The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy

by Kane, Paul

  4

  SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU

  As broached in the previous chapter, Barker is a champion of the horrific image as beauty, or what he has sometimes termed “The Revelation Response.” This is, to quote him, “The sheer wonder of monsters and beasts and extraordinary things, which has always been one of the things that draws me to horror.... It’s the appeal of the strange.”1 Without question, Hellraiser is a visually extreme film. There are fans who watch it simply to see if they can endure the intensity of the gore scenes. Yet, unlike splatter flicks such as The Evil Dead (Sam Raimi, 1981) and Re-Animator (Stuart Gordon, 1985), the bloodletting of Hellraiser is not the main impetus of the film. And it is shot in such a way as to inspire as much awe as it does repulsion.

  The standout episode in this respect has to be Frank’s resurrection. When New World saw the progress Barker was making on the movie, they gave him more money for special effects, and this was one of the scenes added afterwards. Originally the director was just going to cut from Larry’s blood soaking into the floorboards to him reappearing on the night of the dinner party. In retrospect it is difficult to see how the film could work without this added Hitchcockian “ticking bomb under the table.” But it is much more than just a narrative device to drum up unease.

  The sequence itself is a carefully choreographed exercise in spectacular distaste, so riveting it is hard to look away. It begins with a heart beating under the floorboards, lifted almost directly from Poe’s “The Telltale Heart,” where the sound of a pumping heart forces a murderer to admit to his crime. As Frank pieces himself together little by little, accompanied by Christopher Young’s score, we cannot help but marvel at the magnificence of the human body, even as we’re reaching for the sick bags. Bob Keen, who was responsible for this scene, explains: “We’d already done it once. The first time we did it, it was a dried-up corpse that came out of the walls. None of us were happy with this. It was decided right at the end that we would go back and redo it, and it became this nightmare of visceral imagery.”2 With a combination of reverse shots and tricks—like using a rig for the floor shake and porridge pumped through holes—Keen came up with the most memorable scene in the entire film. The last shot, exquisitely back lit by Vidgeon, is quite literally breathtaking. Each stage of Frank’s regeneration holds a fascination for viewers that elevates it above someone having an eye gouged out or their head cut off. Stimulated by the illustrations of Vesalius, Barker delivers lasting images which continue to disturb long after the final credits have rolled.

  For the surrealism of Hellraiser, Barker also looked to the films of a favorite past director and artist, Jean Cocteau, for inspiration. One of his earliest memories is of seeing Cocteau on TV while he was at home sick in the autumn of 1960, and watching a clip from one of his movies: “It was called, though the title meant nothing to me at that time, The Testament of Orpheus, and in it this same old man appeared [Cocteau], dressed much as he’d been dressed in his interview. He was wandering in a rather fake-looking landscape of ruins, where he encountered a menacing woman dressed in a cloak and elaborate helmet, armed with a spear. Flanking her were men wearing horse masks....”3

  Skinned Frank concept sketch for Hellraiser (courtesy Clive Barker).

  Later he would get to see Cocteau’s other movies at Film Societies in Liverpool, and another that holds a tremendous significance here must surely be La Belle et la Bête, Beauty and the Beast (1946). The poster for this alone should be enough to send chills of recognition through any Hellraiser fan, for its depiction of the two major players is an almost exact replica of Julia and Frank while he is still in his unfinished form. Says Barker of the film, “Garbo purportedly exclaimed, when the Beast, played by Jean Marais, who was Cocteau’s best friend, turns into a Prince, ‘Oh, give me back my beautiful beast!’”4

  One cannot discount the effect of William Blake’s (1757–1827) work on Barker in this respect, either. Blake proclaimed the supremacy of the imagination over the rationalism and materialism of the eighteenth century, juxtaposing the ordinary with the extraordinary, envisaging angels against the backdrop of Marylebone and Camden Town. This was a revelation for the young Barker, who immersed himself in volumes by the painter/poet, as well as in work by Bosch and Goya. This blurring of the normal with the abnormal, the palatable with the unpalatable, became the norm as far as Barker was concerned.

  Understandably, the director was also eager to carry on the tradition of the Grand Guignol, just as he had done with his own theater productions. Founded in 1897 by Oscar Méténier, the secretary to a police commissioner whose duties included escorting condemned men to their death, the Parisian theater produced plays reliant on violent and bloody set-pieces. If meat was needed in a scene, then real meat was used and actors often “suffered” staged eye-gougings, strangulations and rapes night after night, all very effective and indistinguishable from the actual thing.

  Sketch 1 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 2 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 3 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 4 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 5 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 6 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 7 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 8 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 9 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 10 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 11 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 12 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 13 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Sketch 14 of storyboard for Birth of Frank reshoot.

