Hellraiser
Guest review by Tim “Anarquistador” O’Brien
When one is about to delve into the works of Clive Barker, one must keep certain things in mind. There are things you’re going to find and there are things you’re not going to find. You’re not going to find super-eloquent prose or particularly likeable characters. What you ARE going find, however, is sex and violence in sick and twisted forms. You’re going to see disfigurements of body and mind that are as imaginative as they are frightening. You’re going to see sexual desire inextricably linked with sublime agony. You’re going to see slavering monsters lurking just beyond the pale of human perception, but those monsters are all too human. In a way he’s the punk rocker of horror writers: his works are not philosophically deep, but they come at you hard and fast and leave an impact. And that has its appeal, too. Barker has no interest in being genteel. He’s not going to waste time explaining WHY this horrible thing he’s describing exists; he’s just going to lovingly describe the horrible thing, and hope that he’s made you unable to sleep tonight.
And sometimes that’s all I need, frankly.
Like any ambitious horror writer, Barker has tried to craft an overlying mythos for his work, a set universe that all his characters share. It’s perhaps a grand irony that the most enduring mythos associated with his work is the one he perhaps re-visited the least: the world of Lemarchand’s Box, the Cenobites, and the Gash. It’s hard to believe that Pinhead, one of the icons of modern horror film, got his start in a small modest novella that went mostly unnoticed among Barker’s more ambitious works. But that’s life, I guess.
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The Hellbound Heart
Our story begins with a young man named Frank, fiddling with a puzzle box. Frank, we are to learn, fancies himself a hedonistic adventurer, having travel the world over in search of pleasures. Along the way he’s committed crimes, he’s sampled drugs, and he’s seduced more women than he can remember, but now he’s bored. Firmly believing he’s sampled every pleasure this world has to offer, Frank is now seeking the pleasure of other worlds. To that end he’s acquired a magical puzzle box known as Lemarchand’s Configuration, which, when solved, will open a gateway to the realm of the Order of the Gash. According to legend, the Gash is a place where a group of ancient hedonists went to explore pleasures unavailable to them in this world, and Frank wants to join them.
When he finally solves the puzzle box, and the Cenobites of the Gash appear to take him back with them, however, Frank realizes that limitless pleasure isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. With endless time to experiment with physical sensation, the Cenobites have become twisted and sadomasochistic to the extreme, and before Frank realizes what he’s gotten himself into, he’s spirited away to spend eternity in their company.
Months later, Frank’s younger brother Rory brings his wife Julia back to the old family home, hoping to fix the place up and have a fresh start to his troubled marriage. He and their friends – among them Kirsty, the frumpy “pity friend” of the group who harbors a futile love for Rory – move them into the house, none of them aware that Frank had solved Lemarchand’s Box up in the drafty room on the second floor and still dwells there, trapped between dimensions, helplessly longing to escape the eternal torment the Cenobites subject him to. Another thing that no one else is aware of is that, before her marriage to Rory, Julia and Frank had a short passionate affair. To Frank it was just another conquest, but to Julia it was her last moment of physical passion before her marriage to decent but dull Rory. During the course of fixing up the house, Rory cuts himself and winds up bleeding all over the floor of the drafty room. This proves to be a happy accident for Frank: that blood, in combination with a tiny bit of living matter of his that still remains in the room, is enough to crack open the door between dimensions and give him a hope of rebuilding a physical body. Realizing that Julia is living in the house now, and hoping he can manipulate her just as easily as he did before, he appeals to her to bring him more blood. Julia, remembering the passionate affair she once had, and also turned on by the idea of Frank actually owing her something, agrees. It’s not long before she’s luring men up to the room and killing them, so Frank can suck their bodies dry of fluids and use them remake himself. Unfortunately, what neither of them count on is Kirsty dropping by one afternoon and finding out what’s going on…
The Hellbound Heart is an unlikely supernatural horror novel, as its primary focus is on the sexual soap opera between its human characters, rather than the horrible monsters waiting beyond the pale. This is to the best, as it’s the humans of the piece that are the real monsters, not the Cenobites. Both Julia and Frank are motivated by selfishness and lust. Frank could care less about Julia; she’s a means to an end, the end being his escape from the Gash. Julia, on the other hand, wants to “tame” Frank. To possess him, by making him dependent on her. And both of them are willing to murder relatively innocent people to further their goals. That makes them worse monsters than the Cenobites, who are at least honestly depraved and make no excuses for it.
