by Kane, Paul
Editing would be handled by relative newcomer Kirk M. Morri, whose only experience was on TV with Jeopardy! and Assault on Dome 4 (Gilbert Po, 1996). He would need to add essential suspense and pace to what is largely a thriller film. For sound design, Derrickson hired Creative Café and sound designers Peter Brown and Byron Miller to come up with the movie’s vital auditory scares. Said the director: “Those guys gave 150 percent—honing and working it to build the best sound design they could. That was one way to make this movie feel bigger than it actually is.”12
Last, Walter Werzowa was chosen to provide the music—after working on Tales from the Crypt, supplying additional music for the final fight scene in Mortal Kombat (Paul W.S. Anderson, 1995) and the main title music for the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle Eraser (Chuck Russell, 1996). His new Hellraiser theme would be a world away from those used in the past, but still incredibly powerful with its use of strings and drum base, not to mention a choir, harking back to The Omen. His cool jazz riffs recall those composed by Angelo Badalamenti for Lynch’s Twin Peaks TV series, with cymbals, violins and trumpet used to excellent effect. The movie would also feature the song “From Eden,” performed by MOD: I.
The popular Wire Twins from Inferno. Replica figures by NECA (courtesy NECA; photograph credit: Nicolle M. Puzzo).
As is to be expected when any director is left to his own devices, the shoot went quite smoothly; compared with all the trouble on Bloodline this was a new direction for the series in more ways than one. Bradley’s scenes took just three days to shoot, for which he flew over to L.A., and when he got there he was able to talk to Derrickson about Pinhead’s phrasing. The director told him that writing for the character had been the hardest thing they had faced, so with his permission Bradley was allowed to change aspects of it to more accurately reflect the Pinhead audiences had grown to expect. “He’s a Shakespearean actor at heart,” said Derrickson, “and he added quite a few lines to that final speech that made it a lot better.”13
But despite its brevity this was a shoot Bradley was unlikely to forget, thanks to a very special celebration on-set. On his third and final day at work, Gary Tunnicliffe presented him with a mock telegram from Her Majesty the Queen. The effects artist had calculated that it was Bradley’s 100th day in the Pinhead make-up, so the crew was celebrating accordingly. At lunchtime there was champagne and a cake in the shape of Pinhead’s face with candles in place of the nails. Some old friends dropped by as well, including Peter Atkins and production designer Steve Hardie from the early Hellraisers. “Steve brought me the most fabulous present,” said Bradley. “He gave me a framed piece of Pinhead’s face with a huge, two-foot long nail and a big gout of blood dripping off the end of it. It’s quite impressive.”14 Additionally, the cast and crew were given Access All Areas Pinhead badges, and Bradley got a certificate for all his hard work over the years. “I wasn’t expecting any of it,” he admitted.15
The film wrapped on schedule, but Derrickson still didn’t know whether it was going to be given a theatrical release like the previous Hellraisers. Inferno was shot with both media in mind and was actually transferred in widescreen. As Boardman commented not long after completion: “My impression is that Dimension didn’t necessarily know, either, because some of the movies they’ve done before have gone theatrical and some have not.”16 This turned out to be the case. Hellraiser: Inferno was the first in the series to debut on TV screens at home—in November 2000. Although the “direct to video” label no longer has the stigma attached to it that it once had, due in no small part to the boom of the DVD industry, it was nevertheless a disappointment for followers of the series not to see the new release playing at their local cinema.
But this would be the start of a trend that saw the next three films premiere in exactly the same way.
20
A WORLD FULL OF RIDDLES
Crime and Punishment
Hellraiser: Inferno is at its heart a crime film. The central character is a policeman who is attempting to fathom out who has killed Jay Cho. He is also trying to track down the serial killer responsible for kidnapping a child and cutting off his fingers one by one, with each digit representing a kill. Yet it is not a straightforward crime drama by any means. Its roots lie firmly in the film noir genre, a term used by French film critics of the 1940s to describe American thrillers derived from the kind of hard-boiled fiction written by Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain and Cornell Woolrich. Inferno adheres to this mode of filmmaking in several ways, not least in its overriding sense of pessimism and social malaise.
