The 1980s popularized horror franchises (or just sequels in general) in a big way, bringing back a phenomenon not truly seen since the 1940s. This was the Silver Age of the Sequel, with a modern production pattern of franchising. There weren’t nearly as many sequels made in this new era (not when the 40s churned out six sequels a year per franchise), but the overall lifespan of a 1980s franchise is roughly equivalent to the 1940s predecessors. This lifespan is well under a decade, usually, ignoring reboots and such, and is heavily dependent upon trend cycles. What this means is that the 1980s, the hotbed for horror sequels, saw a lot of the same kind of series – slashers, mostly. It was the trendy thing at the turn of the decade, and had naturally worn itself out as the decade drew on. The newfound need for blockbuster franchises was still there, but in horror no new form was presenting itself.
It is in this environment that Hellraiser found itself. To its benefit, Hellraiser is a complete original, barely classifiable within the popular horror subgenres of the 80s – or any time. There is a vague stench of torture about it, but cut with a hefty supernatural component, some fairy tale, some domestic drama…At any rate, it ain’t a body count flick! In the pit of Hellraiser’s hellbound heart is a streak of sadomasochism, a sexualized horror and literalized metaphor, a ghastly and adult meanness which make its fellow franchises look like, well, child’s play.
Hellraiser is the sick, British brainchild of author/artist Clive Barker, making his directorial debut with an adaptation of his own novella, “The Hellbound Heart.” This would not be Barker’s first filmed tale – though it’s his first to be adapted right, a direct reaction to the poor products others made of Underworld (aka Transmutations) and Rawhead Rex.
Of Clive Barker, every reviewer of Hellraiser is legally entitled to mention the same Stephen King quote: “I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker.” In retrospect, this isn’t wholly true, as Hellraiser (and the rest of Barker’s oeuvre) is too extreme and niche to influence the mainstream – of course therein lays its power as well. Hellraiser is an unrepeatable Faustian bargain, a response to Judeo-Christian mythology which never pilfers imagery from those sources. Even here we must take the good with the bad, as matters of budget and inexperience render Hellraiser a bit less than it wishes. But this is a wildly ambitious effort, and rather Barker put out an almost-classic, warts and all, than kowtow to preexisting genre conventions.
It all starts with a puzzle box of most ancient and mysterious origin, which looks like a Rubik’s Cube. Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman), a hedonist of the highest order, sees this box as the furthest extreme in experiential pleasure. Did I say “pleasure?” Well, that’s only half right…Let’s say “pain” as well. Or, by most people’s definition, solely pain, as solving the box quickly leads to lethal rending by way of chains, emerged from the shadows. Unearthly, unholy beings gather to collect the box, and Frank’s plentiful viscera.
Some indistinct time later, and the vacant manse Frank called lair is taken over by his unsuspecting brother, Larry (Andrew Robinson, Scorpio from Dirty Harry!). Larry intends to transform this decaying, maggot-ridden husk into his dream home, as a way to kick off his marriage to Julia (thespian Clare Higgins). Larry suspects Frank is long gone – but for reasons far more banal than the truth. Little does Larry know (that being his chief character trait, the spineless bimbo) that Julia already knew Frank – in the Biblical sense. In fact, this house holds powerful memories for Julia, of her former affair. For Frank, ever the whoremonger, we take this to be another tossed-off fling; for Julia, this was a bond, a dedication of devotion, which haunts her still.
What is most fascinating about Hellraiser is that Julia, the villain, is the protagonist. (What, you thought Pinhead the villain perhaps? Ha!) The camera remains ever focused on her, as much as many would assume our sympathies must lie with the more sympathetic Larry. But he’s a pushover, entirely too weak for that! In the one sop to standard horror storytelling, Barker provides us with another figure to identify with in the form of Larry’s daughter (and Julia’s stepdaughter), Kirsty (Ashley Laurence, the poor man’s Winona Ryder). Kirsty – and don’t you love the portent of that name? – is in fact Hellraiser’s Final Girl, as much as it has one. To let you know how little Hellraiser cares for such a role, though, Kirsty won’t really have any notable screen time until Act Three, when, erm, all hell breaks loose.
In the moving process, Larry manages to lacerate his hand deeply on a rusty nail – with all the gore to come, this is the most wince-inducing moment on display. Rushing to Julia for solace – spineless bimbo! – Larry’s blood cascades pooling on the attic floor, where Julia has been reminiscing…and where Frank died. And as the unhappily-wed couple takes their leave, that blood seeps into the floorboards, as a shrieking skeletal beast is born! Allow a little last-minute budget to stretch this effect out, but not enough to rescue it from some degree of 80s cheese. Still, this is a gooey pus monster, and kudos to that.
