatever, that that range of topics, it just doesn't happen. There's always like I call it a gateway drug. There's always one thing that happens.

And when you said you had quite a few things, strange things that happened to you, I was wondering, is that related to what got you into this type of genre of the paranormal and horror? Or was it your relationship with Clive and his works that kind of piqued your interest as well? Or was there some a few things that happened when you were younger that were unexplainable that kind of drew you in more?

I'm s I'm sure my bedroom walls spoke to me one night. But but no, as I say, I d I as a kid, I think it it it was that that obsession with ghosts. If if I try and draw a timeline, my gateway into horror would begin with Granada Television in the northwest of England, commercial TV station. It started a series called Appointment with Fear, and this would be again when I was a teenager that came on at 10.30, I think every Monday night, right after news at 10. And they basically ran the entire hammer back catalogue. So that was that was my kind of my entry into horror.

I have my my Peter Cushing shirt on today, who is my God, a horror actor. Not for the occasion, that's just that's purely accidental. Next cap off the rank. And then I guess from there I would have, you know, discovered then the the classic universal movies and moved on to other things.

And around that same time would be the time that I was cast in the school play at Quarry Bank High School in Liverpool, and you know, was told to report to rehearsals, which I did, uh which was, I've said, the day that changed my life because among my fellow cast members was this uh extraordinary fellow called Clive Barker. This is probably around 1969, 70, I think, in that academic year, I think. So that was the start of my relationship with with Clive. And so all of that process then kind of moved forward.

And and and and obviously, you know, that that involved a lot of talk about the the occult and discovering cinema generally and wider fields of horror cinema, discovering Lovecraft. I had already, as a boy, I had uh I had taken taken a book off my father's bookshelves purely because the the title intrigued me, and the title was Tales of Mystery and Imagination, so I had I had already discovered Poe, which is a lifelong love that has never gone away.

And and all of that fed into the theatre work that uh that Clive and I started being involved in in the early 1970s, through the 1970s, into the early eighties, and then takes us into uh in into Hellraiser. So all of that process developed. So there's never been a time that I can remember when I wasn't interested reading mythology and and reading books on, you know, a as a boy on ancient religions, particularly ancient British religions. I always think in in another life I'd like to have been an archaeologist uh specializing in in ancient British history.

UFOs and the Loch Ness Monster, and you know, and and getting lots of books out of out of the library, discovering Eric von Daneken and discarding Eric von Daneken and becoming rather skeptical about the whole UFO thing myself. And although I passionately believed in the Loch Ness Monster as a boy, I don't think I do now, for purely practical reasons, I think. So all all of that is the background, and I've never lost interest in any of those subjects.

Yeah, I I think that cryptozoology is a strong-running theme amongst most of us in this world. Like in high school, I wanted to be a cryptozoologist more than anything in the world. I loved every story I read about Nessie. Even though I don't believe it anymore, I still want to, I'll put it that way. Yes.

I think now it's purely it's purely because if if it's there, it can't be in it. It has to be a breeding colony. Uh and if it is, if we're going to believe it that it's something like a surviving pleseosaur or something like that, then it's a breeding colony and it's a lunged animal, mammal, which means that like whales and dolphins and porpoises, it's got to come to the surface to breathe, either through a blowhole or it's got to come to the surface and open its mouth and breathe.

It can't live it can't be underwater all the time unless it's some kind of a giant fish, which doesn't mesh at all with with the descriptions of of the monster. If it is surfacing to breathe, then, you know, in the in the immensity of the Pacific Ocean, we can go and find a blue whale. It'll take a while, but we'll we'll find it because it has to come to the surface and breathe.

So it's not that uncommon to see whales and in a no, it's a very, very big body of water, but nevertheless, if there's a breeding colony of creatures there, sightings are going to be very common, I would have thought, purely for that that reason of of the necessity to breathe. Also it's it's effectively dead water. Even a few feet down, the visibility is nil. Very little life in it. It's not abundant with fish and other forms of life.

And again, if these creatures are there, they have to eat a lot, which means there has to be uh a substantial stock of food in the loch for it to feed on, which there simply isn't. Or it's got to repeatedly come out of the loch to feed on whatever around the loch, in which case again, sightings are going to be very familiar. So for purely w you know, with with my practical naturalists' head on, I simply think it doesn't make any sense.