Firstly, noir pictures are usually cheaply made, and the ones these critics were originally referring to were B movies. Secondly, Inferno mimics the visual style favored by so many noir films of that age, contrastive lighting being a specific example of this, used to objectify a protagonist’s psychological states of mind. In Inferno the lighting switches from soft and warm when Thorne is with his family, to hard and cold—and even shadowy—when he is on the streets. The noir setting is usually an urban one, highlighting the grimy underbelly of the city, in this instance the world of prostitution and drug dealing.
Minor characters are expected to be stereotypes: the weaselly snitch (Bernie); the loving and long-suffering wife (Melanie); the by the book partner (Tony); the whore (Daphne). The only female character who counteracts this is the femme fatale, an intelligent, active woman who manipulates the protagonist. Granted, one is not present as such in Inferno, but Dr. Gregory/Pinhead certainly manipulates Thorne by the use of these women.
Thirdly, the main protagonist himself is morally ambiguous. Thorne might be a cop, but he has more in common with Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade from The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941) than he does with the clean cut heroes of other police dramas. For most of the movie he operates alone, keeping things from Tony. (He even comments, after Thorne has withheld information about the case, “Thanks for keeping me informed, partner!”) Only when he requires Tony’s help, or backup, does he ask him along—such as when they cover up evidence at the scene of Daphne’s murder or when they visit Parmagi. The rest of the time he is a loner, a drug addict with a cruel streak and a hidden agenda.
Thorne is a thoroughly dislikable character, but like all noir heroes he has one or two redeeming qualities. His love of children and their innocence is what compels him to catch the killer. “That child was still alive,” he says to himself as he looks through the missing children on his computer screen, “and if I could just keep it that way I knew it would be the best thing I could do in my lifetime.” This extends to devotion for his own daughter, signaled quite early on by a close-up of him pressing his face against hers while she sleeps, though the tilted angle warns that something is wrong with this picture. Thorne would be the perfect family man were it not for his warped views on marriage. “I believe in loyalty, fidelity,” he tells us as he picks up Daphne. “I understand the concept. My parents have been married for forty years. But I live in a different world. Most marriages fail, most men just leave; I know that would kill her. But if she doesn’t know, if doing this keeps me coming back, then who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong?”
This constant use of the voice-over is our fourth film noir prerequisite. Most of the early noir films relied upon this device to convey the protagonist’s internal thoughts to the viewer and it is still used in many modern noir movies, from Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) to Memento (Christopher Nolan, 2000). We are privy to Thorne’s thoughts right from the beginning when he gets changed in the locker room: “Even as a little kid I was wanting to examine things closely. The world was full of riddles and mysteries and puzzles. I learned early on I had a gift for solving them.”
Whipping Boy Bernie, with make-up by Gary J. Tunnicliffes crew (courtesy Gary J. Tunnicliffe).
Closely linked to this is the use of flashbacks to tell the story, often facilitating the solving of the central mystery. As Thorne has commented, he is the ultimate solver of riddles, but the one he must so
lve now will explain what’s happening to him and where exactly he is—and only through the flashbacks to his boyhood can he do this. Not only that, time itself is looping, as it does in Groundhog Day (Harold Ramis, 1993). Thorne is reliving the same events over and over, waking up in the bathroom with the box, waking on the bed at home after visiting his parents. Such is the way Inferno has been constructed, the flashbacks are intermingled with real time, and vice versa.
Interlaced with this are the serial killer aspects, where Throne tracks down the killer using police procedural techniques, as Agent Starling (Jodie Foster) does in The Silence of the Lambs. But the film is closer in tone to Se7en, in that it offers a gimmick for the murders. In Fincher’s masterpiece it was, of course, the Seven Deadly Sins, whereas in Inferno it is the loss of innocence represented by the severed fingers. “Doesn’t this guy usually give us the finger,” deadpans Tony at the scene of Bernie’s demise. The calling card of this killer is to leave a child’s digit with each victim, thereby doubling the jeopardy—not only must Thorne stop the killings, but he must also rescue the little boy. As is common in so many slasher movies, the murderer wears a mask. Here it is a little different because the mask appears to be his own skin: like the Wire Twins, he has no eyes to speak of, just healed over holes where they should be. This is what a Cenobite would look like if he were to take up serial killing: the triumphant lick of Bernie’s cigar with a black elongated tongue is his proof of allegiance. Yet we’re also furnished with the reveal at the end, where the rubber of the mask is peeled back to show Thorne’s bloody face beneath, a trick worthy of a Scooby Doo mystery.
