by Kane, Paul
Bota did have some recognizable faces around him, though, like Gary Tunnicliffe, who was not just handling the make-up effects this time, but was also directing the second unit filming (his are the close-up shots at the start in the crack den). Tunnicliffe also turned his hand to acting, for a memorable exchange with Wuhrer in the London Underground office during the title sequence: he’s the one who asks Amy to show him what’s she’s learnt while she’s been undercover. Tunnicliffe’s expertise was especially useful when filming the finale, where the chains jet out of the walls and hook into Winter, pulling him apart in the same gruesome way they did Frank in the original. “Although it looks as though we have many pieces of wall, we actually only use one wall section and we just make a different hole, blast one chain through, then take it out, patch it up, and then just blast another section.... But from different angles, shot high and low, at different frame rates, faster speed, slower speed, it’ll look like the hooks and chains are bursting from all over the place.”14 Perhaps the fact that one producer of Deader was special effects maestro Stan Winston (who created the monsters for Aliens and Jurassic Park) made him raise the bar even higher for this outing.
Bota would also receive quite a bit of help from the other producer, Ron Schmidt, who had previously worked on Wes Craven’s interpretation of Dracula in 2000 (Patrick Lussier) and, of course, Hellseeker. Said Bota, “He’s just a great guy to be working with because he’s just so determined to get you what you need, and I really felt like I had a lot of support.”15 Schmidt made the transition of working in Romania much smoother and generally the shoot was an enjoyable, if tough one—and particularly emotionally draining for Wuhrer.
Perhaps because of how well they got on, two of the best scenes emerged from Bota and Wuhrer working almost in isolation. The first was filmed in breaks during other scenes, it is the section where Amy squeezes herself down a corridor and the walls close in on her. The sense of claustrophobia is palpable here and Wuhrer’s acting is superb, as it is in the bathroom scene after she is stabbed. Bota had always been nervous about filming this because he feared it was one of those scenes that read well in the script but would be difficult to interpret on celluloid. He needn’t have worried. “Everybody was tired,” recalls Wuhrer. “I had been in and out of bloodstained clothes all day. It was cold, I’m constantly wet and having to be dried off, it was freezing and we just said let’s go for it! So he’s [Bota] got the camera on his shoulder.... We locked eyes and we knew if we didn’t fully commit ... And we just started filming and I went for stuff and he followed me, and there wasn’t any set choreography, it was all motivated by emotion.... I followed his leads and there was the silent communication. It was brilliant.”16 The outcome was an extremely distressing scene.
In post-production, House on Haunted Hill (William Malone, 1999) editor Anthony Adler had his work cut out for him but did a great job of splicing together the footage and adding even more tension. Visual effects supervisor Jamison Goei included touches like the chains springing out of the box and hooking Amy’s face, lightning crackling around the box itself, the Cenobites’ entrance at the end, and the Deaders being skewered by Pinhead’s chains. German composer Henning Lohner (who provided additional music for The Ring) could then also lay down the soundtrack. Bota had been petitioning Dimension to buy the rights to Young’s signature themes from Hellraiser, which he wanted to use at key points, like when Pinhead first appears, but Lohner’s themes do a fair impersonation without breaking that copyright. And his theme for the titles and credits provide a terrific sense of melancholy.
But one mystery remains, even after Amy has solved the puzzle of the Lament Configuration and the Deaders. That is why Dimension chose to hold back on releasing the movie until the summer of 2005. With Hellseeker making its appearance in 2002 at the same time Deader was being filmed, a release the following year would have helped to keep Hellraiser in the public eye. It would be a riddle that would not only haunt this movie, but the eighth Hellraiser film as well.
