Stick a pin in it: “Hellraiser” (1987)

I suppose I should really call it “Clive Barker’s Hellraiser”; but really, whose else would it be? The first entry in the series is regarded as the best and it works as a standalone. My understanding is that in the world-building that followed, the series lost its way, as others of its ilk did, similarly. 

“Hellraiser” is a cold, calculating piece of nastiness with little genuine character development and much more emphasis on the cruelty of humans toward other humans and its reflection - or amplification in the utter torture of the Cenobites - about whom more, later - toward humans. Sex and power dynamics are woven into the grand scheme of things and withal, a jolly time is had by all.

After an eye-popping openting, the film starts with a box being purchased somewhere in Morocco. It’s a nicely constructed opening with a man - Frank - who seems to be on the run from the past, sitting before the box as it opens a portal to another reality and is quickly shredded to bits. The box closes up and in short order, we discover that Frank’s brother Larry and his family are moving into the house, with extreme resignation on Larry’s wife’s part since she had an affair with Frank. Larry and Julia’s relationship was fraying and somehow, Larry thinks this is a good step to rebuilding it. Kirsty, Larry’s daughter by his previous wife, doesn’t have a vary sympathetic relationship with Julia. So much for the domestic setting. 

As these elements go, if have moved into your deceased/missing under mysterious circumstances brother’s house and there’s an empty attic where something transdimentional occurred, then you know something’s bound to happen. The mechanics usually depend on something unusual and why should “Hellraiser” be any exception. 

Two movers are getting ready to move a mattress up the stairs and Larry volunteers to help them. Both men eye Julia and Kirsty and that’s almost as creepy as anting else that happens in the film. As they’re mounting the stairs, Barker directs out attention to a nails sticking out from a beam with the back of Larry’s hand on course for what turns into one of the goriest sequences of what would typically a simple scratch. However, Larry bleeds like a stuck pig and his blood somehow leeches into the floorboards of the attack summoning Frank into a corporeal manifestation. 

Larry cries out like that stuck pig and almost faints as Julia tries to get him to pull his shit together. It’s all very domestic. The closeups on bodily desiccation and dissection are masterful and in 1987, were no likely stomach churning. At this remove, they’re still effective but post-“Saw” and “Hostel”, almost quaint. It’s the larger context that lends them any kind of force. 

Once we see Frank coming together gradually, from his climbing out of some goo like a sentient biohazard to his later completion, the game is afoot to draw the viewer into a world where the space between this world and another - not “the next” - and for the most part, the film succeeds. 

Julia is drawn to the attic where she meets Frank in his out-of-the-goo form and he explains that in order for them to be together, she’ll have to bring him more men. Barker to his credit, doesn’t paint Julia as a shrew; she’s brittle but if you had your ex-lover recomposing in your attic, you might be distracted, too. As it is, Claire Higgins brings a genuinely fraught tension to almost every scene she’s in. Julia is barely holding it together and every interaction with Larry is tinged with borderline contempt, outright loathing, or just plain pity. Kirsty has nothing to do with her step-mother and only puts up with her because it would mean a lot to her dad.

Julia grows increasingly obsessed with restoring Frank and begins luring men to the house and up to the attic. The first time is one of the more uncomfortable seductions in film. She isn’t used to this sort of thing, alternating between luring and almost rejecting the first guy who grows pretty pissed, and once up in the furnitureless attic, tells him she likes to do it on the floor. Then she brains him with a claw hammer after which Frank tells her to get out. We are left to imagine what it is Frank does to his victims’ bodies in this and subsequent kills. Oh, yes, our Julia gets better at this. Eventually, Frank’s viscera is restored, his musculoskeletal system is visible and he notices that his nervous system is getting back to functioning. 

Poor Larry, in the meantime, just doesn’t know what’s going on with Julia. Julia has kept Frank from killing Larry, but things begin to come to a head when after coming onto her husband, Julia shifts gears and rejects him. As played by Andrew Robinson, the best you can say for Larry is that he means well, but he does read as kind of a shmuck, and it is understandable that Julia would have fallen for the more interesting/dangerous Frank. Just so we’re clear, Frank and Julia’s thing started and ended before she and Larry were married. Still, we are now here where the relationship is reaching peak cataclysm. 

Larry later makes one more attempt to get Kristy to buddy up to Julia. All Julia needs is another woman friend. Of course, the day that Kristy decides to visit the house, she sees Julia leading another man into the house. Not a good look, Julia. 

Kristy enters the house, as of course, we know she would. Unlike instances of where you may find yourself shouting, “don’t go in!”, this is one where it’s so understandable. If I were her, I’d make a beeline straight to where my stepmom is doing the deed to call her out on it, too. That is, if I didn’t know that there was a resurrected homicidal monster in the attic. It’s an efficient and effective sequence from Kirsty discovering Frank, seizing the box and escaping. There is an economy in this movie that is startling for a first-time director. It is no doubt helpful that he created all these characters and the world they inhabit, but also, as a bestselling author of some of the more reliable horror pulp, Barker is no doubt attuned intuitively to telling a story with little fat on the bones. 

Kirsty passes out during her escape and wakes up in the hospital where she still has the box and opening it (I know some call it a puzzle box, and it is, but it’s no Rubic’s Cube), opens a portal to that other dimension in her hospital room. She travels down a lengthy hall, encounters a wonderful creature - okay, ugly as sin - of practical effects and starts booking it back to our world with the critter in hot pursuit. Upon getting back to her room, she’s not out of the woods or the interdimensional shit.

