How are you doing today, everyone? Welcome back to another odd and great MarvelousVideos video. For your horror hunger pangs, we have a really uncommon item for you today, directly from the year 2020. Books of Blood is an American anthology horror film that will leave you astonished, frightened, and possibly scared due to its unique plotline and several surprises.
Brannon Braga directed the film, which you may remember from his amazing work in the Star Trek franchise. He co-wrote Books of Blood with the infamous Adam Simon, who is best known for the television series Salem, which he developed. With these two incredibly skilled directors on board, you can bet that Books of Blood will be a must-see film.
The film is based on a story from the British author Clive Barker’s series of horror fiction anthologies, which were published in 1984 and 1985. There are six books in total, and this film adaptation from 2020 will not be the first. The first adaption, The Book of Blood, was released in 2009 and directed by John Harrison.
The usage of how the poster is created to throw spectators off the scent of the title may very well be the smartest trick in Braga and Simon’s adaptation. “Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we’re opened, we’re red,” Barker said sarcastically.
Although you may be correct, Barker, the audience is still waiting to see how terrible the picture will be and how many times it will make them scream their hearts out.
The film had its world premiere at the 2020 Screamfest Horror Film Festival on October 6, 2020, and was then released on Hulu the next day. This was, without a doubt, Touchstone Television’s penultimate production before it was absorbed by 20th Television.
So, without further ado, let us go right into the video and witness how the movie unfolds. Hold on to your seats, for there will be a lot of blood and gore on the way.
Nightmarish Conjurings – Books of Blood (2020)
So, there are three different stories in this film, with all different timelines and it is kind of nonlinear. But don’t think they are standalone stories; they definitely meet at the climax of the film. It begins with a figure sitting visibly on a rocking chair. We don’t find out anything about who or what he is. But we are soon taken to a library.
A fight breaks between a bookseller and a shady kind of guy named Bennett. It looks like the bookseller owes him some money. Now, because he does not receive the money that he is owed, he clearly wants to kill off the bookseller. In an attempt to save his own life, the bookseller tells Bennett about a very rare kind of book which is worth a million dollars.
This opening scene of the bookstore was actually filmed in a visually creative section of the neatest bookstores in downtown Los Angeles, “The Last Bookstore”.
Now, even though the million dollars sounds like an excellent deal, Bennett still ends up killing the bookseller. He then tells his friend Steve about this book which is called Book of Blood, and apparently, it is hidden somewhere in an abandoned town. Bennett is a money-hungry person, so obviously he decides to go after it.
We now see the name Jenna written with blood, on what looks like some kind of meat. So, it possibly is the second story. You will be surprised to know that the original plan was to make the film as an anthology series, but well the producers later on decided that it would be better to just combine a small number of stories into a single anthology film.
Jenna is a patient with misophonia. It is a disorder that triggers emotional and physiological responses in the patient due to certain sounds like dripping water, chewing, or repetitive noises. Her parents have decided to send her to an institution called The Farm for treatment. So after Jenna finds out about this, she runs away from home.
She gets on a bus to Los Angeles, but it looks like there is a creepy-looking guy who seems to be following her. So, she goes to a nearby bed and breakfast to stay the night. It is run by an elderly couple Ellie and Sam. We also see another guest there, Gavin, who is quite chatty. Oh, things are just about to take an eerie turn.
Since Jenna is so sensitive to even the tiniest of sounds, she hears noises coming from the wall. She also sees that same man, through her window, which shocks her even more. Of course, in this situation, anyone would think it is just a hallucination. Now, the weirdest things are about to happen. Jenna is in a catatonic state where she can’t move and that is exactly when Sam comes into her room and takes the measurement of her body. Right, as if that is not creepy!
Now, Jenna is just undermining herself because she thinks all of this was just a nightmare because she had stopped taking her medicines, so maybe now she is having withdrawal symptoms. The next day Jenna again spots that same creepy guy making eyes at her. She tells Ellie all her troubles.
Then once again, Jenna hears sounds coming from the wall, but this time, she finds an opening. And guess what, she sees the body of a woman, who looks kind of like a zombie but very much alive and breathing, inside the wall! You heard it; it is inside the wall.
