Books of Blood is the sort of movie that makes you seriously question whether anyone involved actually likes books, blood, or stories. It’s “based on Clive Barker,” in roughly the same way instant noodles are “based on cuisine.” Technically true, spiritually insulting. This anthology is supposed to be a twisted tapestry of interlocking horror tales. What we actually get is three stories that slowly bump into each other like tired strangers on a night bus, then collapse into a shrug. Let’s crack the spine. We start with Jenna, a college student with a sound sensitivity condition so extreme that tiny noises become unbearable. That’s a genuinely interesting vulnerability for a horror protagonist—perfect for creating tension, paranoia, and sensory-based dread. So of course the movie mostly forgets about it. Jenna stops taking her meds, flees her parents’ house, and spends a while being stalked by a suspicious car. Then she checks into a bed and breakfast run by Ellie and Sam, who radiate “we bake pies, sell jam, and definitely have people sewn into the walls” energy from the second they appear. The B&B segment could’ve been a brilliant self-contained horror piece: Cozy old house Overly sweet hosts Our protagonist increasingly unsure if she’s losing her mind or in genuine danger Instead, subtlety gets set on fire around minute 20. Jenna discovers: Guests paralyzed Eyes sewn shut Ears and tongues removed Bodies hidden in walls and crawlspaces like some kind of artisanal hostage storage Ellie insists she’s “saving” them by giving them a silent, senseless existence away from the cruelty of the world. It’s like Misery meets DIY surgery, if both had been written by someone who just discovered the word “twisted.” There are genuinely unsettling ideas here—especially for Jenna, who craves silence—but the execution is so blunt and overexplained that it stops being frightening and slides into goofy. Things escalate when her stalker is revealed to be the father of her ex-boyfriend, who died by suicide. He’s trying to find out why his son killed himself. This has the potential to add emotional complexity. Instead, he’s immediately murdered by the B&B psychos, shoved in his car, and sent off a cliff as a fake suicide. Jenna, because the plot needs her somewhere else, just happens to be in the back seat. This is less storytelling and more moving chess pieces with a shovel. Next up: Mary Floresky, a researcher whose young son Miles has died. Enter Simon McNeal, a psychic whose face screams “I monetize your trauma.” He claims to speak with Miles. Mary, desperate and intelligent but apparently movie-level gullible, buys it. She and Simon: Conduct “experiments” contacting the dead Launch a foundation Become a couple This is, again, a potentially strong setup: predatory psychic exploiting grief, ethical horror of turning loss into spectacle, the possibility of real supernatural consequences when you fake the dead. For a while, it works. Then the script basically puts on clown shoes. Mary discovers Simon faked everything. He wasn’t talking to Miles. He’s also cheating on her. So he’s not just a fraud, but the full Costco-sized sleazebag bundle. Later, Mary sees her son’s ghost and messages urging her to repeat the experiment—this time for real. The dead want their stories told. Simon, reluctantly, agrees to be the guinea pig again because, you know, money. Cue the film’s big “horror” showcase: ghosts appear and carve their stories into Simon’s flesh, making him the literal “Book of Blood.” In theory, this is classic Barker body horror: the human body as text, narrative etched into skin, suffering as medium. In practice, it looks like the world’s least convincing haunted tattoo session. The sequence isn’t bad, exactly—it’s just oddly flat. The movie treats it like the center of its mythology, but it never earns that weight. Simon’s such a cartoon sleaze that seeing him punished doesn’t scare or disturb; it just feels like cosmic HR finally doing its job. Our third story stars Bennett, a thug-for-hire sent to collect from a bookseller who owes money to very bad people. When the bookseller can’t pay, he tries to save himself by babbling about the legendary “Book of Blood,” a rare tome worth a fortune. Bennett listens, kills him anyway, and decides to go get the book himself. So far, not bad: mercenary greed meets cursed object. Then the movie remembers it has a budget and decides that most of this segment will take place in: An abandoned town Some dark corridors A car Bennett and his driver Steve experience random hauntings. Steve hears his dead mother’s voice and promptly shoots himself, which is played as tragic but mostly feels like the script needed him gone and chose “ghost guilt speedrun” as a method. Bennett is attacked by his own car—yes, literally—and chased around like the film briefly forgot what genre it was and wandered into Christine fanfic. Eventually, he finds Mary, Simon (now fully fleshy scripture), and tiny ghost Miles. Mary explains that Simon is the Book of Blood, his skin filled with the stories of the dead. Bennett is told he’s now part of those stories. He doesn’t believe it. So the movie does what it always does when confronted