The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy

by Kane, Paul

  After tracking down the Deader hideout, as she moves through a darkened corridor with only her lighter to guide the way, Amy feels the walls closing in on her. Finally, she arrives at the room where the first video was made and finds it full of people staring at her. Amy is sent in to see Winter and tells him she wants to join the Deaders. It is here that Winter elaborates about the real and unreal. Taking her hand he explains that it is not the flesh that defines this, but the spaces around it and in-between. “In all essential qualities, it is less than nothing. ... you are less than nothing. Not solid, not here, not real.”6 The reason Marla is decaying is that she’s still clinging on to the real world instead of letting go. There follows an impressive special effects sequence in which he forces Amy to place her hand on the table and close her eyes. The surface feels wet, something is sucking at her fingers, and when she opens her eyes she sees a baby’s face embedded in it; then the table turns into Sheila, who bites her.

  Amy escapes and returns to her flat, ringing Larry to tell Bud that she is off the story. But while she is in bed that night, trying to sleep, she is shocked to find blood on the pillow—and a knife sticking in her back. She manages to remove the knife and stem the bleeding. Realizing the blade belongs to Marla, she returns to the woman’s apartment by traveling on the subway, encountering a strange old man on the train. When Amy arrives, Marla says, “I’m sorry.... It’s the way it’s supposed to work. The one who initiates you is the one who has to be your guide,”7 a guide who makes it easier to believe in coming back. She tells Amy that the apartment is too solid and that she’s been drifting in and out of its reality all night. A crack appears in the window, but it’s more than just a hole in the glass: the shafts of light illuminate figures from the real world, like the policeman from the subway. “In their world, in the daylight, a knife in the heart is fatal. If you stay ... then you’ll have to live by their rules. The rules that make you dead.”8 So the choice is clear: the light is reality, the dark is unreality, and the women slip into the Night side.

  In the Nightworld anything is possible, as we see in a series of hallucinatory scenes, the first involving a restaurant with dead cats hanging from the ceiling and a cluster of grotesque chefs. Following these incidents, Amy wakes to find herself in a hospital bed with Larry and Bud beside her. She’d been found in her apartment covered in blood, just as Marla had been found in hers. As night approaches, she tells the doctors that the things that lurk in the dark are coming for her, but, as they’ve done before, they put this all down to a psychotic episode she’s having. The faces of the dead are not quite human here (there’s a fantastic description of a shark-mouthed creature) and in the end Winter appears. Amy has misplaced her guide, but she must still leave everything behind in the real world. After finding Marla, she repeats the “I’m not real” speech we heard right at the start and accepts her fate.

  The effective ending sees Larry quitting because he thinks Amy and Marla have been killed by the cult, while Amy pays a visit to Bud and initiates him into the Deaders. Taking off her sunglasses in an action that mimics Marla, Bud sees that she has no eyes now, just dark, gaping holes.

  Similar to Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002), with its video mystery and determined news reporter as central protagonist, the Deader script would have made a decent movie in its own right. Stevens’ initial idea draws on concepts explored in films like Flatliners (Joel Schumacher, 1990) and Jacob’s Ladder, but it does so in a unique way. The screenplay, however, after being acquired by Dimension, was then selected as having potential for a Hellraiser movie. It was handed over to Tim Day, co-writer of Hellseeker, for him to insert the mythos elements. He would also cut some of the other more expensive or extraneous bits.

  To this end, the character of Larry is the first to go. His presence serves only to hint at a possible relationship with Amy, which goes against the grain of her character, anyway. By taking him out, the Hellraiser Amy becomes more of a loner, who rarely asks anyone for help. Thus, Joey becomes not an informant she has used before but one of the Deaders himself, whom Marla directs her to. In actual fact this tightens up at least part of the script and reinforces the investigation side of it. The “baby table” sequence and other Nightworld hallucinations were all removed, replaced by flashbacks Amy keeps having of childhood revolving around her father. Day tied the abuse aspect in to the stabbing scene, by having Amy use a very similar weapon on her Dad: the personal demons Winter must force her to remember before she can become a Deader (which results in another recurring line: “Fear is where we go to learn”). Therefore, although it is still Marla who stabs Amy, the reporter finds no knife now in the woman’s apartment. It is instead a replica of the one she herself used to kill her father that winds up in her back.