The flaw of the book, however, is the flaw of Clive Barker as writer. Given that he started as a playwright, Barker is very good at crafting an image and evoking a mood. What’s he’s not as good at is backstory. He presents the reader with his characters, but makes only a perfunctory effort to provide motivations for their actions. Barker only gives you enough to get the story going, and a reader is left to infer a lot about the relationships between them. The character of Kirsty is the most glaring example. All we know about her is that she’s part of Rory and Julia’s circle of friends, and that she’s the mousey depressed one. We don’t know who she is, or why they bother to keep her around if no one seems to really like her (then again, I suppose every circle of friends has one of those…). She becomes a central character in the story – the heroine by default – and we don’t know a single damned thing of consequence about her. She’s a convenient plot device, is all. We’re not given enough to really identify with any of the characters, actually; they’re just there to move the plot along.
This makes the story more about theme than character, and at least the theme is a good one. The Hellbound Heart is a tale about desire and obsession gone wrong, about hedonism taken to a horrifically logical extreme (after all, what physical sensation does NOT simply become pain after a certain point?). It’s almost a dark fairy tale, a cautionary tale about not letting pleasures of the flesh get out of control. And at the same time, it’s a very small and intimate story. There are no vast-reaching cosmic machinations at work here; just the unraveling of the obsessions of a small group of people (granted, some of those people aren’t quite human anymore, but still…).
That being said, it’s an odd thing to consider that this book became the basis for Clive Barker’s most well-known – and most often-explored – fictional universe, a thing he probably never consciously intended. How did this happen? Through the movie adaptation.
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Hellraiser (1987)
The story in Hellraiser doesn’t waste much time getting going. Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) gets his hands on Lemarchand’s Box, solves it, and gets dragged into the Cenobite’s dimension by barbed chains within the first five minutes. Months later, Frank’s brother Larry (Andy Robinson), his wife Julia (Claire Higgins), and Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Larry’s daughter from a previous marriage, move into the old home. It’s clear from the very beginning that this family is disintegrating: Larry is desperate to “make things work” with Julia, and to at least try and have Julia and Kirsty get along well enough to be the same room together. Julia is cold and distant from the first time we see her, however, so it we’re pretty sure Larry is doomed to fail.
In the explorations of the long-abandoned family home, Julia finds the room where Frank was staying, and some of his personal possessions. While she has a surprisingly graphic flashback to her brief violent affair with Frank, Larry cuts himself on a rusty nail while moving furniture. After Julia and Kirsty ferry him off to the hospital, the floorboards of the room drink up the blood he’s spilled. Some time later, a pool of fluid – oddly, and no doubt intentionally, reminiscent of semen or afterbirth – is spewed out of the floorboards, and a skeletal wreck of a human being crawls out. Frank (now being played Oliver Smith with Sean Chapman’s voice overdubbed) has returned.