with disbelief: it throws visions at him until he stabs himself. But he doesn’t die. Instead, he crawls away… and lands at Ellie and Sam’s serial killer B&B, where Ellie finishes him off. Because nothing says elegant anthology structure like “and then the old couple killed him, anyway.” Just when you think it’s over, the film drags Jenna back onstage like, “You thought we forgot? We did. But we remembered now.” We learn that she encouraged her boyfriend to jump to his death. The implication is that she’s not an innocent victim, but someone with a cruel streak. That could’ve been fascinating—if the movie hadn’t waited until the end to reveal it like a twist no one asked for. She survives the crash, ends up in the hospital, sobs remembering her boyfriend’s suicide, and then… returns willingly to Ellie and Sam. She lets them: Drug her Mutilate her Remove her hearing And the film presents this as a kind of messed-up “happy” ending: Jenna is finally at peace because she can’t hear anything anymore. She’s literally walled up in silence. Now, that could be a devastating, bleak commentary on mental illness, guilt, and escape. Here, it mostly plays like: “We didn’t know what to do with this character, so we turned her into a nightmare ASMR project.” The finale tries to tie everything together with Mary reading the stories etched on Simon’s skin, as if this has all been part of some grand design. Instead, it just highlights how disconnected the pieces are. They technically intersect, sure—but emotionally? Tonally? Not so much. The saddest thing about Books of Blood is that you can see the bones of a much better film: A woman who wants silence so badly she walks into a living tomb A fraud psychic weaponized by the actual dead A mercenary dragged into a narrative he can’t control Those are great ideas, straight out of Barker’s playbook of erotic, grotesque, morally complicated horror. But the movie keeps sanding down the edges. Instead of lush, perverse nightmare logic, we get: Generic digital ghosts Flat dialogue Characters who only exist to be punished, not explored The anthology format could’ve been a strength. Instead, it feels like three half-finished drafts awkwardly stapled together and then stamped with “Clive Barker” in the hope no one would look too closely. If you’re a Barker fan, this will likely just make you want to re-read the original Books of Blood and pretend this adaptation was a shared hallucination. If you’re not, this probably won’t convert you. It’s not offensively terrible; it’s worse than that—it’s mediocre with occasional flashes of “oh, that could’ve been cool” buried under safe choices and limp execution. In the end, the only thing truly carved into this movie is wasted potential. Books of Blood (2020) is an anthology horror film that manages to make the extraordinary work of Clive Barker feel like a flat, mid-tier streaming special with the personality of cold oatmeal. You can almost hear Barker’s words whispering from the void, “This is not what I meant.” The film promises a sinister literary tapestry—“stories written on flesh!”—and instead delivers something that feels like a few random pages from three different paperbacks taped together and soaked in beige. Let’s dive into the carnage, shall we? Our first story stars Jenna, a college student with a hypersensitivity to sound, which is a clever horror hook—until the movie forgets about it almost immediately. She flees home because her parents want her to stay on medication. (In horror terms, this translates to: She has trauma and is about to make bad choices.) She ends up at a charming little bed-and-breakfast run by Ellie and Sam, a pair of retirees who are so aggressively wholesome you just know they’re eating something other than casseroles. The first half of “Jenna” is basically “Grandma’s House of Pain,” played like a travel brochure for cannibalism. Soon enough, Jenna finds out the couple’s hobby: paralyzing guests, sewing their eyes shut, removing their tongues and ears, and storing them in the walls like deeply unfortunate art installations. Ellie claims she’s doing them a favor—keeping them “safe and quiet.” It’s Get Out meets HGTV’s Fixer Upper, if the hosts were lobotomists. When your “psychological horror” plot is indistinguishable from a Lifetime movie about elder abuse with a dash of taxidermy, something has gone wrong. Even the twist can’t save it: Jenna’s creepy stalker turns out to be the father of her dead boyfriend. He’s promptly killed off, because nobody in this movie is allowed to have emotional continuity. Then the old couple fake his suicide by driving his car off a cliff… with Jenna accidentally in the back seat. At this point, logic and tone have both followed the car. Next, we meet Mary, a grieving mother and academic who meets Simon, a handsome psychic who claims he can talk to her dead son. Their “experiment” to reach the afterlife quickly turns into a business venture and a romantic relationship—because nothing screams credibility like sleeping with your medium. The ghostly sessions initially work, giving Mary closure. Then she discovers Simon is a fraud—shocking no one except Mary, whose IQ apparently drops fifty points