Clive Barker’s 1984 six-volume short story collection Books of Blood launched his career as a horror superstar, and the tales in the collection have been adapted into films numerous times, from fan favorites like 1992’s Candyman, 2008’s The Midnight Meat Train and 1995’s Lord of Illusions (directed by Barker himself), to various lesser-known productions. At one point, TV veteran Brannon Braga was set to produce a series based on the Books of Blood stories for Hulu, but somewhere along the line that changed into a single feature film, and not even all of the material in Braga’s Books of Blood is based on Barker’s stories.

Instead, the film is an awkward amalgamation of the title story from Barker’s collection (which was itself previously adapted as the 2009 film Book of Blood) and new material developed by Braga and co-writer Adam Simon in conjunction with Barker (although Barker’s exact level of involvement is unclear). The movie’s three stories are woven together so closely that by the end of the film they converge into one, which makes Books of Blood more cohesive as a feature film, but also ends up diminishing the effect of each individual tale.

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Braga is known for his extensive sci-fi work (including multiple Star Trek series and, more recently, The Orville, whose creator Seth MacFarlane is an executive producer here), but he isn’t much of a horror filmmaker. Books of Blood has only a handful of creepy moments, and it never delivers the prolonged sense of unease that comes from Barker’s best stories.

Almost half of the running time is taken up by the new story of runaway college student Jenna (Britt Robertson), who flees her parents’ oppressively opulent home where she’s being micromanaged by her mother after an unspecified mental breakdown at school. She takes a bus with no purpose in mind and disembarks in a small town, where she stays with a folksy older couple at an Airbnb-style rental. Of course nothing is as pleasant as it seems, and the friendly older couple has sinister intentions, although it takes far too long for the movie to get to that point, after multiple fake-outs related to Jenna’s mental state and vague allusions to her past trauma.

Britt Robertson and Freda Foh Shen in Books of Blood

Jenna’s story seems to end with an abrupt anticlimax, but the next story serves as a sort of extended flashback, eventually coming back around to the characters from the brief introductory framing scene and to Jenna herself. Director John Harrison adapted “The Book of Blood” into an entire feature film, but Braga presents a sort of bullet-pointed version, starring Anna Friel as a college professor who specializes in debunking self-proclaimed psychics. Friel’s Mary meets her match in Simon (Rafi Gavron), who convinces her that he’s genuinely able to communicate with the spirit world, and specifically with Mary’s son Miles. The child recently died of leukemia at age seven.

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Harrison’s film took time to build up Mary and Simon’s relationship and their efforts to commune with the dead, but Braga rushes through it to get to a big twist, although he’s been afforded a better effects budget to depict the incursion of angry spirits. The third story, which begins in a quick prologue, eventually ties all of the elements together, as a hitman played by Yul Vazquez searches for the allegedly priceless Book of Blood, hoping to strike it rich. There’s very little to his story before he encounters the other characters, and it feels less like its own distinctive narrative than an extended epilogue.

Anna Friel and Rafi Gavron in Books of Blood

Braga seems to be reaching for a way to justify the adaptation as a feature film, but there’s no thematic unity to the stories, and the bland, TV-level presentation never captures the weird horror tone of Barker’s stories. The best Barker adaptations, especially the early Hellraiser movies, embrace the perversity and grotesquerie of the author’s work, but Books of Blood is less intense and less gruesome than a network-TV anthology episode. Braga has the chance to cut loose with his first streaming project, but instead he plays things safe, delivering a sanitized version of Barker’s dark concepts.

The performances are solid, although Robertson is stuck carrying too much of the movie on her own, as a character whose motivations seem to shift according to the latest plot revelation. Friel is entertainingly mysterious as Mary, who has a mean streak to go along with her deep grief for her son. Her character arc is the most appealingly nasty, although Braga truncates a little too much of it in his effort to bring in the other stories.

Taking place almost entirely in a single nondescript town, Books of Blood feels generic and anonymous, the opposite of what Barker fans would hope to see from an adaptation of one of his seminal works. Luckily, there are still plenty of Books of Blood stories left to adapt, giving bolder filmmakers the chance to pick up Braga’s slack.

Starring Britt Robertson, Anna Friel, Rafi Gavron, Yul Vazquez and Freda Foh Shen, Books of Blood premieres Wednesday, Oct. 7 on Hulu.

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