I still remember watching the special where they took as a kid where they took a line of boats equipped with radar to scan across the entire surface. And that's when I knew something was wrong. Because if you have to start making up possible excuses as to why your experiment failed, and that you're just assuming that it has to exist because it does, something's probably wrong. Sure, sure. But did but did they not locate something? They I I don't even remember.

The only thing I remember taking away from it is that they kept hypothesizing that there were underground tunnels that could lead to other bodies of water in which they would frequent more often and only appear in the walk for certain occasions.

Seems highly unlikely. I don't know where those caves would lead. Exactly. That that would explain that. But it it is a huge body of water, and it's it it it's very it's quite narrow, but it's very long, and it's very deep. You stand the Empire State Building in the middle of it several times over it. It it is very deep, but it's very cold and and it's full of peat suspension. As far as we know, there's a you know, that there isn't a lot of like weeds and greenery that this thing could be feeding off, even if it doesn't need to be feeding off fish, you know.

And the surgeons photo there is that classic one, which of course turned out to be exactly what I'm doing now. Exactly. Yeah, yeah, exactly that. Very clever, very brilliantly staged photograph, but it was just an arm through a to a kid's flotation device, right? I think the strangest one is the is the one with looking across the loch, with what appears to be something moving across towards the far end of the lock where the the road goes by and there is a car going along the road at the same time. And that doesn't appear to be in any way tampered with.

But it is it's such a strange body of water, and we know the way that the wakes from boats do strange things and the waves roll and seem to go on for a long time, and they come back on themselves off the shores, and particularly when you're down at water level, they appear to, you know, create moving pumps. I don't know. I don't know. I visited Loch Nest once, but never took my eyes off it.

And if you don't mind me asking, I I'm just I I'm curious. As a fellow HP Lovecraft fan beyond the racism, is there do you have a particular uh story that you have always kind of gravitated towards?

There's so many, are there not? I mean, I guess the call of Cthulhu, who is is the granddaddy. The outsider is a huge favorite, as is The Tomb, the Randolph Carter stories I love, and and Dagon and uh The Strange High House in the Mist and The Terrible Old Man, and you know, I it it just they just start to roll in my head. And if you if you tell me any any one of them is his best, you know, I probably wouldn't argue against you. The rats is is is brilliant, very powerful. If uh if I had to pick one, it would probably be the outsider.

That's a good one. Color from Outer Space is phenomenal as well.

Of course, Listeners in the Dark and yes, the Dunnage Horror.

It's the totality of Lovecraft, I think, for me as much as it's just it's amazing that he was able to craft such an in-depth universe and make it seem so plausible with very little spoken dialogue. He he was horrible at writing dialogue. So you you don't you only find a few mentions of words that were spoken between characters, but yet it just feels so alive. It yeah, it's quite remarkable.

And is is the master confronting you with terrible things without ever describing them? So everything is unnameable and unmentionable and unknowable. I mean, the things that really draw have always drawn me to sorry JJ, but that works, I think, powerfully with Lovecraft, because whenever he tells you that it's unknowable and unnamable, and I cannot describe the things I saw, our imaginations rush in to fill the void that is not being explained for us.

I agree. Because I mean it's the same in most horror movies when you don't see what the creature or the monster or whatever the antagonist happens to be, it's much more scary until you finally get that big reveal, and then you're kind of let down at the end of it. You're like, oh, okay, well, that's not as good as what I thought it was.

Always the things we we don't understand and we we can't explain are the most powerful and um the scariest, always. Always, yes.

And just the idea that and you know, you could encounter something that would instantly drive you mad, or the idea of non-Euclidean geometries, you know, featuring all all you know for all of the architects cycloppian architecture, yeah. I still get chills. Ghost Cones.

Uh Eldridge horrors. Yes, Eldridge Horrors. I I I would say maybe, maybe I've never read or listened to Lovecraft, but I might be lying because I'm on volume three of Spine Chillers. There you go. So I'm pretty sure either in volume one or two, you there's probably something with Lovecraft. Well, I think the outsider is on volume one. One, it it probably is, yes. So, so yeah. I so yeah, I've listened or read Lovecraft. I'm I'm more of a and JJ knows this, I'm more of a Tolkien person. I just yeah, get so immersed in into that world. I don't know.