when grief enters the chat. The ghosts, however, don’t like being used for clout. They literally carve their stories into Simon’s skin, turning him into the titular “Book of Blood.” On paper (pun intended), this is pure Barker: grotesque transcendence, the sacred and profane merging through pain. On screen, it looks like a man being attacked by invisible cats with calligraphy fetishes. The scene should feel biblical and terrifying. Instead, you half expect a ghost to spell out “HELP ME” like it’s auditioning for a Disney+ haunting series. Finally, there’s Bennett, a hitman whose personality is “gravelly voice, bad choices.” He’s hired to rough up a bookseller who owes money, but when the guy babbles about a “Book of Blood” worth millions, Bennett smells easy cash. He kills the guy anyway (because why not?) and heads to an abandoned town with his sidekick, Steve, to find this mystical book. Naturally, the town is haunted, Steve shoots himself after hearing his dead mother’s voice, and Bennett gets attacked by his own car—a moment so random it plays like Fast & Furious: Paranormal Drift. He eventually meets Mary and Simon from the previous story, who explain that Simon’s body is the Book of Blood. Bennett refuses to believe it because, to be fair, “human Kindle” isn’t a common diagnosis. The ghosts disagree and decide he’s the next chapter. He stabs himself to escape, limps away, and—because fate in this movie is a drunk GPS—ends up at Ellie and Sam’s B&B from Story One. Ellie promptly kills him, linking the stories together in the cinematic equivalent of a tangled extension cord. In the end, Jenna survives the car crash, remembers she guilt-tripped her boyfriend into suicide, and decides her best life choice is returning to Ellie and Sam to be mutilated into blissful deafness. It’s supposed to be poetic: the girl who couldn’t bear noise finally finds silence. Instead, it lands like a twisted ad for cochlear implants. Meanwhile, Mary reads all the stories etched into Simon’s back, implying this was all interconnected. Except it doesn’t feel connected—it feels like three random people who accidentally carpooled into a Clive Barker adaptation. The tragedy of Books of Blood is that it forgets Barker’s essential alchemy: horror as art, disgust as transcendence, sex and death and religion braided into something sublime. This film replaces that with Hulu lighting, exposition dumps, and the pacing of a NyQuil dream. The scares are generic: A flickering light. A door that creaks like it’s on strike. A corpse doing its best impression of interpretive dance. Even the gore feels tame—bloodless, sanitized, and designed for viewers who think The Conjuring is too hardcore. And yet, there’s so much potential here. Barker’s original short stories are strange, sensual, and full of aching humanity. This adaptation treats them like entries in a franchise pitch deck. Britt Robertson does her best as Jenna, but there’s only so much you can do when your main direction is “look confused while walking down hallways.” Anna Friel as Mary gives the movie its only spark of emotional truth, even as she’s surrounded by ghostly CGI that looks like it escaped a 2006 screensaver. Rafi Gavron as Simon exudes “sleazy tech bro psychic,” which might actually be a compliment, while Yul Vazquez’s Bennett feels like a man trapped in a Sin City sequel that got canceled halfway through production. By the end, even the ghosts seem exhausted. Fittingly, this was the last project from Touchstone Television before it was folded into 20th Television—a studio obituary written in weak blood and poor lighting. You could say Books of Blood killed Touchstone. I’m not saying that’s canon, but it’s emotionally accurate. There’s a universe where Books of Blood could have been great—a lush, grotesque anthology dripping with style and the poetic nastiness that made Barker’s name. But this version plays it so safe that even its demons feel unionized. The film tries to convince you it’s edgy, then spends 107 minutes apologizing for being weird. The result? A movie that’s never scary, rarely interesting, and occasionally hilarious when it doesn’t mean to be. If you’re desperate for Barker on screen, rewatch Hellraiser or Candyman. If you just want stories written on flesh, buy a tattoo machine and some time to reflect. Because Books of Blood (2020) isn’t horror. It’s an audiobook you fall asleep to halfway through—only to wake up and realize you didn’t miss a thing.
“Jenna”: A Great Premise, Then Home Invasion by Lifetime Movie
“Miles”: Ghosts, Grief, and a Guy You Want to Punch
“Bennett”: Hitman, Haunted Road Trip, and Sudden Plot Dump
Ending: Trauma, But Make It Cop-Out
The Real Tragedy: Clive Barker Deserved Better
ChatGPT said:
Chapter One: “Jenna,” or, The Girl Who Checked into Airbnb Hell
Chapter Two: “Miles,” or, The Psychic Who Should’ve Stayed on Etsy
Chapter Three: “Bennett,” or, Tarantino’s Boring Cousin Meets CreepyTown, USA
The Grand Finale: “And Then… Everyone Was Sad and Stupid”
The Horror That Wasn’t
The Cast: Trying Their Best, Bless Their Souls
Touchstone Television’s Final Act: A Corpse That Deserved Better
Final Thoughts: Don’t Judge a Book by Its Streaming Service
