by Kane, Paul
A final concern revolved around the shooting of the climax when Elliott and Pinhead are seen at the same time. As he related in his diary for Fangoria:
Saturday, October 19—It’s a positively schizophrenic night for me as we shoot the climactic confrontation between Pinhead and Elliott, starting out in human form and switching to Cenobite at about 2 a.m.... I’m completely tripped out by the sight of Pinhead standing there, waiting for me. Kevin, my stand-in, has won the nomination to double Pinhead. I point out that he’s the only other person ever to have worn the full Pinhead make-up and costume.... I suddenly realize just how jealously protective of the character I’ve become. It is deeply unsettling for me.35
But in spite of these niggles, Bradley was more than happy during his time in the U.S. His part had more depth, he got to perform as both a human and a monster, and he had nothing but praise for both the production team and the film’s director. In several different interviews he’s claimed that Hell on Earth was one of the happiest working experiences he’s had.
The smoothness of the shoot and professionalism of the crew were also noted by both Alan Jones on a set visit for Shivers and The Dark Side, and Philip Nutman for Fangoria. Nutman’s visit coincided with the filming of the scene fourteen days into principal photography where the Pseudo Cenobites are harassing Joey on an abandoned work site. “The director talks his young thespians through the next shot. It’s taken from Joey’s point of view, as J.P. and the female Cenobite (Marshall) circle her, while Barbie, Camerahead and C.D. advance from the background.”36 After four takes, everyone was satisfied and they set up the scene again to film it from Pinhead’s point of view. The only major reproach was about the skimpiness of Marshall’s costume—fishnet stockings and a leather bodice in the freezing cold of a winter’s evening.
By the same token, Jones’s interviews with Atkins, Bradley and Hickox reveal a general air of conviviality about the shoot, with the possible exception of some unrest when it came time to film the black mass scene. Hickox had already been refused permission to film in an actual church—hardly surprising, given the content of the scene: Pinhead’s very own reworking of a Christian sacrament—so a matte background would have to be painted around the Church’s aisle and altar. But, due to Carolina being in the heart of Bible Belt country, many members of the crew were startled by the display itself, murmuring “sacrilegious” under their breath, according to Jones. Hickox’s reply to that was, “Is it really so controversial? I don’t see it as that, well, no more than Christopher Lee storming around a church setting light to curtains in umpteen Dracula movies. The crux of the sequence is that Pinhead fights back against the power that abandoned him. So the Church fights back, too, by crumbling around him and turning into Hell, the one place he doesn’t want to be.”37
Aside from a little healthy rivalry in the acting stakes between Marshall and Farrell, which Hickox actually welcomed because it meant they upped the ante in their scenes together, there weren’t that many more obstacles during the filming itself. These, it would seem, were being reserved for post-production. The first problem came in the shape of the infamous EDIFLEX editing technology that Larry Kuppin suggested Hickox use, because he owned the company. But the process itself proved incredibly onerous, involving banks of videos in the editing bay. It was so time-consuming that in the end they had to revert to film. By this stage, the independent distribution company Miramax had picked up Hell on Earth for an American release and a rough cut was shown to them.
This is where the story splits into two versions, depending on who is telling it. Hickox maintains that Miramax’s co-owner, Bob Weinstein, who wanted to pick up a horror franchise and start Dimension films, saw a rough cut and loved it. But he asked the director, if he had a week more to shoot and some more money for effects, what would he do? Hickox told him that he’d like to add some more substance to the nightclub scene where Pinhead attacks the revelers, and redo the ending. So he was given the time and budget to do just that. This is how Hellraiser III became a groundbreaking film in terms of special effects technology.
Computer Generated Images, or CGI, was still only in its infancy in Hollywood. A few artists had dabbled with this new toy, one of the earliest examples being the Knight from Young Sherlock Holmes (Barry Levinson, 1985). But it wasn’t really until James Cameron’s spectacular Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), with its impressive liquid metal T-1000, that people in industry circles started to take notice. Hell on Earth was the first horror movie to utilize CGI, expressly for the scene where a glass of liquid solidifies and spears one woman in the face, Sandy’s skinning—and morphing effects when Joey’s father turns into Pinhead, as well as when Elliott and Pinhead merge. Remember, this was still a year before Steven Spielberg popularized CGI with his blockbuster Jurassic Park.