There's something about like I like horror and all that stuff, but I'm the type of reader where when I'm reading, it like plays as a in a film in my head. I don't know, it just makes reading horror books just like that ten times more creepier for me, and then I have trouble sleeping.

So that's the point, Chris. That's yeah again, I I discovered Lord of the Rings in my middle teens. It's a big influence on Clive. There's a direct through line. Clive had one of those teachers, you know, lots of successful creative people talk about the teacher in their lives. And for Clive, and so he's told this story publicly, so I'm not this is this is not out of school, but and it's not you know straightforward enough. His name was Norman Russell, and he taught at Quarry Bank, taught Clive, and he had set homework for Clive's form.

Clive would be probably well in his very early teens at this point, maybe twelve thereabouts, to write a piece of original composition. And uh and Clive wrote his piece and turned it in. When Norman gave the homework books back, appended to it was the the the dread comment, see me, nothing else, no mark, just see me. You know, Clive's thinking, fuck, what have I done? God You know, so dragged himself up to see uh Mr. Russell, as we would have known him at uh at the end of of class. Mr. Russell said, Yes, Parker, you'll notice I didn't mark this. And Clive said, uh Yes, sir.

And he said, Do you do you know why? And he said, No, sir. He said, Because I don't think I'm qualified to mark this, because this is too good. Wow. And I would like to spend you know, the the the things you won't get away with now. I would like to spend some time with you, just you and I, after school, you know. Nothing untoward was involved, but what base basically Norman did was open open the windows of literature for Clive and give him access to a broader world. And I think for Clive, the first understanding that this was something that he could do and he had the talent to do.

And the through line is that Norman at that point would was probably in his early twenties. You know, we we always think of our teachers at school as being old, but very often, particularly as we get older in high school, they're very often only a handful of years older than us, you know. Norman had been at Oxford University and was taught by Tolkien. Wow. So Clive had that, you know, he was immediately one step removed from Tolkien.

That's amazing. And I I will say, like, I've told this to JJ, and I don't share this as to many people other than my wife who watches me do it. Totally fascinated with Tolkien. Probably have too many books, have all the audiobooks. I've listened to Lord of the Rings probably ad nauseum, watched the films ad nauseum, had the pleasure to meet John Reese Davies this past December. Probably along with yourself, one of the best ex celebrity experiences I've ever had. He was like a grandfather, so it was like it was like the greatest, greatest thing ever.

But like just one day I just started just writing this mixture of a mixture of horror and because I'm a classic classicist, I'm a historian, so I went to school for that and all that stuff. So he's the theologian, I'm the historian. More often than not, when he goes off on a historical tirade and it's completely wrong. I'm like, no, it was actually this. He always likes to go off on Julius Caesar about Zoroastrianism, and I'm like, no, that was probably Augustus, but we'll we'll move on. I like history, I like the late Roman Republic period, Julius Caesar, Pompey, the Civil Wars.

So I just started, just this idea came to mind of this like soldier on the frontier, and I just started writing, and it just started to grow into this like world that went from like a normal classical antiquity to when I get 60 pages in, there's like cannibalism, butchering, and biblical references, all these like it just came out of nowhere, but I directly attribute that to the Lord of the Rings with how like Tolkien just spends like five pages describing like what a meadow looks like or what it's what a tree looks like.

It's very like just the world building, like everything, no matter how insignificant it is, has to have some sort of lasting impression. So that's one thing. I know we went down the literature route. You know, it's it's supposed to be like a paranormal show, but you know, can't help myself. But yeah, like to your point, it it's it's amazing how Lord of the Rings and all these other authors just have such influence on everything that we almost consume today.

So we were all uh the the whole group of us because it as you know, that kind of group that had had constellated around Clive in through the 1970s, you know. So we were we were as as well as uh Tolkien and and I read everything. After reading Lord of the Rings, I read The Hobbit, and I had Tom Bombardil and and all of that, and C. S. Lewis and and Alfred Lord Dunstiny and Ursula Le Guin. And so there was a lot of that fantasy elements, which all of which feed into into Clive's work as well.