  Barker has also quoted the playwright John Webster (c. 1578—1632) as being a strong influence on his work, especially regarding the depiction of violence and sensation. In plays such as The White Devil (c.1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (c.1614), we’re presented with the familiar themes of revenge, but we also have the unusual, such as a suitor fooled into kissing the poisoned lips of a dressed up skull, or hints of witchcraft and lycanthropy. “My favorite playwright of violence is Webster,” Barker has clarified. “He’s the grand master of the violent set-piece, in which there’s a broad configuration of events, circumstances, relationships, which are leading inevitably to some dire conclusion.”5

  Barker’s love of Harryhausen and special effects in general has already been noted, and Hellraiser gave him the chance to simultaneously play with such devices and stay true to his own creed of gorgeous grotesquery. But like that other gore fest of the year before—David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986)—the special effects do not overshadow the story. Indeed, Barker learned a very important lesson from Cronenberg and his penchant for staging shocking scenes quite early on in his films (the exploding head in Scanners (1981) for example). The introductory sequence in Hellraiser is radical, but it does grab the viewer and buy Barker exposition time. One of the reasons Hellraiser has stood the test of time is the fact that there is a solid, appealing and emotional story at its center. The effects only supplement this. To have it the other way around would be, as Barker says, “The tail wagging the dog.”6

  Hellraiser can be situated within the whole Body Horror subgenre, in which Cronenberg’s films definitely belong, but again these are not mutations or disfigurements for the sake of them. As in the Books of Blood, the transformations of the flesh have a purpose beyond mere superficial spectacle: Frank’s escape and taking on his brother’s form, the Cenobites’ intermingling of pain and pleasure. In a movie like The Fly, the slow deterioration of the body, the shock at what might be revealed next, starts to become the only impetus. Frank is the antithesis of Brundle, an attempt to make the ugly human and natural, instead of rendering the beautiful repulsive.

  Similarly, jump-shocks do not age well in cinema. Films designed to be like Ghost Train rides, whe
re one fright follows the next, date incredibly quickly. Hellraiser has two such shocks: when one of Frank’s victims pleads with Kirsty for help; and the double whammy of Christ and the maggoty corpse dropping out while Kirsty is trying to hide from Frank. These scenes, added at the behest of New World, who thought that a horror movie should have some sudden scares in it, are the least satisfying in the whole film. They are obvious and seem unnecessary on repeated viewings.

  But if Hellraiser by and large seemingly refuses to pander to these rules of horror cinema, it is still visually informed by other historical horror models. Indeed, it simultaneously pays homage to and transcends them. First, Barker acknowledges the mythology of the vampire subgenre—in his use of blood as a regenerative source. Frank may not have fangs and bite people on the neck, but he is still a vampire. As well as binding the family unit together, blood brings Frank back from the dead and he feeds off the victims Julia (his vampiric bride) lures to the house (their castle). So in this sense too, the blood and gore have value beyond the obvious.

  Alternatively, the resurrected Frank could also be described as a zombie, one of the walking dead, feasting on human flesh. True, he can think coherently, which is more than Romero’s shambling corpses can do, but he is, to all intents and purposes, dead: we saw him ripped apart at the beginning. In a slightly different tone, there are some shots which are pure Gothic in nature, such as one high angle glimpse of Julia at the top of the stairs, her face half in shadow. And Barker pays homage to the haunted house and ghost film, in the most obvious way, with the location house itself, which looks suspiciously like a well-known property in Amityville, and with the ghost presence of Frank in the attic—the oldest form of shade.

  Lastly, Barker includes a creature that would not look out of place in any monster or alien film. As we have commented, the Engineer does appear remarkably cheap compared with what might have been accomplished with more time and money. But thanks to Vidgeon’s lighting again and Richard Marden’s editing, it is nowhere near as deficient as Rawhead Rex. On the contrary, there is an inherent substance and charm to it that could never be replaced by computer generated trickery.

  Grand Guignol poster (courtesy of Eric Horton).

  Both the British Board of Film Classification and the Motion Picture Association of America insisted on cuts to Hellraiser, to the tune of twenty seconds. But there was trimming only within scenes where both bodies thought the intensity was too much, and no scenes were lost in their entirety. For a final word on his motivations for creating such images, we’ll turn to Barker once more: “I think it’s a desire that the audience comprehend that these images are highly charged and mythic, and worthy of our close examination. And if we just go out and say, ‘That was gross,’ then we’ve missed most of the purpose of that image. It’s difficult. You have to create very elegant images and very elegant metaphors. I hope there are places in Hellraiser where I have done that. It’s a picture which should work on more than one level.”7

  5

  NO LIMITS

  Critical reaction to Clive Barker’s Hellraiser upon release was generally favorable on both sides of the Atlantic. London magazine Time Out had this to say: “Barker’s dazzling debut creates such an atmosphere of dread that the astonishing set-pieces simply detonate in a chain reaction of cumulative intensity ... a serious, intelligent and disturbing horror film, Hellraiser will leave you, to coin one of Barker’s own phrases, in a state between hysteria and ecstasy.’”