Conversely, Clive Barker has a different recollection of events. In his version, Larry Kuppin showed him a rough cut of the movie, which Barker was less than impressed with. “I told him that although it contained some great moments, there was a lot of stuff missing; the ending wasn’t right, there was no climax, I didn’t understand some sequences, and in parts the story was incomprehensible. But, true to his [Hickox’s] skills, it was beautifully composed and photographed, the actors were nicely framed and the images did look slick.”38 According to Barker, the low budget was also to blame when it came to the less than impressive effects.39 Barker says he turned down an offer to put his name to it, wished Kuppin good luck, then returned to his own duties serving as executive producer on Candyman, an adaptation of Barker’s own story “The Forbidden.” This would be around the time that the Miramax deal was struck.
Pinhead with rock band Motorhead (courtesy Shelly Berggren, Singerman Entertainment).
A few weeks later, Barker reports that Bob Weinstein called and asked for his honest opinion of the film, which he gave him. As he’d done with Kuppin, Barker told him what he thought were the weaknesses, so Weinstein asked if he could come in and fix these. Once more, Barker declined because he felt that the changes would be too extensive. Barker also felt that more special effects filming needed to be carried out. But Weinstein was extremely keen to get him involved. Said Barker: “So I did a deal with Miramax ... to remake and remodel the picture.”40 This included, according to Barker, the addition of Farrell’s bondage scene at the end, many of the insert deaths for the nightclub and the extra CGI for the girl’s skinning (while Hickox says that this was inspired by a commercial he saw where the “skin” was pulled off a car). Barker’s standpoint was that Hickox was very good on the set, making decisions and handling actors extremely well, but it is during the postproduction period that the film is truly made. This painstaking task took time to get right long after the shoot was over. “There’s no trace of accusation in my comments,” Barker added. “We all have our own ways of working and that’s obviously the way Tony works best.”41
Second unit schedule for Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (showing scenes were shot back-to-back for Children of the Corn II: The Final Sacrifice) ( Trans Atlantic Entertainment).
Whichever way one looks at it, Hellraiser III needed quite a bit of work before it was released. But Barker’s involvement in postproduction meant that now not only would the film receive a Clive Barker Presents and executive producer credit at the beginning, the makers would also be able to call on him to publicize the movie while he was doing the same for Candyman. Although he saw Hell on Earth as being representative of one type of horror film—the in-your-face variety—and Candyman as being more suspenseful and subtle, he declared he was proud of both of them. He even agreed to direct the Hellraiser video for Motorhead’s rock song, a one-day shoot of seventeen hours. In this, Motorhead are performing in a large Hellish space to “The Damned,” creatures characterized by their prosthetic claws and beaks, while props from Hellraiser III decorate the background. As Pinhead enters, the demons thrash about to the music, then he takes a seat and drinks blood from a boiling cup. In a further scene we see
Pinhead playing cards with Lemmy, lead singer of Motorhead—all intercut with clips from the movie.
“While I hadn’t been invited to the party at first,” Barker said afterwards, “I turned out to be the surprise guest only too happy to join in the festivities late in the day!”42 And what festivities they happened to be. Upon screening, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth endeared itself to the fans, with horror audiences generally warming to the cranked up action. But while the movie notched up another gear with regard to energy and pace, it didn’t sacrifice the story to do so. At its very core, the third film in the series contains some very piquant themes and propositions.
