Our hero has visions of a strange place inhabited by strange human like creatures, so he goes to a psychologist. This psychologist is secretly a serial killer, and he drugs and frames the hero as a patsy. Our hero is picked up drugged and put in a mental hospital, where another inmate tells him how to find the place in his visions before killing himself. Our hero goes there and encounters these creatures, one bites him.
But the police pursued him and shoot him dead, he ressurects in the morgue and finds himself turning into one of the creatures and makes his way back to the place. His girlfriend comes looking for him and various adventures are had until a raid by the police and local citizens lead by the psychologist is undertaken on the place the creatures live.
Ok…
1.Why did he dream of Midean and the Nightbreed to begin with?
2.Why did the psychologist have a hatred of the Nightbreed? He rambles on about filth breeding and shit, he seems to have a deep personal hate of them.
3.Who was the other inmate? How did he know of Midean?
4.Several of the creatures clearly crave human flesh, they are stopped by cooler headed creatures. Are we really to believe that humans have been hunting them for all history out of blind hatred, or after humans were eaten?
I know both the movie and the book, I will have to dig out the book when I get home and re-read it. From what I remember, the movie actually cut out a fair amount of background data.
Have you checked the forum at IMDB.COM for commentary? I know there is a lot of crap on the forums, but there are actually some posts with decent info.
I will give short versions for now since it has been an extremely long time. I’m sure someone else can flesh these out.
He was sort of a Nightbreed messiah. The chosen of Baphomet or some such, if I recall. Prophecy and such being what it is, one doesn’t have to be aware that he is chosen to meet the criteria. (ETA: I think he actually defied the prophecy, if I remember.)
The Psycho thought he was nightbreed and got rejected by them because, well, he was just crazy. Not nightbreed.
Don’t remember, been too long.
The nightbreed are pretty much a collective of freaks and monsters. The level of malevolence varies. There was justification for the hunting sometimes, other times there wasn’t.
Boone wasn’t nightbreed to begin with but he was chosen by Baphomet to become nightbreed and oversee the continuation of their species. The book explained this a little better than the movie as i recall. The psychologist was framing Boone for murders that he commited. Boone had heard rumors about a place where killers and outcasts would be accepted (midean), and had dreams about it. I didn’t interpret that as Baphomet sending the dreams, which would be a self fufilling prophecy (if Baphy had never sent Boone the dreams in the first place the nightbreed would have never been in danger). Of course you could explain that by saying they might have been in even greater danger (perhaps even completely exterminated) if Boone hadn’t gotten involved. So whether Baphomet drew Boone to midean in the first place or he found it through rumors, Baphomet tells him that it was “inevitable” that Boone would come to them carrying the seeds of thier destrustion, and that He must “rebuild what you’ve destroyed”. So they take the pieces of Baphomets body and go on the run/into hiding. Again, this was a little clearer in the book.
I am not sure on this one. I don’t think this was real clear in the movie but when he put the mask on he became something else, and believed the power came from the mask (it would talk to him or call to him when he wasn’t wearing it). I think “button face” was jealous of the nightbreed and thier power, they were much stronger and more powerful version of what he thought he was
the guy who ripped his face off? (in the novella he ripped off his face, in the movie he ripped all the skin off his head except his face). He was a killer of some sort (remember his metal thumb-knives?). Midean was a legend, a rumor, among the killers and outcasts as a place where they would be accepted and they could belong. He was killing people so the nightbreed would come for him, which was why he was convinced that since Boone knew about it he must be one of them and was putting him through some kind of test.
Each of the nightbreed were completely different. Some could almost pass for human, and some would have been hunted down on sight. In the movie, there were huge, uncontrollable nightbreed called “berserkers” that had to be locked up, as they were a danger not only to humans but to the breed as well. Boone told their shaman to release them in the movie, as they’d shred the humans and cover the others escape. I don’t remember the berserkers from the book, but it has been a while.