27
FEAR IS WHERE WE GO TO LEARN
Deadly Addictions
The first theme of Deader is signaled within moments of the film’s opening. In a pre-title sequence we’re shown close-ups of a spoon with heroin boiling on it, needles to one side (a different kind of pinprick than customary in Hellraiser), a bottle on bare floorboards—and then we pan across to witness the aftermath of this addiction spree: the first crackhead, face down, cigarette smoking away in his hand. All but one of the major addictions is covered here, and to reinforce the last one we settle on a woman lighting up. As we saw in Hell on Earth, there’s a definite link between smoking and being damned in Hellraiser lore, so when Amy wakes and the first thing she does is take a drag on her cigarette—and chain smoke her way through the entire movie—we know she won’t make it through the picture unscathed.
Yet her determining addiction has nothing to do with narcotics. The drugs available here do not interest her, they are merely a means by which she can satisfy her thirst for a good story. After checking her dictaphone and taking her pictures, she slips quietly out of the den. “You want any of this?” one druggie asks when she’s at the door. “No thanks,” Amy replies, “I got what I need.” And the proof of this comes when she picks up a copy of the London Underground in their office and it has her story on the front. A simple byline is her high, and like Joey before her in Hellraiser III she will go to any lengths to get that elusive credit. Editor Charles knows this and by involving her in the Deader story he’s supplying Amy with what she really desires. Charles is her dealer, getting her hooked and then using her to find him a good story. Indeed, it is insinuated that he might have been the one who started her on this road in the first place: the pair definitely have a reporting history together, judging by the black and white picture he keeps on his shelf. “Back in the trenches together, just like old times,” he says. “Don’t get all sentimental on me,” is Amy’s reply.
The difference between the pair is that he has distanced himself from the front lines. He delegates now, mainly because he doesn’t have the same urges Amy does. This is highlighted in his speech after he bails her out at the police station. “Why’d you give me this story, Charles?” she asks. Charles answers, “Who else would have taken it? Either they’re going to think it’s bullshit, or they’re going to be too afraid. But Amy Klein ... For the average person the hunger for knowledge is like the hunger for food. We want to know just enough to take the edge off our appetite. Then we’re satisfied, and we stop. But you are a glutton. You can’t help overeating.” He gets her to do his eating for him, so he doesn’t suffer from what he calls mental indigestion. “I take them [people] as they come and use them as they pass by,” he finishes. It is something borne out when Amy vanishes at the end and we see him hooking another female reporter on this particular stimulant.
In his own way, Charles is like the Cenobites; they provide the ultimate in pleasure and pain for those who have become weary of what the real world has to offer. Like Pinhead with Frank, or Julia with Channard, he gives Amy only what she truly wants, regardless of the cost. It is why Amy states that there’s “something vaguely demonic” about him. He, in turn, informs her that the word demon comes from the Greek word for knowledge.
In their own way, the Deaders are also addicted. As Pinhead says at the end, Winter was tempted to live beyond death, and, turning to the Deaders: “This world. It obviously disappoints you all. That is why you chose to begin this journey.” Even Joey, who is addicted not to drugs but to sex (his carriage filled with naked flesh, a woman there orally pleasuring him as Amy tries to have a conversation) has embraced the Deader way of life. The ultimate addiction for these people is to blur the perimeters of reality and fantasy, to reject the solid and declare that they are “not real.” Except for Winter. For him, there is also the added attraction of power and cultist leadership. In this environment he becomes like a prophet or even a messiah—Surely the most tempting addiction of all.
A Matter of Life and Death
In its standpoint on life and death, Deader comes down firmly on the side of the deceased. All the members of the cult have taken their own life, some with a gun to the head like Katya (formerly Sheila in Stevens’ script), or by hanging, like Marla. They proudly display their wounds to Amy when she stumbles into their lair. Slashed wrists are held up for her to see, knife wounds worn like badges of honor or some bizarre rite of passage. But this is a slightly different kind of death. As Marla points out to Amy after she’s been stabbed, neither of them should be walking around: “Why aren’t you dead? Why aren’t I? Because when it’s dark enough there’s no such thing. There’s no difference between being dead and being alive.” Theirs is a resurrected existence, one where you can jump in front of speeding trains and still survive, or bleed profusely but never let your wounds fell you.