  A pre-credits scene showing Amy actually inside the crack den was also added, which says more about her character than dark clothes ever could. This is someone who will go that extra mile for a story, someone willing to brave the seedy underbelly of society and won’t stop until she’s uncovered the enigma of the Deaders. Two shifts in location were also required. The first made the paper English because the majority of actors used for these scenes would be of this nationality—necessitating a name change to London Underground. Because the star had to be American, her new job is explained away in a conversation with her editor (now named Charles), who refers to her having been sacked from the New York Post, though Amy prefers to call it “reassigned.” This has the added effect of bolstering her bad girl image. In addition, Day connected the dots between Amy and Charles by simply having a photograph in his office of the two of them together on an assignment in the past, hinting at a long-term history.

  The second shift in territory reflected the movie’s budget. Dimension knew that it would be much cheaper to shoot the film in Romania than in either the UK or the U.S.—so cheap, in fact, that they decided to shoot Hellraisers 7 and 8 back to back over there. So, rather than filming in Bucharest and pretending they were in the lower East Side of Manhattan—where Stevens’ script was initially set—the home of the Deaders was changed to Romania where, according to Charles, “All the Eurotrash kids looking for a good time are heading these days.” If nothing else, it would open up the Hellraiser world again beyond the confines of Britain or New York. Romania is also steeped in horror genre history, having direct links with Dracula and vampires in general.

  Day’s other principal task would prove much harder. Deader arrived with a fully fledged mythology of its own, so the problem was how to integrate the already established Hellraiser components. The notion was put forward that Winter should somehow be connected to the maker of the box. In fact, it was in the script right up until almost shooting that Winter’s great-grandfather was the creator of the Lament Configuration. It was Doug Bradley who pointed out that Lemarchand had done this in both the original Barker novella and in the complex storyline of Bloodline. In the finished film, Winter’s association with that particular family is left extremely vague.

  When talking to Amy, he claims the box is a “family heirloom” that belongs to him. As Pinhead gives his—now almost compulsory—summing up speech during the finale, he says, “It seems that evil does run in the family. Your lineage is that of a craftsman. A maker of toys. You should have stayed in the family business.” It is obvious that Winter cannot be little Jack; for one thing, he is the wrong age (Jack would only be in his teens). For another, Winter dies without—to our knowledge—leaving any children behind to carry on the bloodline which would eventually culminate in Paul Merchant’s birth. More likely is the possibility that he is a cousin of Jack’s or perhaps even a brother of John’s we weren’t aware of. (After all, Jack is shown already building things with his Meccano, whereas Winter is involved in another game entirely.) That none of this is clarified reflects the haste with which the change was made.

  Another factor that wasn’t quite thought through was Winter’s new motivation for the Deaders. Tantalizing though the thought of building a force to fi
ght the Cenobites is—indeed, it was even used in the Hellraiser comic series for “The Harrowers” plotline (see chapter 33)—it jars when coupled with the original Deader idea. In Stevens’ incarnation, Winter represents the Nightworld and unreality, in direct opposition to the light or Dayworld. In Hellraiser there can be only one source of darkness, that of the Cenobites.

  In contrast to the Stevens written character, Winter wears white (trousers, T-shirt and coat) like an angel and pits himself against Pinhead. Yet the world in which he lives is very similar to the Hell we know: dark and clandestine, stone walls and shadowy corridors. Also, the methods he uses are questionable, to say the least, as he recruits his group from the hedonistic thrill seekers of Romania’s backstreets. He even repeats Pinhead’s line, “Don’t think for a second you’re not in danger.” The struggle over Amy’s soul—she being the only one who can both open the box and become a Deader—is inventive, but it is not fully explained why Winter should want her to do this. If he is of Lemarchand’s line, then surely the last thing he’d want is for anyone to open the box? In Day’s script Amy has already done this by the time she meets Winter, an encounter with chains and Pinhead in her apartment her reward for finding the box at Marla’s. Indeed, the prising of the box from Marla’s dead finger’s is a retread of Amy reaching for the package: two suspense scenes for the price of one.