There’s the Cenobites - the chatterer, butterball (lovely lad, that one), the female Cenobite, and the leader who fans call “Pinhead”, but whom Barker called The Priest. He explains that they are sometimes seen as demons, sometimes angels, but they’re just explorers who no longer differentiate between pleasure and pain. Oh, this takes the tale up a notch. We are now into some wonderful psychosexual territory. It is stated, but not really as explicit, as you might be led to believe. This is where the film misses some opportunities; I don’t know if Barker’s novella on which the film is based goes into greater detail, but at no point in the film did I get the feeling of either pleasure or satisfaction being derived by the Cenobites. They are intimidating looking (and again, some great practical effects) and they make it plain that they don’t care about Kristy or her situation, even when she tells them that she can deliver Frank to them.

Still, they strike a bargain: she takes them to Frank and if he confesses and proves he’s the one being who got away from them, they’ll let her go free. Deal? Sure!

What follows is pretty remarkable, if for one problem which I’ll address in a bit. Kristy returns to the house where Frank has assumed Larry’s identity by applying Larry’s flesh to his own body. Kristy sees a flayed body on the floor and Frank as Larry and Julia try to convince Kristy that’s Frank’s body on the floor. FrankLarry makes some gross sexual advances to his niece (ewww…) and when she declines, he winds up stabbing Julia accidentally, and pretty coldly just goes about absorbing her life energy. The Cenobites have appeared by now and don’t buy Frank’s deception and upon hearing Frank admit to killing Larry take him. Frank gets his second flaying and in the meantime, Kristy grabs the box from Julia’s hands, reverses the order used to invoke the Cenobites and sends them back to their own dimension. Oh, and Kirsty sets fire to the house. 

I haven’t mentioned her boyfriend because he really is just a plot advancement tool, but he shows up, they flee the collapsing house and later, Kristy tosses the box into a burning pile of wood. A bearded vagrant who appeared earlier in the film appears, retrieves the box from the pyre, transforms into some kind of flying dragon thing, and the movie begins where it ended with another shmoe paying for the box from the same vendor.

“Hellraiser” has become a cult classic over the past 35 years and I can see why. It has some fascinating ideas baked into a well-enough-executed film, and as much as I admire what Barker has accomplished, the film falls short in terms of the performances and woefully underwritten characters. Sometimes, this can be overcome with more engaging acting or even more interesting filmmaking. 

What’s on view here is interesting enough, but without characters to have some degree of empathy for, it really is difficult to feel too invested in the proceedings. “Hellraiser” isn’t the only horror film where the villains (are the Cenobites really villains? They are more neutral in their motivations and while talking to Kristy, the female Cenobite makes it clear that Kristy will do just as well as Frank; their motivations really do seem more like explorers to see - what? How it feels to flay other beings? The BDSM element is not really exploited or realized here) more interesting than the “heroes.”

The series continued over eleven entries and I don’t care enough to pursue them, but the Cenobites intrigue me. My understanding is that their is a broader storyline that develops for them with diminishing returns on the narrative front. In our present film, they remain tantalizing enough to want to explore their milieu. 

I basically wanted to see this because I really didn’t care too much about “mainstream horror” at the time in the 80s. I had seen plenty of grindhouse movies in the seventies and was pretty dismissive of studio attempts to gin up franchises. Craven’s “Nightmare on Elm Street”, Tobe Hooper’s “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”, and John Carpenter’s “Halloween” all kind of intrigued me but if I had the chance to go see the latest Scorsese or Bergman or any number of repertory films, that’s where you’d find me. To be sure, I’d check out films like “The Serpent and the Rainbow” or “Jacob’s Ladder” and yes, love them; but I found the brouhaha around the franchises to bear out my reservations about them. The diminishing returns based on reviews told me I wasn’t missing anything. Eventually, this changed a bit. 

I did catch up on all the Nightmares on Elm Street, and I’ve seen a fair amount of the 80s flicks that I missed the first time around. However, I still feel that a lot of what the later films were getting at had been done just as well and sometimes better in the sixties and seventies. I like my trash, god knows, but I am particular about it.

To me, it’s instructional to match a film like “Hellraiser” against, say, John Carpenter’s “The Thing”. Each boasts a thought-provoking plot, grisly and effective practical effects; but only one really succeeds as a film in execution. And it’s a masterpiece. It isn’t “Hellraiser”; I don’t want to diss Barker’s work out of hand and I hope I haven’t, but what Carpenter was able to do was present us with three-dimensional characters with whom we could build alliances until we couldn’t. The sense of dread and paranoia Carpenter evoked was organic, unsettling and so expert, there is no way to turn away from the film. 

Both films are thematically rich, but Carpenter could present those themes as organic elements in the way the characters behaved and positing a genuinely destabilizing premise. Barker, potentially, had a similar set-up but it remains mostly that; a framework on which to hang a movie. 

Of course, it is - in most worlds - unfair to compare anyone working in the genre with John Carpenter. However, that’s precisely we do criticism. Why does one film work and another not quite? I’ll be curious to see the new “Hellraiser” opening soon; because I do find the premise intriguing, I have enough interest in seeing how it’s handled. 

Likewise, for my own edification, I may check out a couple of the entries in the series. I wonder if something more interesting lies in them, something worth seeking out. If so, I’ll plop out some more verbiage, if not, not.

If anyone has seen the series, do let me know what you think; what did you find interesting? Was there anything, any entry that was more involving or that you liked more than others? Leave a comment and let me know.

The Box that started it all.

Larry and Claire. Just  trying to work things out.

Monster Frank just trying to rekindle the old flame.

Kristy’s not having it.

Well, Frank, you made some bad decisions, let’s face it.

Frank flayed. The second time. I reckon he learned his lesson.