In looks, these Deaders bear more of a resemblance to the zombies of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968), Dawn of the Dead (1978) and Day of the Dead (1985), or Lucio Fulci’s Zombie Flesh Eaters (1979), City of the Living Dead (1980) and The Beyond (1981). Their milky white eyes have no color, the decaying flesh peeling away from cheeks or chins to reveal the bone. The main difference, of course, is that, far from shambling along looking for brains to devour, the Deaders operate at a similar capacity to when they were alive. They walk and talk normally, and some even appear completely human, those who totally accept that death is not the end. This isn’t the first time zombies have been linked to the Hellraiser series. In his book, Zombies (1992), Andrew Black makes a case for seeing both Frank and the Cenobites as zombies: all resurrected flesh, all living beyond death. “If Hellraiser is indicative of the standard of forthcoming zombie films,” he states, “then the future of the genre seems assured.”1
The Deaders in Zombie 3 resemble the zombies of Fulci but are different in certain ways.
But in spirit the Deaders have much more in common with ill-fated Brandon Lee’s Eric Draven from The Crow (Alex Proyas, 1994). Sheer emotional will brings him back for revenge upon those who murdered him and his girlfriend. In the case of Draven it is love that spurs him on, in the case of the Deaders devotion to Winter’s doctrines. But it can be no coincidence that a black crow does appear twice in the film, the very first time on the grainy video Amy watches as Winter brings back Katya from the grave. And how does he do this? By kissing her, just as he does with the unidentified male Deader when Amy arrives in the underground room. In a reversal of the typical Hellraiser motif, a kiss brings life rather than death. There is no betrayal, apart from that of the natural order of things.
When we first encounter Amy she looks dead. She’s on the couch in the crack den, head back, hardly breathing. She has surrounded herself with the nearly dead as well. The bodies she steps over to get out appear just as lifeless as those on Joey’s train carriage the final time we see them. In the script, she’s described as wearing black (which is the standard color of funerals) and having a pale face (just like a corpse); this is something that Wuhrer pulls off well in the movie. In essence, Amy is dead right from the beginning; she simply doesn’t realize it yet. “I just want to go home,” she tells Marla. “Amy, you are home,” Marla enlightens her. The question is not if she will die, then, but what will happen to her soul? Both Winter and Pinhead wish to claim it, and the balance changes throughout the film. Twice we see Amy ascending stairs at the start, in the office and at Marla’s home, suggesting she might end up safe or in some sort of Heaven. But both times she finds herself in danger after these ascensions: Charles sends her on the assignment and she finds Marla’s body and the box in her flat.
It is after this point, and after she has opened the Lament Configuration, that we see her descending: into the subway to find Joey, into the Deader’s dungeon, and then down into the subway again. This would lead us to believe that her soul is well and truly doomed. In the end, the sacrifice she makes of killing herself—falling backwards martyr-style with arms outstretched—saves her from both of these fates. Neither Winter nor Pinhead can really possess her soul now that she has made the choice herself—now that she has accepted death in its true form.
Stabbed in the Back
Trust issues imbue Deader, or more correctly the loss of trust. The most horrendous loss of trust there can ever be is that between a parent and child. And this, as we see piece by piece, is what happened to Amy as a little girl. The very first images, those black and white flashbacks of the checkered floor (once more hinting at the colossal chess game being played behind the scenes), and a corridor leading to a door (recalling Joseph Thorne’s flashbacks from Inferno), presage the revelations to come. The confined space where Amy hides to get away from her abusive father parallels the scene in which she becomes stuck in the gap between the walls when looking for the Deaders, just before being stabbed by the hooded figure.
The flashbacks again herald a stabbing, this time in the back while she lies in bed, tying the physical to the mental. Amy was stabbed in the back by her father (figuratively, although one fears when he turns Amy onto her stomach on the table that he might be doing this literally, only not with a knife). As she thinks about the events, facing her demons, the knife in the back manifests itself and her blood flows freely like the memories.
