The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy

by Kane, Paul

  “You have seen many things that you will wish you had not,” Pinhead informs Trevor as he writhes around, hooks and chains holding him fast. Trevor was hoisted by his own petard, his love of watching finally turned around and aimed at him.

  Good and Bad

  Another theme in Hellseeker is the one crystallized by Lange and Givens. Lange was meant to be a caring figure, like Allison, who guides Trevor through the search for his wife. “How’s that head of yours feeling?” he asks as Trevor comes down to the station for a talk. When he inquires whether something might have happened, just before the accident, that Trevor is withholding, Lange says in his softly spoken voice, “Don’t take it the wrong way, I’m just a guy trying to do a job here, okay?” Later, after they catch Trevor at the scene of Sage’s murder with a bloody ice pick in his hand, Lange appears genuinely disappointed in the man.

  His partner, Givens, is a completely different character. Mean, cynical and bad tempered, the grilling he gives Trevor about Kirsty and her inheritance oozes malice: “How many zeroes was your wife worth? ... Don’t play fucking stupid with me, all right? ... If Kirsty’s dead, like you seem so fucking certain, well, then I guess it all goes to you, Trev.” He continues, “My partner, Detective Lange, he’s softer around the heart than I am. Me, I’m hard as they come and when I get a feeling about something I’m usually right. And I get a bad feeling about you, Trev.”

  Toward the finale, when Lange takes Trevor down to the morgue, we discover that they are, in fact, one and the same person, augured by Givens’ sudden appearance after Lange walks down a corridor, and when Trevor hears the two of them talking in an office, but only Lange emerges. “I believe each of us is the sum of two entirely different people....” says Lange. “Good and bad, honest and dishonest, righteous and evil. That’s how we’re all made. It’s just a question of how much of each.” In the original script, we see Givens’ face on the back of Lange’s head. In the finished movie, thanks to Goei’s visual imaging, Givens separates his head from Lange’s and it hovers on his shoulder—a little like Johnny Knoxville’s character in Men in Black II (Barry Sonnenfeld, 2002). “I believe you and me have a lot in common,” Lange tells Trevor, which is true.

  Lange/Givens are Trevor’s twin characters, used to highlight the fact that Trevor also has a light and a dark side. But instead of being the ultimate good cop/bad cop like them, Trevor is torn between the love he felt for Kirsty (his imagined past with her) and his sordid vices—women and money. This is only fully revealed when Pinhead forces him to remember what really happened that anniversary night when he handed over the Lament Configuration. “I trusted you,” says Kirsty, “Goddamn it, how could you do this to us? You told me you loved me...” Trevor answers coldly, “Just open the fucking box,” which she does, much to his eventual regret.

  No Mercy

  The title here comes from deleted lines that Pinhead utters in the script: “Jealousy arouses a spouse’s fury. And no mercy will be shown when that revenge is given.”1 It is an appropriate one as it underlines the final major theme in Hellseeker, that of revenge. Without a doubt, it is Kirsty’s vengeance that is the driving force for the entire narrative. She takes her revenge against the women who have slept with Trevor by killing them one by one, and then murders the man with whom he conspired to kill her. Her final act is to shoot Trevor and then ensure he takes the blame for the murders. And why is her retribution so brutal? Not only had he betrayed her sexually—possibly the worst thing a man can do to his wife—but he had also brought the box to her again, confronting her with a past she thought she’d left behind. Trevor offered up Kirsty. “I can’t believe this is happening. I have a deal,” he says in the car. “No, you had a deal,” Kirsty takes great delight in informing him, “but I made a better offer, and guess what? He took it!” She sacrifices Trevor just as he was willing to do to her.

  But hers is not the only revenge on display. The women whom Trevor used—and who are now with Pinhead—also get to take their revenge on him. Gwen shocks him when she is suffocated by the plastic bag; Tawny’s bloody corpse appears in his apartment, and then she rejects him when he knocks on her door; and Sage leaves him to Pinhead’s devices in the acupuncture room, stabs him with the ice pick, and coerces him into pulling that same pick out of her head, thereby incriminating himself. Bret, too, compels him to watch as he blows his own brains out, after accusing him of reneging on their deal: “You had to go solo with your little car accident bit, then you fucked it all up. What were you thinking?”