Later that night, Frank and Julia entertain guests who get drunk and tiresome very quickly, and Julia excuses herself early. Something compels her to return to the room where Frank waits for her. Frank begs her to help her, to spill more blood in the room, to heal him so he can finally escape the Cenobites forever. Remembering her passionate affair with Frank with fondness, Julia agrees to so do, and soon she’s luring lonely businessmen up to the attic room, where she bashes their brains in with a hammer and then lets Frank have his sustenance. As Frank recovers, he tells Julia about the Cenobites, and what they did to him, and impresses upon her the need to hurry with their work, so he can finally have a complete body and be free at least. Their arrangement works for a short while, but then Julia begins to crack under the strain. Having to commit murder on a regular basis is bad enough, but that combined with the stress of keeping the increasingly impatient Frank hidden from an increasingly curious Larry causes her to break down one day. Still clueless as to what’s really going on, Larry thinks she’s just stressed out by the relocation, and he urges Kirsty to visit with her and try to make nice with her. But when Kirsty finally does so, she comes at the worst possible time: right when Frank and Julia are dispatching their latest victim. She barely escapes, and somehow manages to get away with Lemarchand’s Box in hand. Playing with the Box later on, Kirsty accidentally solves it and releases the Cenobites. The horrific Cenobites are quite willing to drag her back with them to their dimension, but Kirsty offers them a deal instead…
Hellraiser occupies a revered niche among cult horror movies, largely due to good timing. By 1987, the horror genre had gone stale. Gone were the days of serious supernatural horror; by the mid-80s the slasher film was king, and even they were going downhill. By then there had already been six Friday the 13ths and three Nightmare on Elm Streets. Movies about wisecracking killers hacking up horny teens in creative and ironic ways were par for the course. To have a movie like Hellraiser come out was a breath of fresh air. Its thematic material is unconventional for a horror movie, and presented in a dead serious manner. The atmosphere of sexually-charged weirdness that permeates the film was something absent from its contemporaries. Sex and death have always been closely linked in horror film, but Barker does something different here. Lust is not punished with death by inexplicably puritanical killers. Rather, it is lust, twisted into sadism and murder, that motivates our killers. There are no innocents here; our protagonists are no less monstrous than the monsters they seek to escape. And at least our monsters have the decency to look monstrous. The struggle is not between good and evil, but between the grotesque and the even more grotesque.
When you consider the $1 million budget – a pittance, relatively speaking – and when you consider that this was the first feature film Clive Barker ever directed himself, with virtually no experience in film whatsoever, it’s a wonder the film got made at all, let alone be as good as it turned out. You see every penny of that $1 million on screen, predominately in the makeup effects. The Cenobites, members of Barker’s old acting troupe from his playwright days, are truly startling to behold. Their flesh is gray and corpse-like. Their eyes are black and empty, and their voices – or at least the voices of the two of that actually speak – sound dead and inhuman. Their disfigurements are as creative as they are grotesque, scarifications and piercings of such delicacy and intricacy that it’s clear a whole lot of thought was put into them. The leader, “Pinhead” (Doug Bradley), is of course the one everyone remembers, but my personal favorite is the “Chatterer.” He seems to me to be a more fully realized version of Barker’s idea of the Cenobites: he’s torn himself up so badly that he barely looks human any more, and he probably thinks he looks great.
Mention should also go to composer Christopher Young and his effectively creepy score. Like the film, his music is small but enormously effective, revolving mainly around this slightly off-kilter waltz that starts up whenever the Box is being discussed. The music really does convey the image of an ancient music box finally winding down, of a thing that was meant to be beautiful but has suffered the ravages of time and misuse and has become twisted and corrupt. Which is a pretty fair description of just about everyone in this story.
There are flaws to the film, however, and, just as in the book, the flaws can be attributed to Clive Barker himself. The mistakes made in the movie are those of a novice director. Although there are a few moments of cinematic brilliance – take the juxtaposition of Larry’s injury with Julia’s flashback, for example – for the most part Barker is a pretty workmanlike director. Very much from the “point and shoot” school. And there are several other scenes where Barker quite obviously wasn’t sure what to do, how to frame a shot, what motivation to give his actors. Barker also fails to successfully convey a sense of time and place; where never exactly sure where this story is supposed to be taken place. It was shot in England (and the old house was apparently Barker’s own house), and so the buildings and the locations are quite distinctly English. But half of the main cast are American actors, with American accents, and this includes Larry himself. It’s never fully explained how or why Larry would have an old family home in England, or how he’s able to drag up some boring old friends for a dinner party after moving in. And finally, if you look very carefully, you can see the exact moment the film runs out of money (and if you’ve seen it, you know where to look).