Larry and Julia host a dinner party that evening, another chance for us to marvel at the train wreck that is their marriage – it’s sub-Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? for now, but just wait… Over the sound of their company’s braying laughter, Julia hears noises in the attic. Thinking it just rats – who are too busy cowering in dread for such scampering – she heads up there to instead discover –
It’s Frank, rescued from the nether realms! “His blood, on the floor, it brought me back … Please God help me!” This scant tendril creature (Oliver Smith’s body under Sean Chapman’s voiceover) demands more blood to be made whole. Julia becomes a cog in her ex-lover’s demands, part of the oath she swore to him. Larry who?
Okay, pause. There’s a certain iconic figure Hellraiser is known for, a top tier horror icon whose sequelizing would eventually drag this series screaming into standard franchise territory…and it sure ain’t Frank! Nope, it’s Pinhead, that guy on all the posters, who won’t even show until well into the end. Ignoring his absence for now – which wouldn’t even be a problem without our future expectations – we can instead focus wholly on the tale of Frank and Julia, a rather engrossing (if slow-paced) tragedy in the making. I mean tragedy in the sense of “Macbeth,” of a villainous figure’s downfall. Such can be fascinating stuff, and far more off-putting in a real world sense than all the hell demons to come.
Julia’s first step into this pit of sin comes the following day, with Larry off at work, as she stalks into town to amass a victim. She seduces a poor, lonely sod at a bar, and takes him back home under the promise of adultery. This pitiable man simply wanted to get hammered and get nailed…and in a way, that’s what he gets. Julia murders him with a hammer, ripping his skin on the nails this house is just lousy with. And Frank feasts upon his flesh.
Taking on more form (though significantly less than his first resurrection, for some nebulous cosmology), Frank comes to resemble an escapee from Body Worlds. And with his brand new nerve endings, Frank can start to feel pain again – the first moment on the path towards pleasure. Tentative physical joy is taken in Julia, with Frank sneering “Come to Daddy” in just the most vile, leering way possible. Hang onto that.
Frank discusses his need for further victims, desperate to complete his regeneration before “they” find him. “Who?” “The Cenobites.” The word means “monk,” an ecclesiastical order. That it refers to a cadre of ostensible demons is one of Hellraiser’s nasty little blurring effects, muddying diametric notions like Good and Evil, pleasure and pain, Heaven and Hell…
With renewed purpose Julia delivers Frank another delicious schlub to chow down upon. Frank takes on more form, earning a layer of bleeding gore I cannot bring myself to show in a screen cap…No, wait, I can! Behold!
This latest murderous station of the cross complete, Frank reveals more of the Cenobitic legacy. Producing the puzzle box (or Lament Configuration, though I prefer simply “puzzle box”), he informs how it “opens doors – doors to the pleasures of Heaven or Hell. I didn’t care which … The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond the limits. Pain and pleasure, indivisible…” Flashes hint at the incalculable torture Frank endured.
Larry is growing more suspicious of something. Frank wants him out of the picture, his latest sacrifice; Julia balks, divided and somehow determined to protect her husband. To keep him away from the attic, she seduces him (a reversal of her usual tactic with the town’s anonymous singles), leading Larry to the bedroom. Most carnal love is made, Frank looking on as he skins a rat. Julia begs for Larry’s life as Frank retreats. Poor Larry, though, simply believes she is sexually bipolar.
It is on the third day, in the midst of Julia’s third murder, that Kirsty enters into the picture – at Larry’s request, to provide Julia some friendship. What little does Larry know! As Julie hides away her latest fresh carcass, Kirsty reaches the attic to see what has become of her uncle. Her blood uncle. And you want icky? How about having Frank come on to his brother’s daughter, again growling “Come to Daddy.” (We’re a long way from Be Forever Yamato, which portrayed a sexual yearning for one’s niece as heroic – anime, man!) “Betcha make your daddy so proud.” Ew! Kirsty beats Frank off – not that way! – and makes her escape by hurling his puzzle box through the window.
We now take up Kirsty’s story, as she stumbles listlessly through town and past nuns in an effort to contact her dad. But screaming about one’s “bloody uncle” merely sounds vulgar in England, simply earning Kirsty a one-way trip to the hospital.
Awaking, the doctors pooh-pooh Kirsty’s concerns. Left alone in her cell with the musical puzzle box, its charms prove strangely more inviting than the need to rescue Larry. Kirsty solves the box, over many fades – an act which shouldn’t be this easy, frankly, as Frank says. Rather than a reception by chains, Kirsty beholds a sudden passageway in the wall, Grecian corridors leading to the abyss, tears of the innocent echoing throughout. And as a female in a 1980s horror movie, naturally Kirsty strolls right on down!
So it’s no one’s fault but hers that she is pursued back out by a gigantic, uteral scorpion-baby-monster-thing. Again, the budget isn’t up to such specific ghastliness, but…How many horror franchises can boast a bestiary of creatures like this?!
Safe back in the hospital…light emits from the grout. The walls bleed. An infernal wind blows as the Cenobites make their grand appearance! And thus Hellraiser becomes a franchise!