So, now, Ellie texts Jenna from Gavin’s phone, asking her to open the door. She attacks Ellie and tries to run away from that place. She then tries to hide in an opening in the wall, but oh my god, the place is full of zombie-like people. That is when Sam and Ellie find Jenna, and inject her. Ellie confesses to Jenna that during her time as a nurse, she had a lot of patients who were on life support.
She used to treat them constantly with her special sleeping meds and plants from her garden. Obviously, she was fired, and later on due to the fear of losing her kids and grandkids, she sort of turned all of them into zombies. They all are pretty alive but stored inside the walls and their eyes and tongues have been cut out.
Looks like that is exactly what they plan to do to Jenna as well. Just then, that creepy stalker guy comes to the house and tells Ellie that he is the father of Jenna’s former boyfriend who had killed himself. This guy has now been killed by the rather sweet-looking old couple. So, in order to look like a suicide, Ellie and Sam take his body in a car and throws the car off a cliff. Surprise surprise, Jenna was hiding in that same car. And this story ends here.
Now, we see a very successful professor who is a psychic researcher named Mary. Her son, Miles, who had cancer, died some time ago. Before dying, Miles tells his mom that he will always be with her. Sometime after, Simon goes to Mary’s office and tells her that he can talk to the dead and Miles really wants to talk to his mom.
Naturally, Mary does not believe this. So, in order to prove it to her, Simon does something, and we see that on the walls are written a bunch of things with blood like “I am not sleeping, mommy”. Now, who wouldn’t want to believe all this? Simon and Mary end up becoming really close because of this. But trouble in paradise, Mary walks in on Simon while he is having sex with another woman. Of course, Simon confesses to her that he actually cannot talk to the dead.
In reality, Mary’s ex-husband had hired him to take some revenge on her. Now, something even more strange happens, when it looks like Miles has actually contacted Mary and he wants her to bring Simon to him. She does just that and locks Simon in her son’s old room. Here, the dead actually appears and starts talking to Simon. It looks like there might be hundreds of them there. They have all decided to tell their death stories through Simon.
Words start appearing on Simon’s body, and it looks like the ghosts are writing their stories, engraved on Simon’s body. So, basically, it is Simon who is the Book here. His body looks terrifying, covered in blood like pages of a book.
Now, we are once again with the money-hungry Bennett who has reached the place which the bookseller told him about. It is dark and the place looks completely abandoned and gives a super eerie vibe. It looks like Steve becomes possessed by some evil spirit and ends up taking his own life. Clearly, the place is crawling with thousands of evil spirits who came here while they were making Simon- the book of blood.
Here, Bennett finds Mary’s house. It is literally the only neat and tidy house in the whole area. He enters Simon’s room, where we see an old Mary and Miles along with Simon who apparently looks exactly the same way. Now happens the real twist. It looks like Bennett is not the first person to ever come looking for the Book of Blood. There have been many before him, and probably will be after him.
So, basically, whoever decides to come looking for the Book of Blood, apparently their deaths have been already written. And so, their names are already on the Book of Blood, which as we know is Simon. Then we see Bennett’s name. Lots and lots of rats cover Bennett and thinking that there are rats on him, Bennett ends up stabbing himself several times. What could be more horrifying than that!
It looks like while running, asking for help, Bennett has ended up at the place where Jenna stayed. And soon Sam and Ellie end up brutally killing Bennett. I mean, just look at what his body has become. Now, we also see Jenna, if you thought she was dead, think again. She is at a hospital and we see a flashback of her last phone call with her boyfriend. It would appear that it was actually Jenna who sort of led her boyfriend to jump off the roof.
An extremely guilty Jenna then decides to go back to Sam and Ellie’s house to basically give herself away to them. So, we see her with eyes and ears stitched because she no longer wants to live with the pain. Underneath the floorboard, she is lying there, smiling. The film ends with a look at Mary and Simon because it turns out there still are more stories to tell.
Well, that sure was an interesting end. Let us check out what can we expect.
How all three stories connect & Where Books of Blood leaves off
The film brilliantly connects all the dots between the three main characters and their individual stories Bennett, who is played by Yul Vazquez, Jenna, who is played by Britt Robertson, and Miles, who is played by Etienne Kelli.
Books of Blood, like all horror flicks, and Halloween films, is eerie, dark, mysterious, and at times impossible to watch, but of course in a good way. Throughout the film, you will probably feel as if you are actually trying to survive together with the characters. That totally makes it even more interesting every step of the way.