Flaws and all, though, it’s still a damn good horror movie. It’s a rare horror film that can successfully play with genre conventions and can genuinely disturb its audience with its imagery. This is a film with demonic creatures in it, but those demons are bound by rules that even they cannot break. This is a film where people die for sexual trespasses, but it is the woman who kills the man. This is a film where a cute terrified teenage girl still has the presence of mine to bargain with the monster for her life – and where the monster will actually consider her offer. That was a rare thing then, and it’s still a rare thing today.
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It’s often the case when translating a book into a screenplay that not everything makes it up to the screen. Some books are just too long, plots too intricate, to film anything but the core of the story. And yet, The Hellbound Heart is such a short book. You’d think there wouldn’t be much to leave out. But left out some stuff is. The meager backstory of our characters that was told in The Hellbound Heart is gone. We never find out how Larry and Julia first got together, or what led to their current marital woes. They just…are. Perhaps this is related to the change in the ages of the characters. In the book all our characters were significantly younger than their movie counterparts: Rory, Julia, and their friends are all in their mid-twenties, while Frank himself is twenty-nine. This lends a certain poignancy and sympathy to the characters that is absent from the movie. These are young adults. These are people still figuring out who they are. Rory is the childlike “good brother,” who’s always done what he’s told and hasn’t quite figured out that that may not always be wise. Julia is the beautiful debutante who’s starved for adventure and excitement. From that standpoint, their behavior makes a little more sense. Of course Julia is bored with Rory, and of course Rory is clueless about it; they’re too self-absorbed to know any better. It’s unpleasant to think about, but it is understandable. More so than boorish movie-Larry and frosty movie-Julia, who just seem like they should know better by now. Although, making them older does serve to distance our characters even more than the usual teenage protagonists found in these films. And it does add more to the off-kilter feel of the film; these don’t seem like the right characters to be found in a horror movie. They’re too old and too ordinary-looking.
Making the main characters older might also have been an attempt to better deal with the presence of Kirsty, by making Larry old enough to have been married before and to have had a teen daughter. After all, in the book, Kirsty is just kind of there. In the book she’s the sad-sack friend whom Rory and Julia tolerate just because they feel sorry for her. Making Kirsty a relative at least gives the movie a better excuse to have her there. But on the other hand, it sends the film in an unpleasant direction. We have a scene where Frank attacks Kirsty, and his intentions toward her are…less than ambiguous, let’s say. She’s seen too much, and we know he’s going to kill her. What’s not clear is just what he’s going to do her before he kills her. In the book, this is pretty distasteful, but in the movie this is downright nasty. This is his brother’s daughter, for God’s sake! It gives Frank an entirely new level of depravity – not found in the book, but not entirely surprising in the movie. In the book, Frank is described as roguishly handsome, charming in a dangerous sort of way. The kind of bad boy that young women like Julia are always attracted to. It’s only after he gets his way that the sleaze in his nature comes out. Movie-Frank is sleazy from the start. We only see him whole in Julia’s flashbacks, where he is greasy and unshaven, and clearly not to be trusted. His seduction of Julia is brutal joyless rutting; he virtually rapes her. Granted, that’s not too far off from the book version, but at least from the book we know that Julia is remembering the affair through rose-colored glasses. No such thing happens in the movie. All we know is that some sleazy guy had his way with Julia, and somehow that makes her willing to kill for him.