  Both the Deader and Hellraiser strands work perfectly on their own, but do conflict somewhat with each other. This was something Stevens contended when he saw a copy of the finished shooting script. (As a requirement of the Writer’s Guild, when there is more than one writer involved in a screenplay, a copy must be sent to all participants past and present.) He told The Hellbound Web via e-mail in 2003 that he’d had no contact whatsoever with Day or the makers of the final movie. “I haven’t spoken to anyone at Dimension in years,” he said. “I simply cannot be enthusiastic about the process that transformed my script, which had nothing whatsoever to do with Hellraiser or the Hellraiser universe, into a direct-to-video Hellraiser movie.”9 Director Bota diplomatically said, “Neil Marshall Stevens had really brilliantly written a story in dialogue, but once it was changed along the way into a Hellraiser sequel, there were several scenes which really did not work anymore within the mythology.”10

  An unused Cenobite: Spike (courtesy Gary J. Tunnicliffe).

  So, this was the script the makers had and, barring changes on the way such as the inclusion of underground tunnels after a scouting trip to Romania (Bota found the perfect Deader den—World War II Army bunkers on the outskirts of Bucharest), this would remain pretty close to the finished film. As mentioned, Dimension wanted to shoot two Hellraiser sequels back-to-back in Romania, which would mean extremely short schedules—an incredible twenty-five days for Deader—and possible problems when trying to hire Bradley again. In his book, Behind the Mask of the Horror Actor, Bradley tells readers how Dimension wanted to book him for both movies, but only pay for one.11 Luckily, all came to an agreement and the role was once again secure in Bradley’s capable hands. For his part, he was particularly happy to be involved again because it meant for the first time in the series’ history he’d be working with the same director twice and wouldn’t have to go through the motions of explaining the character.

  For the daunting part of Amy Klein, the makers chose another experienced genre actress, something they’d later be very thankful for. Born in 1967 in Brookfield, Connecticut, Kari Wuhrer began studying acting at thirteen, as well as singing at every opportunity (she was the youngest member of the band Freudian Slip). RADA trained, when she was old enough she moved to New York and applied for as many auditions as she could. Ford’s Model Talent Division signed her up and she appeared in a number of commercials on TV Her first film was Fire with Fire (Duncan Gibbins, 1986), but almost immediately afterwards she landed a job as an MTV VJ, co-hosting Remote Control. When she returned to movies, it was for the 1990 comedy The Adventures of Ford Fairlane (Renny Harlin, 1990) and Beastmaster 2: Through the Portal of Time (Sylvio Tabet, 1991). She also found time to star as Abigail in the Swamp Thing TV series (1990).

  Parts followed in such films as Beyond Desire (Dominique Othenin-Girard, 1996) and Stephen King’s Thinner (Tom Holland, 1996), but it was on television again that her next big break came, playing Maggie Beckett on the sci-fi parallel universe show, Sliders, from 1997 onwards. Just before taking the role of Amy, Wuhrer had starred in the big budget Hollywood creature feature, Eight Legged Freaks (Ellory Elkayem, 2002), alongside David Arquette. The film actually had its Romanian premiere during filming of Deader. She had also just executive produced her first feature in 2001, coincidentally entitled Spider’s Web (Paul Levine). Said Wuhrer afterwards about the experience, “The pace of making this movie, it was extreme. It was the longest day imaginable on a film set that we could get away with ... and yeah, I was in every scene, start to finish, and it was grueling.”12

  For the enigmatic role of Winter, Wales-born Paul Rhys was also perfect casting. The intense actor’s first film was 1986’s Absolute Beginners (Julien Temple), followed quickly by TV roles in an adaptation of My Family and Other Animals (1987), Tumbledown (1989) and Opium Eaters (1990), as well as a part as Sydney Chaplin in Chaplin (Richard Attenborough, 1992). The television work continued for over a decade with productions such as The Healer (1992), The Haunting of Helen Walker (1995), King Lear (1998), I Saw You (2000) and the new version of Randall and Hopkirk (Deceased) (2000) with Vic Reeves and Bob Mortimer. But it was in the lavishly superb adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel, From Hell (Albert & Allen Hughes, 2001), that he really shone with a career best performance as Dr. Ferral, one of the suspects in Johnny Depp’s Jack the Ripper investigation.

