A Quick Detour Through Hell
Part One: Canon



Hellraiser (1987)

The first, still the best, and one of the best horror films ever made - hell, one of the best genre films, any genre, ever made. It usually ranks fairly high on lists of horror fans and critics' lists, but I'm convinced the reason it doesn't rank higher is that, as explicated in the previous post, the frank psycho-sexual weirdness in the film makes a lot of people - even gorehound horror fans - extremely uncomfortable. The later films drop the sexual element almost entirely, or diminish it to the simple level of hetero titillation.

(I remember reading an interview - or was it a director's commentary? - with Tony Randall, director of Hellbound, who stated that during an early scene in the sequel where a mental patient flays himself with a straight razor, Executive Producer Clive Barker insisted they film an FX shot with the mental patient cutting off his penis. The director said something like, "well, that's just Clive". Well, no, that's Hellraiser in a nutshell: a psychotic man cutting off his cock with a straight edge razor on a bloody mattress.)

Anyway.

Considering that this film was made for a reported $1 million dollars, it's easily one of the best-looking "low budget" horror films ever made. Considering the Faustian bargain that Barker reportedly made in order to have the film made his way - signing over future franchise rights to New Line and agreeing to a paltry budget in exchange for the chance to direct his own book - the fact that it looks as good as it does is something of a minor miracle. Especially if you consider the fact that Barker was himself a novice filmmaker, with just two experimental shorts under his belt as a director. It's a shame, in a way, that he's not temperamentally suited to working in the film industry, because if he had chosen to focus his energies he probably could have been a director for the ages. As it is, he's probably a better writer, but still, the prose world's gain is film's loss. (And the first person to mention Lord of Illusions in the comments gets bopped on the head.)

It never loses its ability to shock and dismay.

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Hellraiser II: Hellbound (1988)

A great sequel, almost as good as the original in some respects, but you can begin to discern how the wheels might come off in future installments.

A lot of people call this movie "cerebral", and I can see why - certainly, whereas the first film was almost exclusively focused on sexual metaphors, the second film is much more concerned with exploring the dark side of intellect. They spent a lot of time crafting some truly disturbing images, and they obviously had more money than the first film with which to do so. If you've ever been to a mental hospital - let alone been in a mental hospital - certain sections of this film are almost unwatchable. There's the aforementioned scene with the straight-razor, there's a lobotomy scene, there's a man getting a hand blender stuck on the end of demon phallus drilled into his skull . . . and then there's a scene in an elevator that is probably the single most horrifying sequence I've ever seen on film. It's not even that gristly a scene in the context of a movie where even the monsters get eviscerated and torn limb from limb, but I swear to God I almost never enter an elevator without thinking of the scene where Dr. Channard gets turned into a Cenobite. If you've seen it you know what I'm talking about.

But still, the movie suffers from an almost unintelligible third act. At a certain point you realize you have no idea why things are happening onscreen, and while they may be suitably gruesome and horrifying, you still don't understand why the man with the demon phallus thingie coming out of his head is killing everyone indiscriminately. A lot of its reputation for being "cerebral" comes, I think, simply from the fact that the plot is kind of vague in places, and it requires some thought to put all the proverbial pieces together. It's hard not to feel that just a little polishing on the script would have improved the final product inestimably.

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Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth(1992)

And here's where it all falls apart.

If they had continued in the vein of the first two movies, the series would have devolved into some kind of unwatchable hybrid of Shinya Tsukamoto / early Cronenberg. But apparently the powers that be at New Line figured that the best way to continue actually, you know, making money with the franchise was to scale back the ambition and intellectual pretensions and make something more resembling a straight slasher film. And this is pretty much exactly what Hell On Earth is.

At least they try to give an in-movie explanation as to why Pinhead would go nuts and start spouting off sub-Freddy Krueger one-liners while dispatching bar-goers with floating CDs. But the problem is that instead of making a good Hellraiser film they decided to try and make a Pinhead film, and as I implied before the storytelling engine was just not designed to tell stories specifically about the monsters themselves. Getting to know Pinhead's "human" side and learning that he became Pinhead as a result of the grotesque charnal horror of the First World War - well, it's all rather besides the point, and it's all rather boring. At least, on a meta-level, there is some acknowledgment that turning the concept into a slash-by-numbers horror franchise essentially means bending it almost entirely out of recognition.

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Hellraiser: Bloodlines(1996)

I've got an odd fondness for this film even if I also realize it's not very good. The first thing you need to know is that this is an "Alan Smithee" film. Kevin Yagher was the original director, and the cut he delivered to the studio was reportedly a half-hour longer than the finished film that was eventually cut to the bone and supplemented with post-production work by Joe Chappelle (who apparently later worked on The Wire). The extra half-hour of Yagher's cut was destroyed, Yagher subsequently took his name off the film, and the result was an awkward, defanged mess.