It is not until she remembers fully in the hospital corridor—obviously her mindscape, complete with checkered floor—that the wound starts to bleed again and the implication is clear. But it is what she recalls that is important: Amy stabbing her father in the stomach—penetrating him, as he has done her—and killing him. In the flashback we see the adult Amy take the place of her younger self in a floral dress, and we know she has confronted her fear so that she can move on to the denouement. “Why is it that you feel no pain?” Pinhead asked her when she accused him of doing this to her. At the time, she felt no pain because she’d buried the memories so deep they couldn’t possibly hurt her. The more blood she loses, the more the past comes flooding back.
The way this happens is through photographic images. The scenes in that crack den that Amy takes pictures of are now frozen black and white moments in time, as is the picture of her and Charles that we zoom in on at the end. (The camera dissolves blocking out Charles and finding Amy’s face, her eyes; this was her story, after all.) Her memories are just moving monochrome representations of a childhood she’d rather forget, opened up by the various keys in the movie: the one that opens the Deader gate, the Lament Configuration that opens the pathway to Hell, and the opening of the cupboard door where young Amy hides.
Finally, there is the trust the Deaders place in Winter, who ultimately betrays them all. Without their knowledge, they are being used in his war against the Cenobites; Winter is amassing troops for the final push. But in the end he has sealed all their fates. One can therefore state in no uncertain terms that their trust in him was completely misplaced.
28
DEADER, LIKE ME?
With a mixture of anticipation and excitement (remember the film had a two and a half year build-up), Hellraiser: Deader was finally released on DVD in June 2005. Dave Davis of Chud.com was one of the first to review it, saying, “Director Rick Bota has done a few movies in the series, and he seems to be getting the hang of it, judging by the murk and mayhem of Deader. Of course, it’s only just superficially a Hellraiser movie—it feels like an original horror script was refurbished to incorporate Pinhead and the pain aficionados.” Which, of course, it was.
John J. Puccio of DVDTown said: “The Hellraiser series has always been about grotesque imagery, mostly of death and dying, and this entry is no exception. But the editing and direction leave a lot to be desired, with too many important plot details blithely skipped over.”
The Film Journal’s Rick Curnutte, Jr., was more optimistic in his assessment: “Though none of the subsequent films have captured the sexual potency of the first film or the fantastic allegory of the second, Deader returns, at least in spirit, to the mor
e organic tones of the earlier installments.” This positivism was echoed by Slasherpool’s reviewer AnthroFred, who even stated: “It’s really a shame that they started going DVD with the Hellraiser movies because this movie is definitely the best since the first Hellraiser movie and I think that this might have done pretty well at the box office.”
Tony Whitt of Now Playing Magazine commented, “Perhaps it’s my own lower expectations, then, but Deader turned out to be a pleasant surprise. It hasn’t got the gravitas of the first two movies, the flash of the third, nor even the plot twists of the fourth, but it’s still a deeply scary, deeply disturbing little movie.”
To conclude, Pop Matter’s associate music editor, Tim O’Neil, summed up thus: “For about the first two thirds of its running time, it creates a deliciously evil atmosphere of dread and dismay. Kari Wuhrer’s performance as a desperate reporter being dragged further into the grips of hallucinatory madness while investigating a strange death-defying cult leader is especially good. Her intensity, especially during extended scenes dealing with her own death and bloody rebirth, is far more evocative than any B-movie has the right to expect.”
29
HELL OF A WORLD
But, as we know, Deader wasn’t the only Hellraiser movie to be made in Romania at that time, although it was the only script Rick Bota and the crew took there with them. Throughout early stages of filming for the seventh movie in 2002, there was an initial idea for a script revolving around a party in an old house. But there were also a considerable amount of historical flashbacks involved—one venturing to Nazi Germany—and so the producers decided it would prove too complicated and too expensive to make. With shooting on Deader continuing apace and no film as such waiting to be made when it finished, the net was once again cast to find a Hellraiser story. Joel Soisson, who wrote Trick or Treat (Charles Martin Smith, 1986) and Mimic 2 (Jean de Segonzac, 2001) and produced the Prophecy series, had written a short treatment called “Dark Camp Breathe.”