Absolutely. I mean uh you can see that in Nightbreed and a whole bunch of his other works, and Yeah, I mean, but there there is something special about Clive Barker's writings. I mean, they immediately suck you in so much more than other renowned horror authors that you can read. There's a visceralness to it that you it almost feels like you're punched in the stomach by, and it's phenomenally done. I'm biased, obviously.

But I think he is the best. I enjoy Stephen King up to a point. I've never been I've never been the biggest fan of Stephen King. I always feel let down. I know that's a silly thing to say, but it's like I mean his books are big, you know, and you you cancel months of your life to read it, and it turns out to be a spider and or whatever, you know. Right. Yeah.

One of the reasons why I think the movie of The Shining is much better than the novel is I remember feeling actively angry with King at the end of The Shining because you know, he's building the mystery and he's building the mystery and he's building the mystery, and then the place burns down. The end. Right. Yeah. And I I thought, no, no, that's that's how we end ghost stories that we're writing when we're a kid. You know, you have two endings. One is either and then I heard the voice saying, Wake up, it's time to go to school, and it was my mum. And then the house burned down.

And, you know, and I d and I know he writes in a king writes in a in a very particular style, and obviously his career speaks for itself. But there's a there's a flatness in in his writing that I could that kind of doesn't really engage my soul as well as my head.

And I I I I find in Clive's writing a a poetry and a mastery of language that I think few writers in in the in the genre share. I would equate him with Edgar Allan Poe in that way with without hesitation.

I would thoroughly agree with you on that front. I mean, King to me is his psychoanalysis and getting into character's head, that is where his strong suit is, but it kind of fizzles out beyond that. Whereas the pure mastery of the language that you see in Clive Barker's works is just yeah, I'm not trying to gush or anything. So sorry if I fanboy out a little bit.

I told you not to. I'm a ban you.

You won't cut me disagreeing. I had watched The Terror, the the the TV show, uh, which I thought was brilliant. I had no idea that it was based on a novel until I was recently in my half-priced bookstore, and uh I saw the terror. And I thought, that's not the same The Terror, is it? Hold it down, and of course it is. And again, it's it's a it's a big fat brick of a book at 700 pages in in paperback uh as I read it. I thought it was brilliant and brilliant writing, wonderful writing. I'm certainly going to I I bought another of his books.

I I my prime sin is buying books faster than I read them. We have a have a pile waiting. But uh in many ways I thought the novel of the terror was actually better than the TV series, which as I say, I thought was was brilliant. And uh a 700-plus page novel that for me went by like a 250, 300 page book.

I know what I will be adding to my reading list right after this. Because I have yet to I haven't had the pleasure of reading his books yet, and I'm always looking for these. He was the there's a few of them.

Yeah, I have to add that to my list too. I'm one of those audiobook people. I'm sorry. Don't judge me, guys. I just don't have time to sit and physically read. So I just Hey, you're listening to Spine Chillers. I'm not arguing against I am on volume three. Right. So how many volumes are there?

Thirteen.

Perfect.

Good. You should have bought the box set when you were at Steel City.

Yeah, I saw that. I did see that. I was interested. I was like, what is this? And and then we got to talking about uh Liverpool and it just completely everything else takes the back seat. Absolutely. But uh continuing with uh I I'd like to continue with Clive for a second here, specifically with Hellraiser. The time you got casted by Hellraiser, what like did Clive specifically handpick you for the role of penthead, or did you like how did you get involved into that? I know you're best friends with Clive, so I'm assuming I I don't want to assume, but I figured I'd ask.

No, sure. Well I've uh I've I've talked about starting out at the the with the the school player at high school in in Liverpool, late 60s, early 70s, after school, university. We started doing theater, own experimental, independent theater. I'm very much the driving force in that, and obviously the principal writer, though at some point in the middle of the 1970s we became the Huntermine Theater. We were a mind troupe for a few years, and then we became the dog company, and the words came back. So through the 1970s, that's what I was doing. I was acting.

I think there was a point at the end of the decade, going into the the beginning of the 80s, we were at the Edinburgh Festival, a French festival, with a play called The History of the Devil, which is published now, written by Clive. I think for for me it's it's my favorite of his plays, but all all all the stuff that we were doing as a company is. Is is published now and they've been independently performed here here in America as well now. And I was playing the devil. It was a big part. We were at the Edinburgh Festival.

