Mr. Pat
- Oct 22, 2020
- 3 min read

Books of Blood

Updated: Jul 19, 2021

The 301st review!

Yesterday was the second time Facebook’s soon-to-be-gone Notes section screwed me. I was getting ready to go to bed and post the script when I realized it had been deleted and nothing saves in drafts anymore. So after I posted the video, I had to go ahead and transcribe the whole thing. Ugh. Anyways, after that was finished, I got a chance to lay down and watch...

Books of Blood (2020). Hulu

As you may or may not be aware Clive Barker’s Books of Blood are a series of six anthology books. The original idea was to make an anthology TV series based on the stories, but it seems like at some point during production someone just said, “Screw it! Let’s just make a movie instead.”

It’s kind of like Trick ‘r Treat where the stories are intertwined at various points but you don’t understand how until you’ve watched the whole thing. Reviewing these types of movies is a bit of a challenge because I’m not exactly sure the best way to go about it because there are three stories with a set starting point, but the timeline gets a bit muddied the further along the movie goes. I think I’ll talk about the movie as a whole and not go into too much detail about the individual chapter because this review would go too long and it may give away too much.

To sum it up, the movie has three stories; Jenna, Bennett, and Miles. Each of them unwittingly has a part to play in the other’s stories. In most anthology movies you can pick one or two that stand out as better or worse than the others, but all of them are good. Personally, I think the Miles chapter was the best despite the movie showing off a dude’s ass for a large chunks of it. Bennett’s was definitely the scariest and raised the most questions while Jenna’s story was the most fun and had my two favorite people in it. None of them were great, but they were all good.

The thing that sticks out the most to me is there’s no one to root for. We have a pair of contract killers, someone who made their career out of ruining hope for people, a fraud, a possible rapist and an edgelord hiding a secret (this person was the worst.) During the tense scenes or big reveals I didn’t feel much for what they were going through because none of them were likable. I will say for some, the conclusion of their arcs are definitely intriguing, in not whole satisfying. The more I think about it, the more I kind of enjoy two of them. It’s hard to explain and I can’t really get into discussing two other pretty important characters because this movie is very new and I don’t want anything spoiled.

As for the movie itself, I don’t recall any jump scares, but it’s very tense and has some really disturbing visuals. The movie really plays with you in that it starts to slowly build something up and the entire time it grabs your attention and still manages to surprise you with what it’s putting on screen. I like a good slow burn as long as it’s not boring. This one dangles the string in front of you and keeps pulling it away as you grab it, but you keep grabbing because you need that string.

I don’t think I’ll ever care to watch it again but if they make more, I will absolutely check out any future installments in this world they’ve created because it’s extremely interesting and there are so many different ways it can go. For a jumping off point to something bigger, it’s well done. If there aren’t more coming in the future, this would be a movie you’d watch and probably enjoy, but would probably forget about in a couple months.