  While Melody Maker proclaimed it was, “The best horror film ever to be made in Britain,” which is saying very little at that time, City Limits encapsulated the attraction quite neatly with these words: “Barker exploits our deepest dreads about pain equals pleasure and the fears that our socially repressed primal desires will one day unloose and end in a sexual nightmare.”

  The Daily Telegraph commented that, in Hellraiser, “Barker has achieved a fine degree of menace.” The Daily Mail called the film, “A pinnacle of the genre.” And The Scotsman said, “It plays on the darkest fears and fantastical obsessions of the human psyche.” The more academic magazines also took an interest, and horror writer and film historian Kim Newman hit the mark with his critique in Monthly Film Bulletin: “The most immediately striking aspect of the movie is its seriousness of tone in an era when horror films (the Nightmare on Elm Street or Evil Dead films in particular) tend to be broadly comic. ... the overall approach is straight, not to say relentlessly grim.”1

  And while Q Magazine echoed these sentiments, they also drew attention to the U.S. dubbing imposed by New World: “Hellraiser does have its share of problems: the re-dubbing of peripheral characters with a mid–Atlantic twang, the relocation of the film in a geographical limbo.... The film, however, cannot be faulted for the ambitiousness of its themes.... Sadly the moral and emotional complexity that is the film’s greatest strength is likely to be deemed its greatest weakness by an audience weaned on the misplaced jocularity of House or Fright Night.” Screen International also decided to concentrate on the scare tactics for their review, calling the film “The best slam-bang, no-holds-barred, scare-the-shit-out-of-you horror movie for quite a while.”

  Oddly, the most savage criticism came from the U.S., although industry magazine Variety did say in their Cannes review that Hellraiser was “a well-paced sci-fi cum horror fantasy which should appeal to a wide youth audience around the globe,” and the New York Times called it “evocatively creepy.” The first barrage came from famous film critic Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun Times: “Stephen King ... may have seen the future of the horror genre, but he has almost certainly not seen Hellraiser, which is as dreary a piece of goods as has masqueraded as horror in many a long, cold night.”

  Richard Harrington was no less unpleasant in his Washington Post review of September 19, 1987: “Some things have to be endured.... That’s what one of the characters says in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, and he might as well be talking about the first film written and directed by this new enfant terrible of the horror genre....” Thankfully, there were some who didn’t share these views, Michael Wilmington from the Los Angeles Times for one. He said: “Clive Barker’s Hellraiser is one of the more original and memorable horror movies of the year: a genuinely scary, but also nearly stomach-churning experience by a genre specialist who seemingly wallows in excess and loves pushing conventions to their ghastly limits.... Hellraiser is intelligent and brutally imaginative.”

  And the fact that Hellraiser won Le Grand Prix de la Section Peur at the sixteenth Fantasy Film Festival only added to its credibility. But from a financial perspective, which is something Hollywood takes more notice of than the written word, Hellraiser netted approximately $14,564,000 domestically and overall generated revenues of $30 million on its release.2 It made Barker a major player and saw offers heading his way to direct the third film in the Alien saga, his response to which was, why would anyone want to make the third in any franchise? He wasn’t even interested in helming the second in his own movie series. That would be the territory of two men, two men who would take us even further into Hell, and bring us back again.

  6

  TO HELL AND BACK

  Even before the official release of Hellraiser there had been talk of a sequel. In fact, it was following early screenings of the movie at Cannes in 1987 that Barker and producer Chris Figg first pitched the notion of Hellbound: Hellraiser II to New World. Said Barker at the time, “We proved our point with Hellraiser.... We thought New World would only give novices enough money for one haunted house and no sets and it turned out to be true. There were clearly many questions left unanswered by the film which we couldn’t do the first time around as we didn’t have the budget. The sequel was conceived with this in mind.... In many ways I see Hellbound as an advance from the teaser trailer that was Hellraiser.”1

  Unfortunately, promotional commitments to the first film as well as for his next novel, Weaveworld, meant that Barker had time neither to write nor direct this. Instead he would
settle for executive producer status, which would allow him to oversee the production but still maintain a reasonable distance from it. By this time, Barker and Figg had also founded Film Futures, seemingly tailor-made for this purpose. As Figg explained, “We set up Film Futures so Clive could executive produce, write plot synopses and supervise projects. Directors can get branded all too easily and neither of us wanted that to happen with Clive’s film career.”2 Reading between the lines, one might speculate that, with the move into more fantasy-related fiction, Barker was attempting to escape the trap of being pigeon-holed as simply a horror writer and director, something a follow-up horror movie so soon would further compound. But at the same time the Hellraiser franchise was fundamentally his baby, so he was loathe to entrust it to just anybody.

  The first person he turned to, therefore, was his old friend from the Dog Company, Peter Atkins. Atkins and Barker first met in 1974 when the former was only eighteen years old and had just finished his A-Levels—with an aim to go on to university the following autumn. Atkins was waiting in Allerton library, Liverpool, for his friend, Graham Bickley, who’d promised to introduce him to someone on Atkins’ wavelength. “You’re very alike,” Bickley had told him, “you both read books.”3