We were being successful, which isn't an easy thing to do if anyone who knows is familiar with the Edinburgh Festival. There's an awful lot going on, and you know, everybody's competing for audience, and we were we were pretty much playing to Full Houses every night, doing very well. There was a point in there somewhere where I you know where you have those kind of almost casual realizations that that affect the rest of your life, that I kind of thought, I suppose this is what I'm going to be doing. And I think that was because I was realizing that this was going to come to an end.

This wasn't going to go on forever. And I knew that when that happened, I've would explode as a writer or a painter, an illustrator, whatever, director, whatever he wanted to do, or all of these things that was never in doubt. And the question for me in some ways was, so what am I going to do? Well, the only thing I feel I do well is acting. I know it it rewards me hugely, not at that point financially at all, you know, hugely rewarding in other ways.

And I I think I was arrogant enough to feel, well, I think I think I can do this as well as most, better than some, and certainly not as well as quite a lot. I think I'm okay at this, and and I think it's what I'm going to do. So round about 1982, the the Dobb Company came to its natural end. Clive was already giving me handwritten manuscripts of stories and saying, I'm trying to write some short horror fiction to see if I can make some money. Would you have a read? Let me know what you think.

And a lot of those stories that he was showing me then were stories that that wound up in the books of blood. So that was all happening for Clive. I got my equity card and became a professional actor. And I was working in the theater, a couple of bits of television, but principally in rapidry theatre around England. So the dog company broke up in 1982, so that's what I'm doing in the next few years. And Clive's writing career has exploded in the meantime, which was wonderful to see, uh, and still feel a part of, in a way.

Towards the end of 1985, in the middle of a conversation about other things, he said, By the way, I'm trying to put together an independent, low budget horror British horror movie. And I think there's a part in there for you. And I said, Okay, cool. The conversation moved on. That was Hellraiser and Pinhead entering my life w without my being aware of it. As far as the casting goes, I mean, Clive asked me to do it, and and I wouldn't have needed anything else at that point. I wouldn't have needed a script or an anything or a contract to, you know. You want me to do something?

Then the answer's yes. You know, it's not a conversation I've ever had with him, but I assume he saw me as playing Pinhead. Uh that would be a question for for him. But my my memory is that through through 1986 there was lots of conversations about the character, and I would have read The Hellbound Heart, I think in manuscript form, before it it was published. And Clyde was showing me his sketches of Pinhead, not called Pinhead then, not at all called Pinhead, just this unnamed creature.

So as I say, that was that was during 1986, and by the fall of 1986, we're at Cricklewood Production Village making the movie, so things moved really quite fast from that first conversation to doing it.

One final pinhead question, because I know I I don't want to just linger on on pinhead. I do have a couple of other things I'd like to ask you. You're famously associated with Pinhead. You ever get tired of the character? It's like, hey Pinhead, you know, like you go to these cons and stuff, and it's like sometimes I gotta put on the costume. You ever like, I wish I could. Well, I don't.

I've done it once I did it once. It's too complicated. It's a very difficult costume to make work without the brilliance of Jane Wild Goose who created working with Clive, designed and built the magnificent costumes that I that that that I had in the in the first two films. Well, y you know, i if you go to a convention and you sign on the dotted line, that's what you're there for. There's no point in me trying to run away from it. I embrace it, I'm proud of it. I don't mind that it has diff defined my career. It's been more beneficial to me than anything else, I would say.

And I'm in a very fortunate position because in a very unforgiving profession, I am I am 71, 72 is beckoning, and I'm still being offered work. And I be and and and that is entirely because of Pinhead. And so to be at to be at my age in in this profession and be in that situation, I I'm very fortunate and touch wood at the moment, you know, still still body and mind is capable of doing it, which which is not the case for for all actors. The desire never goes away. But uh as time ticks by, you know, for some people it becomes physically challenging and the lines become a monster. Right.

Remembering the lines. I don't get stopped very often. I think people recognize me more often than I'm aware, because not everybody who recognizes me is going to come up and talk to me. So you have to be on your best behaviour. And, you know, I'd be lying if I if if I said that there aren't times when when that happens, you know, and you're in the middle of something else, or you're thinking about something else, or you've, you know, your plane's just been delayed again, or you know, or something's going on, and somebody wants to come over and say, Mr. Bradley, Mr.