  Finally, Pinhead is granted a revenge of sorts when he catches up with Kirsty. She escaped him twice in the past, and, indeed, the last time they met he was killed at the hands of Channard. Now, at last, is his opportunity to play with her; to watch her squirm at his hands (although there is an altogether different reading of this that can be made as we shall see in the following chapter). He is the one who gives her the opportunity for revenge, but at the same time he is also the one who turns her into a killer.

  It is a revenge any Cenobite would be proud of.

  Homage to Hell

  In addition to the return of Kirsty, Hellseeker contains references to every single Hellraiser movie thus far. The guardian of the box, or merchant, if you prefer, is back striking deals with the damned. In the screenplay the warehouse Trevor finds contains a tribute to the Pyramid Gallery from Hell on Earth with “erotic, sometimes grotesque sculptures, paintings, and other collectibles from all over the world depicting lust, ecstasy and torture.”2

  The brain operation scene at the start is a direct lift from Hellbound when Channard gives his “labyrinths of the mind” speech. The all-important mirrors from Hellraisers II, III and IV are referenced when Trevor is lying on the acupuncture bed (“What’s the mirror for?” asks Trevor and Sage replies, “To help see into your soul”), and the chart through which Pinhead appears bears a close resemblance to those seen in Channard’s obsession room.

  Infidelity as a theme reappears from parts I, II, IV and V, while the entire plot strand of tracking down a killer and solving a mystery is pure Inferno. But far from making the material clichéd, all this simply shows is that there is an acknowledgement on the writers’ and director’s behalf of the Hellraiser history, and that some attempt has been made to incorporate this into Hellseeker.

  24

  HELLBOUND HEARTS

  Much has been made, particularly in fan circles, of the relationship between Pinhead and Kirsty. Since they met in Hellraiser there has been a fascination between the two. She has been the only person Pinhead has bargained with instead of taking straight to Hell. This indicates some form of connection, possibly sexual, but definitely one based on admiration on Pinhead’s part. It could be argued that on one level theirs is the only union that has ever worked in the entirety of the series’ history. Though on the surface they are supposed to be enemies, as the Female Cenobite stated in Hellbound, they “do keep finding each other.”

  Kirsty is drawn to Pinhead and the box, just as much as he is to her, and Hellseeker plays with these issues, while Pinhead and Kirsty play with each other. The look, the smile that passed between them when he was in his human form the last time they met, insinuated that without his dark side there might have been a chance for a friendship—and possibly more. On Kirsty’s behalf this could be read as a surrogate father figure attraction after the loss of Larry, while Elliott may have viewed her as someone he could put his faith in after both God and Leviathan had failed him. In Hell on Earth, Joey is Kirsty’s substitute, and a romantic undercurrent could certainly be detected.

  But Kirsty is the one Pinhead has always truly longed for, “a far more interesting creature,” as he refers to her. The much longer encounter between them, found in the extras section of the DVD (bizarrely taken out of the movie because Bota didn’t want to exclude viewers who hadn’t seen the other Hellraisers) confirms what many have suspected about these two for so long. In it Pinhead spells out his intentions quite clearly: “You opened a
door a long time ago and it will not be closed until I get what I came for,” he says. “My soul,” Kirsty acknowledges. As if to verify this, he goes further: “I will not rest until I get what I want, and what I want is you!”

  Adding more weight to the claim, he also draws attention to how she has been hurt and left alone in the past. “It was your loving husband who did the hard work. He made it easy for me. It seems your family always does.” Kirsty retorts, “That was Frank. I gave him back to you. I did what I promised.” “Don’t think I’m not grateful,” he says. “I am. Eternally grateful ... But there was another bargain, wasn’t there. You will not have forgotten that I gave myself to let you run. Did you think that gift was nobly and freely given? Did you?” In essence, Trevor betrayed her, Frank betrayed her, but Pinhead allowed her to escape from Channard. He is attempting to make her see that out of all the men she has known—apart from her father—he was the only one willing to sacrifice himself for her. Kirsty owes him, and he won’t let her forget it. But perhaps she doesn’t want to. Pinhead’s first line is extremely telling: “Still playing the innocent, Kirsty? You disappoint me. After all these years surely you’ve realized it’s you that wants me here.” It’s interesting that she doesn’t contradict him.

