Kitamura to team up with Clive Barker for an anime take on "In the Hills, the Cities"?

by Chris MaGee

There weren't a lot of people who liked Ryuhei Kitamura's 2007 screen take on Clive Barker's short story "Midnight Meat Train" from his groundbreaking 1984 collection "The Books of Blood", at least not a lot of people who I've talked to. Lots of ultra-stylish Kitamura photography paired up with weak performances and stomach churning gore didn't impress them too much, but in the end Kitamura really only had to impress one person and that would be Clive Barker. The 57-year-old horror novelist was obviously happy enough with Kitamura's interpretation of a grisly abattoir in the London underground that he has plans to team up with the Japanese director yet again.

In a video interview posted online by film fest world traveler and film blogger Blake Ethridge at Cinema is Dope Barker revealed that Kitamura approached him with the idea of tackling a second story from "The Books of Blood", this time "In the Hills, the Cities" that tells the momentous story of the populations of two cities who combine themselves into towering skyscraper-sized giants and do battle in a ritualistic festival. Now how does Kitamura propose to bring this spectacle to the screen? Well, in an anime film of course, and Barker is in full agreement that this is the only realistic way that the vision he committed to the page could be captured on celluloid.

Barker doesn't reveal any firm production dates to Ethridge in the 8-minute video segment, but his excitement for the project, and for the possibilities of having his work turned into an anime, is palpable. Check out the clip over at Anime News Network, the folks who have picked up on this intriguing bit of news.