Bradley, you know, you think oh, for fuck's sake, not now. But you know, I I choose to put myself in in this prof profession, and we choose to put our work in front of the public. If the public likes what you did nearly 40 years ago, I blast played the character uh twenty twenty plus years ago, but first played the character this year, 40 years ago, the movie was released 40 years ago next year. That's something, you know. And it tells you all the time, wow, you did something right, you know.

And I'm always aware that I had that I have that extraordinary makeup, extraordinary costume, and five's extraordinary words in my mouth. But I, you know, I'm I'm I'm not falsely modest. I I own the performance and I'm I'm critical of it, but I'm you know I'm I'm largely proud of it. And and we collectively, we made an indelible mark. And I don't think any of us had any idea at the time that we were doing it, but we did, and it is an indelible mark in in in horror films, in horror cinema, and in cinema generally.

So as someone who you know, as I say, was worshipping at at the feet of uh Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee and Boris Karloff as a teenager discovering horror, to realize that you have made the same kind of indelible mark is is something uh you know, it's it's quite humbling. And the fans are not a problem. Some of them are, but very, very few. A vanishingly small percentage, without any question. The overwhelming majority are wonderful, and it's a magnificent fan base to have. It is extraordinarily supportive and knowledgeable. They know more about my career than I do.

I mean, I've had people ask me questions about things that I've done. My mind goes blank, and I've actually swore blind that I nope, not me. No, it was no nope, not me. Well wait a minute, wait a minute. I think I mean I do remember that. No, I did we talked of Stephen King and I uh uh I did the adaptation of uh Salem's Lot for the BBC, uh BBC Radio 4. Oh wow. Played Barlow the vampire, and uh and I assumed that was, you know, gone. The BBC, you know, notoriously, as any Doctor Who fan will tell you, the BBC notoriously bad at not saving stuff.

And somebody somebody came to my table at a convention and said, I I really enjoyed you in Salem's lot. I thought you were great. Of course, my mind is completely splitting, and I'm going to the movie or the television series, and I I'm actually saying to him, Well, I I think you're confusing me with somebody else. I wasn't in Salem's lot. And he said, Yes, you were. I I heard it on YouTube. And I said, What do you mean you heard the BBC? He and he said, For the BBC. And I said, Oh my God, yes. Yes. Wow. He said, I thought it was wonderful.

And it's again, it's a it's it's a reflection of of the world we live in now, you know. Nothing goes away. There are things that you might wish would go away, but nothing does. And I never expected that that anybody would ever mention that to me. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I I I know what you mean. Speaking of fans, it's really weird for me. I'm just a minor, I'm a nobody in the creator space, to be honest with you. Just been doing this for three years. I have thousand followers on Instagram or something, and then every now and then I'll get an instant message on Instagram like, oh my God, I'm such a big fan of yours. I'm like, why? I just I'm not special.

No, well, I and and nor am I, but that's not the point, is it? I mean, you you you put what you put what you do out there, yeah, and you either do what you do well or you don't. And if you if you do and what you're doing is interesting, people will find you. And if if people listen to one episode of your show and they like what they hear, they'll come back for more.

That that is true. That's I've been doing Southern Demonology for nine years now, and I have uh a voice for r radio uh what a face for radio and a voice for newspaper. And people still wind up listening to me for some god-awful reason.

So I think it's authenticity. If you are, you know, if you're authentically yourself, you know, particularly a medium like podcasting, ruthlessly exposes that if you're if you're not just naturally being yourself, if you're not a good communicator, i i if you don't have interesting stories to tell, if you don't really know your subject, you will be found out pretty damn quick, you know? Amen. Absolutely. And people people vote with their feet because God knows it's a crowded marketplace.

Like I've had like emails and stuff with other like podcasters and stuff, probably the same for you, JJ. But correct me if I'm wrong. Or like we say in the corporate world, unfortunately, him and I both work in corporate. Keep me honest here, JJ. That we've had our some of like our our listeners tell us to go to you should go to like a paracon or something like that and get a table. And I'm always skeptical. I'm like, what if I get a table and nobody comes and it's like, why am I here?