Cenobites, “explorers in the further reaches of experience. Demons to some, angels to others.” Let us meet this host of marauding sadomasochistic ghouls, in all their pale, leather-clad glory…
Leader of the Cenobites is the Lead Cenobite (Doug Bradley, a proper Limey). The makeup crew, and subsequently the public at large, know him as “Pinhead,” for the pins he has wedged into his own face just so. He is a taskmaster, an anal post-human, and unlike most of his fellow horror icons, Pinhead abides by the rules. Which is the only reason anyone stands a chance against him.
The Female Cenobite too sports self-mutilation as artful as it is ghoulish, a personal tracheotomy, allowing her throat to take on a Cronenbergian vaginal appearance.
Chatterer mostly just chatters, and is so deformed and monstrous he resembles some of those damn monsters from the Resident Evil movies – because they stole the idea from here!
And Butterball, though roly-poly as his name suggests, is no less monstrous. He fancies himself a bit of a surgeon, I’d wager, which doesn’t mesh well with his eyes sewn shut.
So…how is Kirsty gonna get out of this one?!
Well, the Cenobites are logicians, who just happen to worship at the altar of pain. She can debate them! At first, nothing Kirsty proposes can sway our fiends. They maintain unwaveringly the simplicity of the scenario. “The box. You opened it. We came.” Kirsty’s salvation lies in a Faustian bargain, promising to trade Frank for herself. She is sent forth to collect him, with the stern warning that “if you cheat us…WE’LL TEAR YOUR SOUL APART.”
Whew!
Kirsty returns to the house, seeking Frank. Instead she finds a spring-loaded Jesus (!). (That’s a Hell of a weird horror gag.) Then she finds Julia and Larry, joined together to reassure her that Frank is already dead – Larry killed him. Bull! Clive Barker wouldn’t dare let such a graphic event pass off screen! So taking a step back and considering “Larry” again, well…
That’s right, it’s Frank now fully reborn and clad in Larry’ skin – Man, does every horror franchise owe a debt to Ed Gein? As Frank’s incestuous yearnings rise up again, Kirsty too learns the truth. “Come to Daddy.” Shudder!
Frank lunges, but he doesn’t kill Kirsty. Rather she dodges, and Julia takes his blade in her stead. Yes, it’s sexual. Now consciously betraying the woman who saved him, Frank suctions out what little of Julia’s life force he needs, then resumes his pursuit of Kirsty. And cornering her in the attic, he crows about how she is due to succumb to “Uncle Frank,” when –
“We needed to hear it from your own lips.” Worlds merge, as the Cenobites transforms the house into a land of dangling chains and shadow. And these chains aren’t merely decorative, as rather they jut out from every direction, and in turn pull Frank back in every direction. This earns the hateful retch one of horror’s greatest kills ever, as he is pulled apart into countless pieces. “Jesus wept.” And now this is something I absolutely cannot screen cap here!
Now, with a few exceptions, Hellraiser has progressed in a wholly respectable manner, for what it is. This has been a nice, self-contained document of a remarkably crappy marriage, which just happens to invoke blood skeletons and extra-dimensional demonic monks. I can almost excuse the inartful application of Kirsty as heroine. But that’s when it all goes to Hell…
The Cenobites confess they still wish to claim Kirsty anyway, for the sheer Hell of it – Okay, no more “Hell” comments. Because you don’t create a chain gang like this and underutilize them! So they rampage all throughout the house, which starts to crumble as a sudden influx of budget comes in, aided by Clive Barker’s confessed on-set drunkenness. Honestly, he too lamented the chintzy quality of the final 5 minutes once he’d sobered up at the premiere. For what it’s worth, Kirsty banishes the Cenobites, one by unholy one, as she seals the puzzle box with inestimable ease. Also, suddenly her useless boyfriend Steve I’d never mentioned is there, solely because all 1987 horror movies must end with a couple.
And the house…er, it like burns away, or vanishes into a black hole or something, in a flash of optical effects which are again the direct result of Clive Barker’s boozing. A beastly winged skeleton whatever thing hurtles across, like something out of Army of Darkness. Okay, one more “Hell” comment, which is also used in film: The Hell is that?!
Okay, I lament the tail end, but there remains a lot to like. Even without the marvelous Cenobites to cling to, there is plenty in this beast. Enough to make Hellraiser a modest success, relatively, earning $14 million worldwide (not bad, considering its $1 million budget). It’s this sort of profitability which makes horror an enticing sequel generator. Horror has a longevity other genres often don’t, as Hellraiser’s true audience wouldn’t come until video – here’s a new phenomenon which only took off toward the 80s’ end, which will demand more attention at some point. And with the popular Cenobites left tantalizingly mysterious, there’s plenty of sequel material, even if we consider the tale of Frank and Julia a done deal…Or is it?
Related posts:
• No. 2 Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
• No. 3 Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)
• No. 4 Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996)
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