To countdown to this year’s Halloween, Luke Owen reviews a different horror film every day of October. Next up – Clive Barker’s Hellraiser…
Based on the novella The Hellbound Heart and directed its author Clive Barker, Hellraiser is a visceral experience that focuses more on character than it does on the freaky imagery that Barker’s mind (and the series) is best known for. In retrospect, it’s almost amazing how popular this series became, considering that the man who would become the focal point of the franchise is only in a handful of scenes and is dispatched off fairly quickly.
The movie centres around Julia, an unfaithful wife who was having an affair with her husband’s brother Frank all the way up until his disappearance. What Julia discovers is that Frank had ventured into the dark arts and felt the wrath of Hellbound creatures known as Cenobites, but has managed to escape their clutches. As a rotting corpse, he convinces his lover to kill men she picks up from bars in order for him to drink their blood and eventually re-grow his body. However, the Cenobites are hot on his tail – and they don’t take kindly to his escape.
What also makes Hellraiser fascinating is that it doesn’t really have any leading heroes – just some horrible and unfaithful people and the bad guys who track them down. There is an argument to be made that Kirsty, Julia’s daughter, is the movie’s hero due to her Final Girl role, but she is more or less an after thought for a good portion of the film’s runtime, and is only brought into the fold to bring about the movie’s conclusion. In a way, the Cenobites are our heroes as they are the ones who eventually show the unfaithful wife and her rotting lover the error of their ways, but they are portrayed as the monsters during the movie’s climax as they go against their deal to chase down Kirsty. It’s these moments that further highlight her supposed role, but to call her Hellraiser‘s hero would be a disservice to the movie.
Where Hellraiser works (apart from the brilliant direction and wicked visuals) is in its pacing. Barker brilliantly builds to not only the reveal of the Cenobites, but the movie’s third act. He keeps everything shrouded in shadows and even when we get our first full glimpse at the Hellbound creatures, they’re often shot from behind a pillar so that we only get glimpses of their designs – which are all superbly dark. The now-named Pinhead (credited in the script and novella as Priest) is the most iconic the four, but Chattering and Butterball also have brilliant and disgusting designs which will stick in the mind of the viewer long after the final credit has rolled. The simply named Female Cenobite (who was often referred to on-set as Deepthroat) gets the second most screentime behind Pinhead, but is actually the less creative of the four. In fact, the only reason she was given so much dialogue was because the make-up on Chattering and Butterball restricted the actors from talking, making dialogue reads difficult.
As aforementioned, when looking back in retrospect at Hellraiser, it’s weird to think that Pinhead became such an iconic character to rival 80s horror icons like Freddy and Jason. Although he has the most dialogue of all the Cenobites (for the same reason as Female Cenboite), he never appears to be the lead villain of the movie – being dispatched of quite quickly by Kirsty while the others fight on. Yet here we are nearly twenty years later and he is the only thing remembered from the series. This is in part down to the sequels that shifted more attention to him, but also due to the genius performance by Doug Bradley, who in many ways is like Bela Lugosi’s Dracula or Boris Karolff’s Imotep – a foreboding presence with phenomenal tone and pitch. However if you were to watch this entry and ignore the films that followed, you’d be amazed to discover that “Pinhead” would become the “figurehead”.
The rest of the Hellraiser series would never quite match up to the first movie and would eventually be relegated to the depths of “straight-to-video”, with the last entry Hellraiser: Revelations being a rushed 3-week production just so Dimension could keep hold of the franchise rights. Rumours of a remake have been bounded around for a long time, but without the brilliant vision of Clive Barker behind the camera, it’s likely that nothing will ever touch the original Hellraiser. It’s a superb movie with a great cast of characters (likeable or otherwise), a brilliantly paced plot and the designs of the Cenobites have stayed in the minds of many for a reason.
Luke Owen is one of Flickering Myth’s co-editors and the host of the Flickering Myth Podcast. You can follow him on Twitter @LukeWritesStuff.
Originally published October 2, 2013. Updated November 7, 2019.