Like, you know, I waste my time, but uh well, but you'll also you'll also meet other people interested in in you know, your peers and colleagues and fellow podcasters and fellow paranormal investigators and so forth. So it's a great networking opportunity as well. But if you if you go to those places, you'll probably be surprised. People will come to you and say, Oh, I listen to your show all the time, and you'll think, What?

Like, why? That's my first inclination. Like, we have this one listener, she knows who she is, she listens, she she like runs a detailing shop and she like literally has messaged us saying, Yeah, I listen to your show on repeat. Like, and she'll comment on our episodes and stuff. I'm like, that's it's really humbling. I'm like, okay, I'm it's it feels nice when someone acknowledges you know the work that you put into this. And it tells you that you're doing something right. Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely.

But Doug, I wanted to ask you, speaking of like what you said, things that won't disappear. What are your thoughts on some people call them ghosts, some people call them spirits? Like, what do you personally believe is going on there? Because me, I grew up in my teen year, like from age nine to about 17, a very active paranormal home. So did JJ when he was younger. So that that's yeah, that's kind of how like all of this got started. It's it's like our podcast got started, like while we went through some very traumatizing stuff, me personally, along with my family. Yes. But what age were you?

It was so I lived in the Bronx, grew up in the Bronx, New York, from was born in 90, lived there until 98, late 98. We moved to Queens, New York, and we moved into a duplex home. Aunt and uncle and cousin lived downstairs, and we lived upstairs. And when we moved into the home, like right off the bat from day one, weird things started happening. Like electronics turning themselves on and off. You would hear like weird footsteps in the attic, and I'm talking like just heavy boots walking back and forth. Unexplained.

I wanted to, but my parents, like, they drained so much money into like that investment. Sure. And dealing with two young kids at the time, they're like, Oh, don't worry about it. It's just the wind, the gene, the right. Yeah, we had squirrels or something, pigeons and squirrels. I'm like, okay, since we're in New York, the pigeons had Timberland boots on.

But the New York pigeons, the one you don't know, they're there.

Yeah, right. Absolutely. But when you start hearing like knock, you're you're by yourself and you start hearing distinct, like on your door, and you hear voices call your name that mimic your mother's voice. Calling your name. Calling out my name. Whispering. My mother's voice. No, like like how we're having a conversation right now. There was this one time I was finishing up high school. I got home, went to my room. It was like 11 in the morning, because uh our schedules at the time, when you were upperclassmen, you got out earlier.

I'm in my room, I'm sitting there, I'm playing my Xbox, and then I hear my mom's voice.

Chris. Did the voice sound as though it was in the room with you or somewhere else in the house calling you? Somewhere else in the home calling me.

Okay. Like in the living room, dining room type of area. So the way it was set up, like we call it apartments, you guys call it flats. The way the flat was set up, it was the two bedrooms, the kitchen, the dining room, and the extended living room. In between, separating the kitchen and the dining room was a very heavy wooden door that we always left open, and my mom would shut the door if she was cooking some sort of Caribbean food that would just permeate throughout the house. So that door was open. I heard her voice come from like the living room area. I heard it twice.

Chris ignored it once. Chris ignored it again. I pull on my cell phone and I call her. So my mom was a nanny in Manhattan, and she picks up the phone. And Doug, all I hear in the background is the hustle and bustle of Manhattan, the wind, the cars, and she's like, Hey, are you okay? What's going on? I'm like, no, I'm not okay. I hear you calling me. I just wanted to make sure that you were not here. She's like, no, I'm not here. I'm not gonna be home till like 2:30, 3 o'clock. You know this. So I told her what was going on. And my mom is from the Dominican Republic.

And if you know with the the Caribbean islands, they're very spiritual when it comes to the paranormal. They're like Catholic plus whatever cultural belief like is infused into that that region.

So she was very much folk stuff correct. And and older religious beliefs mixed in with with with Christianity, Catholicism, right?

Yes. So to her, when she hears that, she says, do not respond to it because that's the dead calling out to you. I'm like, okay, that's fine. So thanks, mom. Thanks, mom. She's like, just I'm gonna be home soon. I'll be home in about three hours. You'll be okay. Don't answer it. So see, I would have been out of that house immediately.

To the park, to a movie, just walking around somewhere. I would have been out of that house. But anyway, go on.