I will say, however, that the for the most part, the movie handles the Cenobites better than the book. The Cenobites are creatures of twisted vision, and the movie conveys that vision better than the written word really could. Barker describes them in the book with somewhat oblique language, making references to scars and piercings but not going into a great many specifics. The movie-Cenobites are iconic. They are incarnations of BDSM carried to its logical extreme, all leather and metal and gangrenous flesh. And where the book did not give them names or characters, the movie gives us Pinhead. One of the great monsters of horror film, Pinhead conveys himself with a dignity that is rare among his movie-monster brethren. There is a certain imperiousness that defines his attitude during his parley with Kirsty, as if he’s just too important to be bothered with this puny mortal girl who summoned him by accident. You almost get the sense that she just pulled him away from a particularly good bit of torture, and he just wants to get this over with and get back to what he was doing. The affairs of the human race are, by and large, nothing to the Cenobites. They are not some elder race of dark gods clamoring to be released; they’re perfectly happy to poke each other with sharp objects in their own little universe and be left alone to do so. It’s only when people escape them that they deign to lower themselves by walking among us.
Of course, it’s the mechanics of the Gash, the Cenobites’ dimension, where the movie kind of goes wrong. In the book, we know from the beginning what the Cenobites are. We know what Frank thinks they are, and we realize along with him how wrong he was. In the movie, it’s not until Pinhead appears to Kirsty that we get a concrete idea of what they are. “Explorers in the further reaches of experience,” he tells her, “Demons to some, angels to others.” A bit vague, but pretty close to the original conception of the Cenobites. Super-hedonists who have gone to the point where pleasure and pain are no longer distinct sensations. Of course, the later movies in the Hellraiser series expanded on the mythology of the Cenobites: as the movies went on, we were to learn that the Cenobites are actually demons, and furthermore they were once humans who were lured to Hell by the promise of eternal pleasure (much like Frank himself was). It’s quite an intricate mythos that was eventually woven around the Cenobites, but it ultimately robs the story of its power. The most frightening idea put forward by The Hellbound Heart was that the Cenobites did it to themselves. Self-mutilation is perhaps the most psychologically repulsive of deviant behaviors, and this story plays heavily on the horror implicit in it. The idea that the Cenobites are human beings who derive some kind of sick pleasure from disfiguring themselves – and that there are other people who might want to be Cenobites – is perhaps scarier than any supernatural or alien monster. By instead turning the Cenobites into just another instrument of the Devil, much of what made them truly scary is taken away. But fortunately, there are few indications of that theme here in the first movie. When taken by itself, Hellraiser remains pretty scary and depraved.
(I should probably say a few words about Lemarchand’s Box itself. As a concept it’s a great one, a seemingly innocuous puzzle box that opens the Gates of Hell. There’s something Lovecraftian in it, in the idea of using arcane geometry to punch a hole in time and space. The featureless, beautifully-lacquered music box described in the book is quite fascinating, a challenging puzzle that plays a tune of increasing complexity with each solved piece. It evokes a Renaissance aesthetic, a melding of artistic elegance with clear scientific purpose. It’s a beautiful thing that provides no real indication of the horrors it unlocks. The demented Rubik’s Cube of the film, that grew more and more easily solved with each new movie, is less interesting. There’s a different aesthetic to be found in this Box. The movie version looks sinister and alien, carved with strange abstract patterns inlaid with metal. This thing looks like bad news long before anyone opens it, and the fact that it seems so easily opened doesn’t exactly help. The Box is supposed to be hard to solve; you don’t want to accidentally summon Pinhead. Nothing seems to piss him off more.)
All in all, both the book and the movie suffer from the same faults: great idea, great imagery, less-than-great execution. And that’s pretty much a problem that has haunted Clive Barker throughout most of his career. But if that’s Barker’s fault as author, then it’s not his alone. Many horror writers have the same problem, and it’s only that Barker’s images are so unlike most of what other writers do that his execution problems stand out more. And if the movie Hellraiser had one good idea behind it, that was frankly one more than a lot of its contemporaries had at the time.
And again, sometimes that’s all I need.
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