  Londoner Georgina Rylance took on the difficult part of Marla, now more European-looking than Asian. Another TV actress, she had been a regular as Anna in the series As If (2002), in addition to securing roles in Manchild (2002) and the U.S. fantasy program Dinotopia (2002). Georgina had one of the toughest tests of the shoot, to lean forward and hold still while pretending to be dead on the toilet, the process of which actually hurt her back during takes. She was joined by Northampton-born Marc Warren as Joey, whose energetic, spontaneous performance caused some headaches when it came to editing, as no two takes were the same. Warren had enjoyed a long and varied acting career that encompassed everything from the BBC’s Casualty medical series (1991) to the Spielberg produced Band of Brothers (2001) on television, and Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis (John Henderson, 1997) and f2point8 (Paul Hills, 2002) in the cinematic realm. He would definitely add a much-needed humorous slant and his last line, “For fuck’s sake!” after Pinhead runs him through with a chain, is one of the most memorable in the entire franchise.

  Another Englishman, Simon Kutz, was hired to play Amy’s boss, Charles. Kuntz’s admirable credits included Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994), Disney’s The Parent Trap (Nancy Meyers, 1998) and homegrown horror chiller The Bunker (Rob Green, 2001). A regular also on British TV, Kuntz brought a requisite charm and ruthlessness to the role of Charles that would lead some to believe he was in league with the Cenobites themselves, especially after Amy’s line: “You know there’s something vaguely demonic about you, Charles.” The other woman in his life, secretary Betty, would be portrayed by veteran actress Linda Marlowe.

  The majority of other actors in Deader would be drawn from Romanian stock. The Landlord, for instance, Costi Barbulescu; Young Amy, Maria Pintea; Amy’s father, Daniel Chirea; Anna, Madalina Constantin; Subway Cops, Mircea Constantinescu and Marius Ratiu; the Deader Guide who shows Amy the way to their hideout, Nike Phanzu; and the Young Girl who paints in the asylum, Daria Enescu in addition to the numerous extras needed for scenes like the subway carriage lair. Many of these actors couldn’t speak a word of English and had to learn the lines parrot-fashion, particularly impressive when you consider the inflections they managed to achieve. But this would expose one of the largest problems the U.S. directo
r faced, the language barrier with a Romanian crew.

  As hardworking as they were—though in Hollywood terms they were being paid relatively little, their Romanian wage was a cut above the average worker there—Bota would find it difficult to communicate his meaning on occasion. This would become particularly apparent when dealing with major crew members like cinematographer Vivi Dragan Vasile [Ultima noapte a singuratatii (Virgil Calotescu, 1976) and Dark Angel: The Ascent (Linda Hassani, 1994)]. As we saw in previous chapters, Bota is an experienced DP himself and even wondered whether or not to hire a cinematographer at all for Hellseeker. But he was actually looking forward to working with a foreign DP of this caliber. And the majority of the time there was very little problem working with the translator on set. “It was just the fine detail and explaining of things. I think he was more traditional, so things like odd camera movements and odd lighting decisions didn’t come as easily to him. I think he was thinking he was doing an American movie, and I was thinking I was doing a European movie. He wanted to add lights, I wanted to subtract light and, given the language difficulties, there were times we definitely clashed.”13 In addition, Bota had difficulty securing some of the locations he’d set his heart on when scouting. For example, the director wanted to film in one of the old, run-down subway stations for the scenes with Joey and Winter, but instead the Romanians had arranged for him to shoot in a new station that hadn’t even opened yet.