  An unfilmed version of this exchange from the script presents yet more evidence:

  KIRSTY: How did you find me?

  PINHEAD: I never lost you. I’ve waited. Watched and waited. Seen how the bud blossomed and ripened into firm fruit. But what to do? Pluck it and consume it? Or watch it fall from the bough, rot and wither into dirt?1

  Hardly subtle, which is possibly why it was cut. But one last piece of dialogue remains:

  PINHEAD: Ah, a little understanding at last. It [her soul] is mine Kirsty. I possess it utterly. More completely than your pathetic Trevor ever could in his haphazard couplings. I touch the deep, dark, secret center of your self. And you know it. You welcome it.2

  More metaphors that need no explanation. Yet the question remains: why let her go again?

  There are two possible explanations. First, he is impressed once more with her bargaining skills and that she is willing to kill this time (“You’ll get your five!”), something she gives him the credit for (“I had a great teacher,” says Kirsty in the extended scene). In the script it has Pinhead smiling like a “proud parent” at this point, but reading between the lines it could be more than simple emulation. Second, if Kirsty is released, not only will she be granted her revenge as we’ve seen, but also the game can carry on, as will the sexual tension. “The box will never let you go,” Pinhead tells her, and he is talking about himself as well. As long as the Hellraiser saga continues the question of whether Kirsty and Pinhead will ever meet again—and what will happen next time—remains.

  Theirs are the real Hellbound Hearts of the series.

  25

  SOUGHT AFTER?

  Hellseeker was released in October 2002 and met with another mixed response from critics. Garth Franklin at Dark Horizons on the Internet questioned the logic of making a movie so similar to the last one: “Again this is a character drama about a man who may be suffering delusions, though there’s a more ... unsettling horror tone than the previous paranoid venture.” He also laments the shortage of Kirsty: “Where this film truly bites, though, is that the great Ashley Laurence is back but totally underused and appearing in only a few minutes of footage at best.”

  Meanwhile, Jason Myers at Revolution Science Fiction sang the film’s praises, declaring, “Imagine my surprise, then, to find that Hellraiser: Hellseeker was not only better than most direct-to-video horror movies, but also better than a good portion of the horror movies that get a theatrical release.” Although he admits to having only seen the first two films in the series before this one, he says: “Questions about the movie’s innate ‘Hellraiserness’ aside, Hellraiser: Hellseeker is actually a decent horror flick.”

  Horror Express’s Scott W. Davis saw the positives as well: “[The puzzle] appears briefly, but in fact it’s all around us. That’s the trick of the latest Hellraiser film. The entire film is a puzzle. Every time the film shifts, it reveals one part of the picture while concealing another. During the entire running time, we’re wondering which end is up? Actually, people who are familiar with this type of story may guess where it’s all leading, but there’s enough of a surprise in the final revelations to make it all satisfying. Yes, I said satisfying. Hellraiser: Hellseeker has defied all expectations and is actually a good little horror film, the best this series has seen in some fourteen years. Clive Barker is allegedly happy with the film, too, since it seems to treat the mythology, surroundings and, most importantly, the characters with respect.” On the other hand: “Writers Carl Dupré and Tim Day’s script likes to walk the fine line between fantasy and reality, but rarely does it cross the mediocrity line from TV movie to feature film,” claimed Travis Eddings of Film Threat. “Even the sets stay, the majority of the film, grounded on Earth, unlike previous prequels, which ventured into nether worlds.”

  The Surgeon 1:1 scale head. Replica sculpted by Ian Frost (courtesy Ian Frost).

  Kage Alan of Modamag.com felt cheated by the cuts made to the movie: “While it’s fantastic to see Kirsty again, the director didn’t want to alienate viewers who weren’t familiar with the Hellraiser series by giving too much exposition about events in previous installments, so he cut much of those sequences out. Personally, I find this extremely insulting. The people who are watching this 5th sequel are the ones who have stuck with it all along, even through the unforgivable Inferno, so why alienate us?”