12
COMPLETING THE PATTERN, SOLVING THE PUZZLE, TURNING THE KEY
War is Hell
There is really only one overriding theme in Hellraiser III, that of warfare. This permeates the movie to such a degree that it can be felt—if not always seen—in almost every frame. On the most obvious of levels, we have the blatant homages to films like Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece, Apocalypse Now (1979), and the thought-provoking motion pictures of Oliver Stone—chiefly Platoon (1986) and Born on the Fourth of July (1989). The Vietnam flashbacks that Joey experiences when she is dreaming about her father could have been lifted directly from any of these. The iconography is exactly the same, the death sequences comparably harrowing, the tone unmistakably grim. When Joey, walking through this terrifying landscape in a white, billowing nightdress, claps her hands to her ears and closes her eyes to shut it all out, we can sympathize. We do not want to be confronted with the reality of war any more than she does. But for her there is an added sadness, the pain of loss associated with the death of her father in that conflict. He represents all those who never made it back alive from the jungles of Vietnam, and she, in her own way, represents those who were forever changed by what they had seen there.
Through this imagery, the film deals with not only the visual trauma of battle but also its devastating aftermath: the effect it has on those waiting at home for their loved ones to return. Her father’s demise has had such a profound impact on Joey that it still has the power to reduce her to the helpless child she was when she heard the news. In her dreams she reverts to this state, calling out to the soldiers who leave her father behind: “Where are you going? My Daddy’s still alive. Come back and save my Daddy!” It is this weakness that Pinhead exploits when he pretends to be Joey’s father. “Daddy,” she shouts again as she runs to him, falling into his embrace. It is the safety she yearns for, which was denied to her because of the war, but which will be denied again by another battle entirely.
Yet it is not just the after effects of the Vietnam war that the movie dwells on, but of every war throughout history. To quote Elliott Spencer, “A dream of one war is a dream of all wars.” We see Terri alone in Joey’s flat, reading a book about battles of the twentieth century, but the way Hellraiser actually underscores this point is by exposing us to the horrors of the First World War in graphic detail, using the character of Elliott as our escort. Basically, it was the rigors of World War I that drove Elliott to become Pinhead. As he explains to Joey while he strolls through the streets of India in 1921, “The war pulled poetry out of some of us. Others it affected differently.... I was like many survivors, a lost soul with nothing left in which to believe but gratification. We’d seen God fail us ... so many dead. For us, he too fell at Flanders. The war destroyed my generation. Those that didn’t die drank themselves to death. I went further. I was an explorer of forbidden pleasures; opening the box was my final act of exploration. Of discovery.” This is backed up by Doug Bradley on the audio commentary to Hell on Earth:
Just before we came out to film it, there was a documentary on the BBC about survivors of the Somme and one of the guys said this extraordinary thing I just grabbed hold of, talking about all his comrades who had died on the first day of the Battle of the Somme—something like 60,000 British troops were killed or injured in the first twenty-four hours. He felt as though he had cheated, that he was in the wrong place, that he shouldn’t have lived, that he should be dead and he should have been buried along with his comrades in France. And I thought that’s exactly Elliott’s thing. That’s exactly what leads him from there to this.”1
Two different characters, two different generations, both affected in different—but no less devastating—ways by the wars that impinged on their lives. It drove Elliott and Joey to search for something, perhaps a meaning for what had happened? And it shaped who they were later to become. In the case of Elliott, his search was for the Lament Configuration, for answers to the great questions about what we are and what’s beyond this reality. He assumes, quite wrongly, that nothing can be worse than the horrors he has already seen. His own search will draw out the monster inside him, the dark side of his nature that, possibly—although we are not shown this—somehow enjoyed being in charge of those men on the battlefield. Like Channard, who was transformed into a warped version of his former self, Elliott is Cenobitized and turned into another commander of sorts: working for Leviathan in charge of the other demons. “Monster that I was,” he tells Joey, “I was still bound by laws. Hell has its commandments, too, you know.” As Elliott Spencer he followed the orders of his superiors, for King and Country—and for God as well. As Pinhead, those same orders now came from another god entirely.