See, I was stubborn. I enjoyed like my solitude. So it's like I'm gonna read, I'm gonna play my game, I'm gonna do what I want to do, like the hell with you. So the voice calls out in my mom's voice about two more times. And the final time, Doug, remember I told you about that door. We always let my cat scared the shit out of me. God damn it, Diesel. So that door, that heavy wooden door, no windows are open, nothing like that. There is no draft, there's nothing. There's just this boom, it slams on its own. I'm like thinking to myself, I'm 17. I'm like, fuck this.

I close my bedroom door, I pull my desk a little bit, so like it blocks the door open inwards, so it blocks it. And I'm just sitting on my bed, I have my game on pause. I'm just sitting there, just waiting for somebody to come home. And that night, I told my parents, I never swore at my parents, I was like, I don't want to fucking live here and I am done. They were already looking for a home, but then they like put it into warp speed because you know, when the kids tell you, like, look, I can't be here anymore.

Were they experiencing the same things?

Yes. My parents, it was not until I started my show and publicly talking about this that other members of my family finally had the courage to speak up on it. Me and my sister could meet.

Yeah. Right. You you have one sister.

Yeah. But as we got older and we started talking about it, because you talk about it in a very joking manner, but at the time it's very it's terrifying. But I'm like 15, 16 years old. I what can I do? I just gotta find ways to cope and just go about my day. But like when you see someone physically get shoved by something that is not there that you can't see, and they get lifted off the ground and shoved like six feet in the opposite direction into like a wall or door. You're like, okay, I don't understand what's going on here, but there's something not right.

Because wind does not do that to people.

And that was that your sister you observed that happening too?

That was my aunt. So it was my aunt who was in her 50s at the time. So my aunt had stayed with us.

Yes, yes, that's extreme. Highly. Yeah. And when you when you moved, it stopped. It stopped. Never had a problem. A duplex. So not not a particularly old house. Were you were you able to find any history of the house? Did you explore any of any of that?

So my aunt, who like when I like I said, when I started the show, my aunt, who's very supportive of me sharing these stories, she came out and said to me that, hey, when we moved into that home, the neighbors across the street, they were two older German women. They had like German accents. And you know, they introduced her themselves to my aunt and my parents and everything. And they told her specifically, you need to get that house cleansed before you move in and after you move in. Because the people that were there were involved in some shady practices.

We don't know if it was a cult or something of that sort. They made the claim that some some teenage girl back in the day was abused there or killed there or something. But I could never when I looked into it, I could never really corroborate that story.

So Is that something that your parents did? I mean, I know I know uh when my uh my my first wife and I, we we had kind of a we lived in the upper part of a house in in London. There was a the the landlady lived on the ground floor and I did some work in in the house for her. She she was Catholic, and I discovered when I lifted the window frames that each each window frame had a small crucifix placed so that the window shut on it. Oh wow.

Which is which was quite a common thing to do. And again, that's to, you know, to stop the the evil things uh coming through the windows and getting into into your house. But uh but if it's quite w so my my point was that I think it's quite common. It was, I think, more so than now, but particularly for Catholics to want to cleanse a house, or at least have a priest come in to bless bless this house before moving in. Did they did they take up? So did not the German ladies on their advice.

So the w my family makeup is like I I call it a Crayola box, a cultural Crayola box. So my aunt and uncle were Muslim. My dad was a Hindu, and my mom Catholic, but my dad eventually converted to Catholicism because of what he experienced in that home, which I found intriguing. We so what he would try to do, he would do like his Hindu prayers.

They would have these prayers like once a year, they call it a puja, to like one of their patron deities, and he would do that, and it would things would taper off for maybe like a week or so, and then it would come back with a vengeance, more activity, more noise, everything of that sort. And it wasn't until like my mom started saging and and doing her like Catholic type of cleansings, in which like but that again is more of a folk kind of that's so sage, a bundle of sage. Yeah, I would would you say so, JJ? That's not really a Catholic thing.

Sage not a thing. No. No, Catholicism has two different types of rights for this. One is just a generalized blessing, or you could have a exorcism of place or locale, which is much more free to allow an individual priest to decide to perform or not. But still it's a little un it's a little uncommon though.

Yeah. No, you you're a teenager, Chris, so come on.

At the time? You did the Ouija board, right? No, I didn't. I didn't. I never never never did. I am deathly afraid of them. Right.

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