  Still, the reaction seemed to be in favor of Hellseeker, certainly over Inferno, in spite of any similarities. Of course, by this time Bota was already hard at work not just on the ensuing film, but on the next two Hellraiser films.

  26

  DEADER CERTAINTY

  Aping Inferno’s genesis somewhat, Hellraiser 7 began life as a pre-existing script, this time written by Neal Marshall Stevens. Stevens’ first writing credit was on the TV show Monsters in 1988. From here he went on to direct Stitches (2000), about an evil sorceress who sews together the body parts of her victims, and then to write Dimension’s Thir13een Ghosts (Steve Beck, 2001). Stevens’ Deader script was sold to Dimension as a stand-alone, an intriguing horror story about the boundaries between life and death. In it, we’re introduced on page one to a feisty reporter called Amy Klein, who works for The Underground, a weekly newspaper in the Village Voice mode. The poster outside their offices promotes her most recent story “How to Be a Crack Whore.” She’s dressed all in black, with black sunglasses, except for a white complexion “so translucently pale that it bespeaks only the most rare and grudging familiarity with daylight,”1 so much so that she is described sarcastically by her editor, Bud, as an “Angel of Light.”2 He plays her a low resolution tape he’s received set in a dingy apartment where people drift in and out of frame and the narration is provided by a girl of Chinese descent called Marla Chen, Official Deader Archivist.3 Amy watches as Sheila—a new recruit—mouthing the mantra that she “isn’t real,” lies on a mattress, puts a gun against her head and pulls the trigger. Their leader, Winter, kisses a Deader called Carl, who then straddles her and apparently brings her back to life in a non-penetrative sexual orgasm of heavy breathing.

  Colleague Larry believes the tape is a hoax, but Amy takes the story, the return address on the video envelope leading her to Marla’s apartment. There’s a rancid smell coming from inside, so she gets the super to break down the door because he doesn’t have a key. The super’s unwilling to come in, so Amy steps inside—to find Marla’s dead body. She’s hanged herself on the toilet with her own bootlaces. Next to the sink is another manila envelope that looks like it, too, has a tape inside. Amy tells the super to go and phone for the police, while she enters the bathroom and grabs the video. Searching the flat, Amy finds a stiletto knife and photos of another Deader party Marla attended. Hearing noises from the bathroom,
Amy sees Marla’s fingers twitch and her head turn, which causes her to scream and flee the building. Later, Amy watches the video at home, which was made just after Marla’s own initiation. When Marla removes her sunglasses we see a pair of dead eyes looking out of the screen. It is at this moment that Larry calls Amy, startling her. When Amy calls Marla’s number to see what has happened, she ends up speaking to the dead woman herself.

  Amy subsequently enlists the help of Joey, who let her inside the drug scene to do the crack whore story. She finds him in the subway, having a private party in one of the coaches:

  The interior of the car has been transformed into some oddball cross between a very small nightclub and an opium den. Anyway, there are PERFORMERS at the far side who start playing as the train pulls out....

  In the uncertain light Amy can see the various CELEBRANTS hanging out—some on the seats, some on the floor, some dressed, some partially undressed, some engaging in desultory drug use, others in desultory sex acts.4

  Joey tells her all he knows about the Deaders, that they’re more than simply the Frankensteins or zombies Amy thinks. “It’s all about minds, and believing and what’s real and what’s not.”5 They are playing with the concepts of the real and unreal, and it was all started by a man named Winter. Joey gives Amy the address where the group hang out—Avenue B and Third Street—but warns her away from the place.

  Upon leaving the carriage, Amy sees a dead figure in a green plastic raincoat. Then she spots Winter dressed in black. He falls backwards in front of a train, but when she reports this to the police they can find no sign of his body on the tracks. When she sees Winter again she chases him, only to be arrested by the police. Bud bails her out and in a conversation between them it’s revealed that Amy has an appetite for information, but he’s the one who is curious about what’s on the other side—and what the Deaders might have discovered. Amy herself is not tied by any religious guilt, which makes her the perfect person to find out.