And yet, it's still kind of fun. The central idea is good: showing the history, not of Pinhead or Hell, but the puzzle box itself, by tracing the lineage of the man who unwittingly created the means by which Hell was able to begin its war on humanity. There are sequences in pre-Revolution 18th century France, contemporary America and, heh, the 22nd century in a floating space station. If you don't like horror in space, well, this probably isn't for you. (I mean, it's no Leprechaun 4: In Space, but what is?) Seeing the space marines (right out of Aliens, no less) take on the Cenobites is fun, even if - again - it deviates from the tone of the original films so dramatically that you can't imagine a Hannah Montana crossover would be much worse. There's even a cute Cenobite doggie - yes, a doggie.

Originally, the film was intended as more of an anthology, with a clear through-line from the French sequence all the way through the movie's concluding future sequence. The changes imposed after Yagher left the production resulted in the three plot threads being spliced together in a matter that could best be described as "haphazard". The ostensible reason for the changes was to keep the audiences from bristling at the lack of Pinhead until after the half-way point of the movie - but it's worth pointing out that Pinhead probably doesn't appear on screen in the first film for more than seven or eight minutes, tops. By this point, all the great thematics of the first two films have essentially been discarded: there's nothing too weird about hell anymore, it's just a slick vaguely Marylin Manson-ish place filled with evil demons who want to take over the earth. All of which has fuck all to do with the concept as introduced in The Hellbound Heart, but hey. You can sort of see the outlines of Yagher's attempt to hew closer to the spirit of the original film by introducing other denizens of Hell with conflicting goals from those of the Cenobites (a female demoness named Angelique), as an attempt to inject some mystery and sensuality back into the deracinated series. The mangled result ends up pretty predictable, but you can just barely discern the outlines of a superior film.

Turning Pinhead into the focal point of the mythos weakened the soup almost beyond recognition. He was never meant to be Freddy Krueger or Jason or even Hannibal Lector: he's scary because he's so mind-bogglingly weird and evil that you honestly can't conceive of anything worse than having him walk out of a glowing doorway and drag you to hell. Focusing the camera on him for any length of time ruins the mystique. Having devolved into just another slasher villain, he's a disappointment, just another cackling cinema boogieman to be easily dispatched in the space of 90 minutes. Bloodlines ends with a giant space station turning into a magic transformer and blasting Pinhead into smithereens with the power of the sun, or something - it might as well have been the Care Bear Scare. It's not very good but it gets points for style.

So Many Monsters, So Little Time



You know how this blog works by now: if I say I'm going to write about something, that invariably means I'm not actually going to write about whatever that thing is. So, almost two weeks ago I said I was going to write about my favorite horror movie, after I spent a great deal of time talking about one of my least favorite horror movies, Last House on the Left. The idea was to get it posted by Halloween. Well, surprise! Happy Thanksgiving!

Anyway, we're still alive, so let's get to it.

I still wake up in the middle of the night with cold sweats from Hellraiser. It's been twenty-one years since the movie's initial release - twenty-two since the publication of The Hellbound Heart - and it's still the gold standard by which I judge all subsequent horror films. I don't have a lot of patience for slasher films, and must admit to having seen almost none of the recent crop of "torture porn" movies: supernatural (or sci-fi) horror is my preference, although I admit that a well done terrestrial horror film like the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre or William Lustig's sublimely weird Maniac gets my respect. But for the most part I don't see the appeal of horror based in these kind of (relatively!) realistic milieus - for my money, reading a book about someone like Albert Fish is far more horrifying than watching a movie about a fake Albert Fish. (For the record, I don't recommend actually reading a whole book about Fish - I did, once, and I will regret it for the rest of my life. There's horror, and then there's horror.)

This is why I like H.P. Lovecraft so much. The horror at the heart of Lovecraft is less physical fear than existential dread, the logical extension of 19th century American gothic literature by folks like Poe, Melville and Hawthorne. The fear is not really the fear of death or pain, but the fear of displacement and insignificance - the idea that there is a much larger realm of reality just outside the boundaries of our own, in the context of which we are less than vermin. When this world comes into contact with our own, however briefly, the result is nothing less than transcendental, in the purest Kantian terms: the "real" universe, in its purest form, is unimaginably hostile to life, all life, and especially our life on Earth. More than a knife in the dark, that is primal fear: the fear that, in the final analysis, humans are absolutely superfluous, and that the all-consuming fear of the unknown which dominates human society since time immemorial is in fact the only healthy, rational response to an uncaring universe. It's not particularly pleasant. There is no gratifying reconciliation at the end of the story after the alien menace has been vanquished and the ethical status quo restored.

Speaking purely in terms of style, Clive Barker could not be more unlike Lovecraft. For one thing, Lovecraft had no time - literally, no time whatsoever - for sex. Sex, and physicality in general, is banished from his stories. The "action" in a Lovecraft story is usually entirely cerebral, with the realms of sensual experience confined solely in pejorative terms, usually in an explication of "primitive" ceremony and superstition (see "The Call of Cthulhu", with it’s portrait of a savage and unholy African “voodoo” ceremony, for a great example of early 20th century racism at its most virulent). Barker, however, is all about the sex. I haven't read everything of his, but of what I have read - the Books of Blood, Imajica, and of course, The Hellbound Heart - sex is foremost among Barker's preoccupations. Sex is magic, sex is power, sex is fear, sex is terror - sexual imagery surrounds us and confronts us on a daily basis. The body itself is a canvas in Barker, as in Melville. Physicality is not inviolate.

