Anyone that has read The Books of Blood by Clive Barker might get the idea that this is a subject that’s bound to be gruesome, chilling, and encompass a very wide and unknown quantity of tales that have been worn down to a few compelling stories that might cause your skin to tingle and the hairs on your arm to rise. But watching the movie on Hulu is a very different experience from reading the book since those that read this book before it was optioned for a movie might have been scratching their heads just a bit as the movie kicked off. As it’s been described, there are three stories that are very loose interpretations and do carry a few hints and pieces of the stories that the actual book deals with, along with one of the main themes. The stories are focused upon three individuals that are seen throughout the story, Jenna, Miles, and Bennett, and they’re each a little more macabre than the other. If you’ve read the book then let go of your expectations for this one since the filmmaker went in a very different direction than what Clive Barker might have intended. It’s not a horrible movie, but right from the start it kind of gets a head-scratching neutral score simply because it wasn’t so horrible that it couldn’t be watched, but it was a detour from what was expected.
The story of Jenna sees the young woman in question living in misery with her mother and a man that is obviously not her father but is content to treat her as though he is. Their opulent but cold home is situated near the sea, but for all this grandeur Jenna just can’t be happy for a reason that we find out about later. Upon fleeing her home she eventually finds an Airbnb to check into and finds out very quickly that there’s something very off about the old couple that own the home, and there’s something incredibly disturbing about the home. When it’s discovered that the old people are keeping people behind the walls, under the floorboards, and in every possible nook and cranny they can Jenna is ready to run and is almost saved by a man that’s been stalking her, the father of her former boyfriend, who killed himself according to a suicide pact that she welshed on (yes, it gets complicated). The father is killed by the couple, who then place him in his car and stage a suicide, unaware that Jenna is in the back of the car, as she’d been trying to escape. The scene fades to red at that point, and we head on to Miles’ story.
In fact, Miles does have a good deal to do with this story, but not in a physical sense, as his mother, a professor who debunks psychics, is led to believe that her son has summoned Simon, a psychic that claims to let the dead speak through him. Upon granting her a display of what he means, a scene that is rather macabre since an untold number of messages have been scrawled across the walls and ceiling after the sounds of several inhuman shrieks and other sounds could be heard coming from the room in which Simon was sequestered for observation. From that point on Mary becomes close to Simon, though once it is revealed that he has been faking the whole time she is understandably angry. This anger cools though when the spirit of her son, and possibly others, tells her to bring Simon to them, as she readies another convocation, which Simon is reluctant to undergo. When he is left alone in Miles’ old room, however, with Mary and those they are attempting to convince to fund the spiritual experiment, the screams are horribly real this time as Simon is stripped of every last hair on his body before the dead begin to inscribe their stories upon his flesh, the nightmare landscape he finds himself in rife with dark, terrifying spirits that exact a penance upon Simon for his deception. As you can imagine, at the end of this the field of red returns, and we’re invited into Bennett’s portion of this story, where it all began.
Bennett, a ‘collection agent’ and all-around unpleasant person, starts the movie off by slitting the throat of a bookseller that owed a lot of money to the wrong people. The bookseller attempts to square things by telling Bennett of a priceless book that’s located in a certain location, to which Bennett replies by slitting his throat before taking off with his driver, Steve, to find the book. What they find when they get there however is a haunted place, and when Steve is lured out of the car and then shoots himself after saying that his mother is beckoning him, Bennett somehow finds his way to the house he was seeking, which turns out to be Mary’s home. When Bennett is told that the book he’s seeking is Simon, who has become, in effect, a book of blood, he is in disbelief. But when his name appears on Simon’s skin, Bennett runs, pursued by rats that he’s convinced are climbing his body, forcing him to stab himself repeatedly before discovering that there are no rats and that he’s stabbed his own body over and over. Somehow he makes it to another home, only to let the viewer realize that it’s the home of the same old couple that attempted to kill Jenna earlier in the movie, creating an interconnected web that brings everything full circle once Jenna, who is now feeling guilty for her part in her boyfriend’s death, returns to the old couple to be interred in their floor, where she’ll be kept alive without eyes, ears, or tongue.
You could definitely say this was a weird and unsettling movie, but while it did follow through on the part of Simon, it was definitely a healthy jog away from what might have been expected.
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