This peppering of surrealism is what draws the comparison to Lynchian crime narratives. The discovery of the ear in Blue Velvet, for example, is what leads Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) inexorably into the seedy and disturbing world of gang lord Frank Booth (a chilling performance by Dennis Hopper). The death of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in Twin Peaks opens up the door to another dimension inhabited by the backwards dancing dwarf, one-armed Mike and the evil spirit of Bob.
After finding the puzzle box at Jay Cho’s house, Thorne enters his own world of insanity, where characters and events are just slightly off kilter. When he visits Leon’s parlor, he sees the tattoo on the man’s back come alive. At first it is the Wire Twins, then a hand with a nail driven through it, an essential clue as to who is behind all this. But the one blatant homage has to be the encounter he has with Mr. Parmagi, a character straight out of Lynchian mythology. A gambler with six-shooters on his hips—“I have a license for these”—he is flanked by two karate-kicking cowboys, too weird even for fans of Derrickson’s work. “Even my friends who love the film give me shit about that,” he told The Hellbound Web. “It was the one thing about the movie that Bob Weinstein didn’t like. Oh, well. Live and learn.”1
But Inferno also lifts an idea from another recent crime film. The notion of an almost mystical underworld boss comes directly from Bryan Singer’s The Usual Suspects. In that movie we are told a camp fire tale about Keyser Soze, who apparently vanishes into thin air after committing his crimes. Instead, we have Bernie’s story about The Engineer (itself a reference to the monster from Barker’s original, and a new moniker for Pinhead). In it he describes how The Engineer leaves a severed head—Godfather style—in the bed of one of his enemies. The moral of this: “Hunt for the Engineer and the Engineer will hunt you.”
Ultimately, the punishment meted out for the crime is what Thorne is doing to himself. It is implied that he killed all the murdered people in real life (utilized again in Hellraiser: Hellseeker) and will have to live with this knowledge in his own personal Hell.
Loss of Innocence
The theme of childhood and innocence is one of two carried over from Bloodline, Inferno’s immediate predecessor. When Pinhead snatches John Merchant’s son, Jack, he says as he strokes his hair: “Young, unformed. Oh, what appetites I could teach him.” Later, when John comes to his rescue, the lead Cenobite once again alludes to this theme: “Oh, I understand. You love this boy, you have plans for him. Hopes and dreams, a whole imagined future where you love him and watch him grow.” In Hellraiser V Jack is substituted for Chloe, Thorne’s daughter. She is his hope for the future and, as such, represents a way for the Cenobites to hurt him most.
When he returns home at the end to find her and his wife strapped up to a torture pillar, dying of exposure, Thorne realizes that his dreams for the future are dying also. The twist is that by living the life he has, Thorne has himself destroyed these: the vision he is seeing only reflects what he has done to them both mentally. When his daughter asks him, “Daddy, are you home yet?” he replies, “No, sweetheart, I’m here for a little while then I’ve got to go.” Which initiates the plea: “When are you coming home?” The next time we see her, she’s crying that she wants her Daddy, but in his rush to get to the hospital and check on his mother, he completely ignores her. “Daddy’s gone,” Chloe’s mother says. This neglect will come back to haunt him at the end. Thorne might state that “Children are the only sacred thing left in this world,” although in his quest to save the child that’s missing he is forced to sacrifice his very own daughter.