For Joey, it is the constant search for reasons: the reason why her father was left behind, what really happened to him, where he is now, and maybe even the reason for war itself. In her dreams she has been searching for those answers since she was little, but never finding them. Her own personal Hell. But it is this investigative temperament that has caused her to become a journalist. These are traits which will help her to unravel the puzzle of where the young man in the hospital emergency room came from, and what the box he was clutching really is. Two searches, at different times, initiated by completely separate wars, will nevertheless draw Elliott and Joey together. And it is worth observing that both their quests can only be completed within the limbo world between Heaven and Hell, rather than in either of their own realities.
In an effort to enforce this war theme, the film parallels scenes, linking past and present, unreality and reality. Joey’s first experience of Elliott’s “dream” is in the trenches of World War I. She walks through the muddied channel, dead bodies littered on either side of her, close-ups of cold, staring eyes and body parts. Joey tries not to look, but again she can’t shut any of this out. Stepping up into No-Man’s-Land, she walks over to meet Elliott for the first time, the churned up ground and barbed wire recalling scenes from Lewis Milestone’s superb All Quiet on the Western Front (1930). Later, when she tracks Pinhead down to the nightclub, she finds the victims of his rampage, and once more has to walk through the death and devastation—nightmares even more grotesque than the First World War could offer. Young men and women hung up by their tongues, with pool balls stuffed into their mouths, electric lights wrapped around their heads and dice inserted into their eyes. The scene also echoes those illustrations by Gustave Doré from Dante’s Divine Comedy, a credit to the talents of production designer Steve Hardie, DP Gerry Lively and the effects team. But the true horror is brought home to her when she walks into the room filled with candles and discovers her cameraman, Doc, sitting with his severed head in his lap. As if to compound her grief, Pinhead offers, “Oh, it’s unbearable isn’t it? The suffering of strangers, the agony of friends. There is a secret song at the center of the world, Joey, and its sound is like razors through flesh.” Two battlefields separated by 80 years (as well as the veil between waking and dreaming), the remains of the dead scattered over them both. Each, in equal respects, a Hell on Earth.
Similarly, the Vietnam scene, with its gunfire and helicopters, mirrors the sequence when the Pseudo Cenobites chase Joey down the street at nighttime. Final Destination-style explosions abound, electricity cables crackle, the current conducted by the water running down the road—the result of fire hydrants
bursting—and the police shoot at the creatures to no avail. Instead of returning fire with bullets, the Cenobites have in their own arsenal: fire, spat out blow-torch-fashion by the Barbie Cenobite, sharp and lethal Compact Discs—thrown by the C.D. Cenobite—and a deadly extendible camera lens with which Doc (a.k.a. Camerahead) punches holes into his victims’ craniums, harking back to the method the Alien used to dispatch Harry Dean Stanton’s character Brent back in 1979. “Ready for your close-up,” he grunts before the kill, and “That’s a wrap!” just afterwards. This street has suddenly become a war zone.
When the Terri and J.P. Cenobites corner Joey at the building site—a barren stretch of land which closely resembles the setting for Stanley Kubrick’s own Vietnam epic, Full Metal Jacket (1987)—we see that the one directing this conflict is Pinhead. Standing above them and watching, he has orchestrated their movements like a general moving toy soldiers around a board. It was a connection director Hickox was eager to make: “There is a strong analogy between warfare and how Pinhead learns to kills people. Because Pinhead was a human being in war, I am really saying that he has learned most of his methods of killing from human beings, not from any Devil.”2 And Pinhead admits he is acting out this role himself: “They’re handmade, a shadow of my former troops. Over eager, but let them play. Our game will come later.” Terri, J.P., Barbie, Doc and C.D. are all unwilling conscripts in his army (Monroe even emptied a whole round of bullets into him, which Pinhead spat out one by one) but they are necessary, as he does not want to dirty his own hands. It is interesting that in earlier drafts of the script Pinhead was seen to do things physically, such as putting the handcuff through one policeman’s tongue; there was even talk of him using the sharpened C.D.s to kill instead of the DJ. However, now even the killings at the club are done at a distance—by Pinhead psychically manipulating not his troops this time, but whatever comes to hand. And, of course, the obligatory hooks and chains. Even though he is “unbound,” he is still Pinhead and it would go against his modus operandi to have him connect in any other way to his victims.