39 Years Later, A Clive Barker Original Changed The Face Of Horror
Pinhead and the gang aren't quite like the slashers that dominated the horror movie space in the 80s.
Considering how transgressive and vulgar they were seen at the time, the slasher films of the 80s have now come to be known for establishing a set of moralistic rules that seem out of step with the horror movies of today. While Freddy Krueger, Michael Myers, and Jason Voorhees were carving up teenagers with reckless abandon across each of their long franchises, that violence also fit neatly into the structure of a morally conservative worldview that writers and cultural critics like Carol J. Clover would later identify in foundational works like Men, Women, and Chainsaws. No drinking or drugs, no reckless hedonism, no premarital sex – and the Final Girl archetype, the lone female who traditionally survived the classic slashers of the 80s, was a testament to the utility of remaining “morally pure.”
But at the same time that slasher films were gripped by stealthy puritanism hiding underneath the blood and guts, legendary writer Clive Barker was seeking to explore the link between violence and eroticism. A running theme throughout his literary work, in 1987 Barker would step into the director’s chair for a film designed to illuminate that link with grotesque clarity, and in the process would end up making a cult classic that directly challenged the simple moralism of horror movies popular at the time. Hellraiser didn’t just introduce the world to Pinhead and the Order of the Gash, but it also subtly pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in horror at the time. With Hellraiser back on our minds, because of the season, and because of the new game, Hellraiser: Revival, which released early this month, it’s a good time to look back at the original film, and how it changed everything.
The taboo, inherently sensual nature of Hellraiser didn’t originate in the script, and it didn’t even really originate with the 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart on which the film was based – it originated in the late 1970s, during Clive Barker’s time as a “hustler” trying to supplement his income. It was in that period that Barker, who is gay, first truly explored the world of BDSM, particularly the niche of leather fetish clubs. In one of these clubs, Cellblock 28 (a famous historical spot in the New York queer underground), Barker witnessed the concept of erotic piercing for the first time – a concept that would go on to directly inspire the visual aesthetic of the Cenobites and their ideology of pain and pleasure as indistinguishable, the driving impetus behind the entire franchise.
But one of the most unique things about the original Hellraiser is that the Cenobites aren’t really the primary antagonists, and the movie isn’t really about them in any meaningful way: it’s about the carnal repression of a newlywed housewife, and how those suppressed desires explode outwards. Instead of focusing on a slasher hunting down debauched 17-year-olds, the horror of the film is centered around Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins), a recently married couple trying to rejuvenate a strained relationship by moving back to Larry’s childhood home. Unbeknownst to Larry, Julia had an intense affair with his hedonistic brother Frank in the days immediately following their marriage, and unbeknownst to Julia, Frank is dead – the result of him opening a puzzle box that he foolishly believed would lead him to a dimension of extreme sensual pleasure, only for him to be torn to shreds by disembodied chains and his soul dragged to a dimension where that pleasure is attained through unceasing torture so creative it would make the architects of the Inquisition blush.
You don’t need to squint to see how Barker’s time in the BDSM scene influenced the film.
During the process of moving, Larry cuts his hand on an exposed nail, and his blood mixes with Frank’s blood in the attic, resulting in one of the most spellbinding and gruesome sequences of practical FX work within the decade: Frank’s body reconstitutes itself, burbling slime that becomes a skeletal frame that grows a brain and internal organs and finally the thinnest sliver of graying flesh. But it’s not enough – for Frank to become whole and fully human again, he needs more blood, and to that end he enlists the help of Julia, who reluctantly agrees in the hopes of being reunited with the only man who has ever satisfied her.
While the closest the film has to a true “hero” is Larry’s 20-something daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Julia is simultaneously the antagonist and the character on which everything hinges. Barker has stated before that part of what interested him about the story is seeing what exactly a woman would do for a good lay, and it’s through that lens by which Julia’s actions (which include murdering several men for Frank to feed on) are illuminated – if Frank represents the dangers of unrestrained desire, then Julia is the polar opposite, the extremes brought on by ultimate repression and the self-destructive bliss of giving in to what’s underneath. Clare Higgins brings Julia to life with so much complication, presenting as a fairy-tale evil stepmother to Kirsty and a frigid and implacable wife to Larry, but there’s an unmistakable and undeniable humanity to her absolutely misguided urges that neither Higgins nor Barker outright condemn the way any of the film’s slasher contemporaries would.
Julia and Frank are a match made in Hell, quite literally.
Both she and Frank find their perfect foils in the Cenobites, the "explorers in the further regions of experience” who claim Frank’s soul the first time he opens the Lament Configuration puzzle box. Pinhead (or the Hell Priest, as Barker prefers), Chatterer, Butterball, and the Female Cenobite (officially christened “Mother Superior” in a new comic book published by Boom! Studios) were all once formerly human, before they themselves were taken and refashioned to reflect the dimension they hail from, a torturous circle of Hell in which pain and pleasure have become maddeningly interlinked in the search for newer and more extreme sensations. Their designs are part of what makes them so idiosyncratic – designed by SFX artist Bob Keen, they each bear scars indicating the torture they have so eagerly sought, resulting in a group of creatures that stand apart from the usual 80s horror villains in how grotesque and yet beautiful in a way they appear.
Despite the franchise veering off the rails with the second film and becoming a series of diminishing returns, the first Hellraiser has truly no peer; it’s a film that totally rejects the underlying moral logic of those movies which dominated the genre at the time, embracing sensuality as something fundamentally human and recalibrating good and evil on a horseshoe scale of repression and an extreme lack of inhibition. Clive Barker would only direct a handful of other movies afterwards, but truthfully his contribution to the history of horror films would’ve been solidified if his debut had been his only outing. Nearly 40 years onward, it’s an anathema for a film industry that seems increasingly terrified of eroticism on-screen, still daring audiences to open the box and see whether or not they enjoy the sights it wants so badly to show you.
