This is a movie so obsessed with flaying the bodies of prone, naked women that it never for one moment stops to consider its own plot, characters, or morality. None of this pays off in any fashion, as potentially interesting plot threads are rapidly dropped in favor of a typical maniac plot. Stephen ( Twilight's Jackson Rathbone, sporting an improbable wig) wishes to use the experiment to delve deeper into his regret over his brother's tragic death, while Quaid ( Shaun Evans) wants to use the fears of others to better understand the brutal axe murder of his parents when he was just a boy. Ostensibly, it's a story about university students who conduct a study of fear - but really it's a collection of poorly rendered images in the order of something vaguely gesturing towards a narrative. It's yet another Saw or Hostel clone, where unlikable characters trap each other in rooms and commit violence upon one another, though it possesses the dubious distinction of being the most aggressively ugly and the least bound by plot than any other lowly imitator.

Produced by Clive Barker and based on his short story 'Dread,' from 'Books of Blood.'ĭread is a contemptible film, one of the most ceaselessly putrid and repellent things to ever see release, a 'motion picture' which begins with a young mother receiving what can only be described as an 'axe-cam' to the face and features a climax solely constructed around watching a young woman starve to death.

The forbidden clive barker summary