When Thorne goes to see Dr. Gregory he enquires about the picture in the frame, a little girl who turns out to be the psychiatrist’s daughter, Melissa. “She’s the best thing in my life,” says Gregory. “I envy children. I envy their innocence” (forming a tangible association to Bloodline as we later discover Gregory is Pinhead). It is a sentiment Thorne readily agrees with. But he also seems willing to turn a blind eye to the loss of innocence of the children who frequent Bernie’s ice cream truck. (The use of this symbol itself is twisted.) Because Bernie is supplying him with narcotics—his “birthday present”—the detective lets him go about his business even though it is obvious he is a child molester. When he enquires about Daphne, Thorne adds that she’s a little too old for this man despite being barely out of her teens—and bear in mind this is a hooker Thorne has actually had sex with. The beating he gives his “whipping boy” cannot balance out such transgressions. These are contradictions that do not sit well together and give the character a schizophrenic edge. If children are sacred and it is Thorne’s job to protect them, can he really be so cold as to let a known pedophile roam the streets selling ice cream? The reminders of children throughout, playing in the park, crossing the road in the rain, serve only to enforce where his priorities should lie.
But the problems stem from his formative years. “What are you gonna do?” Tony asks as he’s off to see Gregory. “I’m gonna go lie down and talk about my childhood,” is the answer. Except Thorne does nothing of the kind. Not until he is forced to return “home” at the climax does he discover what his flashbacks are about—walking through his first bedroom (filled with icons of his innocence: toy planes hanging from the ceiling, a stuffed animal on his bed), seeing himself completing a jigsaw on the floor, and then ripping apart the idealistic memories he has of his mother and father. The child’s voice he keeps hearing calling out, “Help me,” is actually his own. The fingerprint from the last digit found matches his, and Thorne is at last confronted with the truth. He has been torturing himself. For each bad deed he his done, he has lost a part of that happy childhood. “This is the life you chose, Joseph,” says Pinhead, the judgmental words ringing somewhat hollow. “All the people you hurt, all the appetites you indulged. You have destroyed your own innocence, allowed your flesh to consume your spirit.” In Inferno the most significant loss of innocence is Thorne’s own.
Winning and Losing
The second theme to feed in from Bloodline is that of playing games. This is certainly true of the scacchic opening, with Thorne and his opponent—the Professor (the Vietnam name Jake Singer went by in Jacob’s Ladder)—sitting in the typical Hellraiser bargaining position: on opposite sides of the frame with the table in the middle. The quick cuts as they make their chess moves and hit the clock not only underscore the competitive nature of Tho
rne, but also indicate that games will figure largely in the plot. If one needed any more convincing, the setting itself is a basketball court with players still in the background. As if to emphasize his need to win, a call comes through on Thorne’s cell from Tony and he tells him, “We won by seven, but it should have been twenty.” It is not enough that he win, he must win outright—as he proves by trouncing the Professor: “You played right into my game....” It’s also one of the first things he tells his wife when he returns home. On asking how the game went, Thorne tells her, “We won.”
In the word games he plays with Tony, Thorne also likes to be the victor. Tony’s futile attempt to get the better of him (“What’s an eight letter word for slaughterhouse ... ?”—“Abattoir”) is met immediately by a much more complicated test. Thorne throws back, “What’s a ten letter word for your name?” and delights in watching him struggle. The next day Tony begs him, “What’s the answer?” and Thorne replies, “You’ve given up quicker than usual, Tony,” thus implying it is a regular ritual humiliation. Tony’s surname is in fact a palindrome—Nenonen—because it reads the same backwards as it does forwards. “Oh I get it,” says Tony, “it’s like the name Bob. That’s one, too, right?” But Thorne has no idea how pertinent his puzzle is, for he is the victim himself of a much larger palindrome. “It ends the same way as it begins,” he informs Tony—just like his own private Hell. Thorne will be destined to live out the same events over and over on a loop, forwards and backwards.
Thorne has no idea that he is playing yet another game, one he cannot possibly win. And his opponent this time is Pinhead. The chess game should have been a clue, as it is a distant cousin to Lemarchand’s dolls. This is investigated more fully in Pinhead’s speech at the climax: “It’s all a puzzle, isn’t it Joseph? Like a game of chess. The pieces move, apparently aimlessly, but always towards a single objective: to kill the king.” Thorne’s reality is Pinhead’s own giant chessboard and the people on it no more than expendable pawns.