Clive Barker

If you've read any of Britisher Clive Barker's horror stories, you won't be surprised to learn that his first movie is about someone who comes back from the dead. Barker's main character, Frank Cotton, dies in the first few minutes of the film. The way he dies caused most of the patrons in the theater where I watched the film to put down their popcorn and soft drinks. Most never picked them up again. To experience "ultimate pleasures," Cotton makes a deal with some demons called Cenobites, who appear once Cotton is able to solve a strange puzzle box. But the demons, those little devils, were just kidding.

"Hellraiser," a horror movie starring Andrew Robinson and Claire Higgins; introducing Ashley Laurence. Written and directed by Clive Barker. Produced by Christopher Figg. Distributed by New World Pictures. Running time: 94 minutes. At area theaters. If you've read any of Britisher Clive Barker's horror stories, you won't be surprised to learn that his first movie is about someone who comes back from the dead. Barker's main character, Frank Cotton, dies in the first few minutes of the film.

Have you seen the latest Halloween masks? Do you really want to spend $50 to look like Ronald Reagan or a reject from a Clive Barker casting session? Masks used to mean something more. They served important ceremonial functions in their cultures - not just a shortcut costume for a neighbor's holiday party. Christos Kondeatis, an illustrator and paper engineer, has come up with an inexpensive way to get yourself a whole bunch of classic masks. They're all included in his beautiful new book, "Masks: Ten Amazing Masks to Assemble and Wear" (Atlantic Monthly Press, $14.95)

Clive Barker's Hellraiser - adapted from his short story "The Hell-Bound Heart" from one of his six Book of Blood volumes - marks the prolific British horror scribe's debut as a filmmaker. It also marks a new boom in the crossover trade between butchers and movie directors. Never before has so much raw meat - liver, especially - been paraded across the wide screen. Paraded, hacked, flung, splattered, ripped, sucked and nailed to wooden posts (in a Bosch-like assemblage of human ears, rats' backs, totems and bones)

The title creatures in "Sleepwalkers" are cat-like beings who can camouflage themselves as human, or even disappear - a process they refer to as becoming "dim. " I suggest you also become dim before seeing "Sleepwalkers," the silliest horror movie ever to be associated with Stephen King (he wrote the screenplay). It's about a mother-and-son team of cat people, Mary and Charles Brady (Alice Krige, Brian Krause), who sustain their immortality by eating the flesh of virginal young women.

Call this the Round-Up-the-Usual-Gargoyles column. Consider firstly Blood and Water and Other Tales by Patrick McGrath (Ballantine, $3.95), a cunning collection of grotesque and arabesque tales that have earned McGrath a collage of raves from scholars and fellow scribes. McGrath routinely names his characters Pander and Gland and Camille Belvedere and Ambrose Syme. You find this line in a story about postnuclear cannibalism: "We found fat Peter surrounded by a gang of little children to whom he was demonstrating the correct method of eviscerating a bat. " Mind you, there are genuine chills in the collection.

It's Horror Night on "The Larry King Show" tonight on WIP (AM/610). After British author Clive Barker discusses his scary tales at 11, consumer protector Ralph Nader tells his latest horror story - about the hidden dangers of cosmetics. At 53, with more than 20 years of crusading behind him, Nader is still waging his war against business and government practices that he feels endanger public health and safety. In "The Cosmetics Industry," his latest book, he charges that some of the products that women - and men - smear on their faces and bodies in the eternal quest for beauty can be injurious to their health.

No, Rawhead Rex isn't a king-size portion of steak tartare, though he does resemble two tons of hamburger meat crammed into a Hefty bag - with fangs. Call him Sleeping Ugly: Rawhead is a pagan demon buried deep in the sod of County Wicklow, Ireland. Some nameless force (boredom, perhaps) has roused the beast from centuries-long slumber, and boy, did he ever get up on the wrong side of the grave! The way this unjolly green giant stalks the hamlet of Rathmore (more wrath, get it?