Along with the content from Barker’s book, the film also features a lot of interesting things which were written specifically for the film. Clive, Braga, and Simon together came up with the new stories for the film which they like to call the Pulp Fiction of horror.
So, basically, Jenna, Miles, and Bennett’s stories are all passages in the Book of Blood. But the interesting take on it is that, unlike Jenna and Bennett, Miles’s story is told to us through Simon and Mary’s encounter. Now, there was a part during Jenna’s story where before reaching Sam and Ellie’s house, she was almost hit by a green car. Really saved herself there, right!
Now, guess what, that green car was actually the same car we saw Bennett and Steve get into in the initial part of the film. So, there you go, that is actually our first clue towards the link between all the three stories. We then, also had a peek at the destroyed body of Bennett at Sam and Ellie’s place, while Jenna was first trying to escape from there. So, that would tell us that Bennett was actually there before Jenna.
Ever since the beginning of the film, we did not know but we were always a part of all three stories. The person we see sitting in the chair in a dark room in the first scene, when we hear a voiceover telling us how the dead want to tell their stories, well, you might have thought that was just a kid. But actually, it was Simon after he had become the Book of Blood.
In the first full story which is about Jenna, we see her going to Spider’s Web Café, where she waits to meet Gavin. Later in the film, Bennett, and Steve visit the same café in the third story. The coincidences throughout the film are eerily excellent. Both of them seem to be searching for two different things, but somehow end up in the same place, and also in the same book that brings bad luck to all.
Well, we can say that all the stories might appear as if the characters end up in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even if the intentions of the characters seem wise and genuine at the start, they all eventually end up in the Book of Blood because of their inherent underlying issues and problems.
Jenna as we know suffers from a disorder. Of course, that is something that is not under her control. But in the end, we find out that she was the person who was in a way directly responsible for her boyfriend’s suicide. So, the book might have made a judgment against her.
Dying due to cancer was once again not Miles’ fault, nor was it his mother Mary’s fault. But as we saw, the mind games that Simon places with Miles’ family, kind of disturbed and upset the dead. And obviously one must repay for disrespecting the dead, right! So, Miles’s story was extremely crucial in the sense that it led to the birth of the Book of Blood. They chose Simon for this purpose because he tried to fool around with the idea of the dead. And anyhow, the dead needed their stories to be told.
With Bennett, it is evident that we have a lot of issues. Even though he was only after the money because he wanted to leave her gangster life behind and settle down somewhere far away with her wife, he cannot ignore the deeds of his past. In order to get that future, he killed a lot of people on the way. Including the poor bookseller, who was the reason why Bennett found out about the Book of Blood. I mean, the dude has to show some gratitude, right!
Well, the last segment of the film is quite extraordinary. It is as if we can hear death all through the town, obviously it is haunted. Oh, but the creepy thing is that all the roads appear to be leading towards Simon, where the highway first opened and the Book of Blood was created.
Mary has aged quite a lot, but it looks like Simon forever stayed the same because he must live on in order to tell the stories of the dead, and give them a voice.
In Books of Blood, we got to see the stories of Jenna, Miles, and Bennett. In the last scene of the film, where Mary and Simon appear, Mary tells us that there are many more stories that are still left unheard. So, it looks like the dead might not wish to stay silent for long. More stories from the Book of Blood may one day be told to us horror fans, who are definitely still waiting to be even more terrified.
On that note everybody, you can catch the Hulu original film Books of Blood, anytime you are bored at home and are dying to watch something scary to the bones. This new introduction to Clive Barker’s most powerful and popular collection of short stories takes us back to one of horror’s most celebrated masters to his throne. These stories are the dream of what a Clive Barker fan would like to see in a unique Clive Barker adaptation.
The Books of Blood comes to life as a successful movie by having the nerve to make a breakthrough while also paying tribute to Barker’s original volumes. The film strikes a clear balance between horror and does not leave the fans in hopelessness. It is as sick and as sinister as it can get. It also gives us a smart and clever storyline that manages to avoid massive bulky plotting in order to create an interconnected story.
Well, with that, guys, we have come to the end of another awesome video. We hope you enjoyed watching it. Make sure to smash that subscribe button, and hit the like button on your way out, so that we can keep bringing more such videos to you. Also, comment down below which story from the film scared you the most. Until then everyone, stay safe and have a great day ahead!