From beyond the outer darkness. From the blackest corner of a family’s past. From the nightmarish realm of the imagination comes… Hellraiser. A tale of flesh, hunger, and desire by horror master Clive Barker (Nightbreed, Rawhead Rex, Candyman, Lord of Illusions), in his directorial debut that really gets under your skin.
Hellraiser
An adaptation of his novella, The Hellbound Heart, the story begins with a scuzzy hedonist named Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman). This is a man who has an itch that nobody can scratch, and he’s seeking a physical gratification that goes beyond any conventional coital activities. Frank has grown weary of the world’s trivialities, and its empty conquests (this includes sleeping with his brother Larry’s wife, Julia), but then he finds The Box while out traveling. A puzzle configuration that is said to open the door to otherworldly pleasures. The super freak Frank takes the box back to the family house he co-owns with the extremely vanilla Larry (who doesn’t live there), figures out its mechanical pattern, solves the puzzle, and opens the portal to whatever awaits on the other side.
Be it heaven or hell, he didn’t care which. Because Frank had gone to the limits of experience, or so he foolishly thought. This configuration is a gateway to the domain of the Cenobites. These are extra-dimensional beings who were once human, but were brainwashed and mutilated through a painful transformation process (something you don’t find out until the next movie).
Afterwards, they become a member of a masochistic religious order that tortures puzzle nerds in hell’s Labyrinth. Demons to some, angels to others. This is something that Frank doesn’t find out until chains with giant hooks at the end are tearing into his flesh, and he’s being dragged off into their realm of eternal suffering.
Vanilla Larry (Andrew Robinson) decides to move in and claims the assumingly abandoned home with Julia (Clare Higgins) who is the very stereotype one imagines when thinking of an uptight, frigid English person. That’s until she sees evidence of Frank having been there, and she starts going into hot reveries about the last person to melt her icebox. Larry cuts his hand open on a nail while moving their mattress while she’s in the seediest of upstairs rooms, daydreaming about being with Frank (guess where that took place), and he comes in splattering blood everywhere.
This is what allows Frank to escape his torment, and it involves an extremely cool resurrection scene, but there’s a problem. Those few drops of blood weren’t enough, and Frank “The Monster” (now played by Oliver Smith) is incomplete. He’s basically a skeleton with cartilage, eyes, and bits to let him speak. More blood is needed to heal him so he can get away from there before the Cenobites notice that he escaped. Luckily, he has a new housemate who will do anything he wants her to do… anything.
One of the best horror films to come out of the 1980s, Hellraiser took the terror of torture to new and exquisitely disturbing heights. On top of that, it brought widespread attention to a burgeoning late 1980s BDSM scene (what’s your pleasure, sir?).
It also introduced the world to the Female Cenobite (Grace Kirby), Chattering Cenobite (Nicholas Vince), Butterball Cenobite (Simon Bamford), and Doug Bradley as the iconic Hell Priest (aka Pinhead). There’s no forgetting the extremely awesome Ashley Laurence in her film debut as Larry’s daughter (and Final Girl), Kirsty. This also features the up-and-coming maestro, Christopher Young, and one of the greatest scores in all of horror.
If you get confused about whether the movie is supposed to take place in England or the United States, then fear not. Hellraiser was intended to be England, but New World Pictures decided to change it to “The States”, thinking it would generate a wider audience appeal if they thought all these blokes were Yanks (instead of just Andrew and Ashley), and this is why Sean Chapman sounds like he should be doing the English dub work for some Akira Kurosawa epic. Open the door to new pleasures on TUBI, they have such sights to show you.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
Impressed by what they saw during the making of Hellraiser, New World Pictures greenlit a sequel during the film’s post-production. The great Clive Barker was replaced by studio suit Tony Randel (Ticks), and Peter Atkins (No relation to American horror chad, Tom Atkins) wrote the screenplay. Barbie Wilde came in to replace Grace Kirby as the Female Cenobite and forever owned the role afterwards. Otherwise, the rest of the gang returned for the shockingly disturbing Hellbound: Hellraiser II from 1988.
For Kirsty Cotton, the nightmares never end. Fresh in her fevered memory are her father’s skinned corpse, the evil machinations of her Uncle Frank’s re-animated body, and the unspeakable perversity of the Cenobites. But for Kirsty, the worst is yet to come.
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Immediately following the events of Hellraiser, she wakes up in a psychiatric hospital with bewildered police at the foot of her bed. As you can imagine, they are damned curious to know exactly just what the hell happened in her father’s house full of flayed bodies and desiccated human remains. The police don’t want to hear about any “demon fairytales”, but there’s somebody who does. That’s the head honcho of the Channard Institute, Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham). He places Kirsty under his care which somehow gets the police off of her back for the rest of the movie, and they even play accessory to capital felonies by delivering crime evidence to his home.
Nobody gets a hospital named after them without having some major pull. It turns out that Dr. Channard has been studying the occult for years, and has prior knowledge of both the Lament Configuration (aka The Box), and the Cenobites.
He enlists a patient with delusional parasitosis to help resurrect Julia (featuring a bloody mattress scene that can’t be unwatched) that will once again have Kirsty confront the Cenobites and a few old faces (for lack of a better word), but she will be joined by a mute puzzle genius (and fellow patient) named Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), and together they take on hell itself.
Between this world and the next, between excruciating pain, between salvation and utter horror, there is Hellbound: Hellraiser II. A flawed film that surpasses the first one with graphic imagery and an even bigger downer for an ending, but that’s about it. Christopher Young kills it again with the chilling score. This might be nostalgia-speak, but there has always been something eerily soothing about the Something to Think About piece.
Speaking of nostalgia, this article is dedicated to anyone else who spent way too much too time in the horror section of a video store. Staring at the backs of their VHS cases (especially when it said UNRATED on the front), and wondering if that was the day they’d have enough courage to rent that movie. It’s a shame those days are gone, but at least this horror classic can still be seen, and it’s on TUBI right now. May your viewing be legendary, even in Hell…
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