But in many ways Hellraiser (and The Hellbound Heart, but I'll refer mainly to the film adaptation from here on in) plays like a Lovecraft story, if Lovecraft decided to hang out in S&M clubs. Which is flip, obviously, but bear with me: the plot of Hellraiser is centered around the circumstances by which an unknown, inherently sinister and supremely powerful universe of unending cruelty and pain comes into brief contact with our own. The representatives of this universe - the sadistic Cenobites pictured above - are implacable, irresistible forces of inevitable evil. Once summoned, they cannot be dismissed until they take their rightful tithe (with the rare exception of a propitious bargain). Their purpose is largely unexplained. There is no way to "vanquish" them except by means of temporary abatement. As with Lovecraft's "Great Old Ones", the mute god Leviathan who sits in the middle of the infernal labyrinth is incommunicable. There is no consolation, no appeasement, no remorse. The Elder Gods communicate their unknowable desires through their emissary Nyarlathotep, just as the Cenobites follow the ominous will of their master.

But arguably the most important element of Hellraiser’s unique structure lies in the fact that although the Cenobites are certainly monsters, they are not actually villains. (At least, that is, in the first two films and the book – everything afterwards gets progressively more off-model.) The villains from the first film are the people trying to escape the Cenobites’ grasp – Frank Cotton and his lover Julia. Frank opened the puzzle box and was taken to Hell by Pinhead and Co. After Frank’s disappearance, Larry inherits his brother’s house, with his wife Julia (who, unknown to Larry, had conducted an affair with Julia on the eve of their marriage). Larry accidentally spills some blood in the house, opening up a tiny gateway through which Frank can return to Earth from Hell. Once there, he enlists Julia to aid in his escape – which means, he needs living blood and flesh in order to restore his desiccated body. This is supplied by Julia, who lures a string of hapless victims to Frank’s room.

It’s remarkable how many classic horror archetypes Barker manages to touch upon in the course of his story. Obviously, the plot hinges on a haunted house, occupied by a revenant spirit both figuratively and literally connected to the past sins of its occupants. Frank and Julia are both demons of a sexual nature – an incubus and a succubus, to be precise – and Frank’s appetites for life-nourishing blood make him a vampire. Towards the end of the film he even skins Larry and steals his face – becoming a chameleon, stealing his brother’s identity and usurping his family life. And, of course, the movie is driven by a series of Faustian bargains the main characters make – or attempt to make – with the hellish Cenobites who relentlessly pursue them.

It is also necessary to point out the context – perhaps blessedly distant at such a late date, but important nonetheless – that at the time of the movie’s release, Clive Barker was an openly gay writer working in the mid-80s. In particular, he was writing about sexual transgression, and the process by which people are remade and destroyed by their desires. It’s something of a canard that horror films are ruthlessly conservative in their sexual attitudes: young men and women – especially women – who transgress against cultural norms (by going out in the dark woods to make out with their boyfriend, for example) are routinely dispatched by sinister forces of reactionary propriety. The Cenobites, however, are not anti-sensualists: they are the ur-sensualists. The puzzle box is ostensibly a key to a universe of untrammeled sensual experience, pain and pleasure intertwined. The book makes the connection far more explicit: when Frank opens the box in The Hellbound Heart, he experiences the most intense, unbelievable orgasm he has ever experienced in his life. This is both prelude to and in conjunction with incredible, never-ending physical and emotional torture – for the Cenobites, the two sensations of pleasure and pain are inextricable. Their willingness to transcend all boundaries in order to experience the most extreme forms of sensual abandon is one shared, at least ostensibly, by the poor souls who open up the box and summon the monsters. You can’t make the argument that Frank didn’t know exactly what he was getting into when he opened the box: he wanted to push the conventional limitations of sensuality. That he couldn’t guess how far these explorations would take him is merely incidental to the Cenobites’ agenda. They are extremely enthusiastic sexual evangelists.

So, is Hellraiser another in a long line of AIDS metaphors? I think the Cenobites’ nature as unmistakably sexual creatures complicates rather than simplifies the question. Certainly, pursuing sexual gratification to its illogical conclusion leads to absolute degradation and physical abasement. But it’s not as strictly puritanical as that. There is a pro-safe-sex message nestled deep within the thorny heart of the film, wrapped in the fact that the Cenobites are creatures of extremity, alien to the concepts of moderation or restraint. Frank and Julia, the ghoulish lovers whose attempts to avoid the strict consequences of their transgression bring about their ultimate demise, are morally bankrupt. Julia, despite Frank’s obvious inhumanity, remains devoted to reclaiming their sexual freedom regardless of the cost. When Frank’s niece Kirsty opens the box out of morbid curiosity, on the other hand, there is no sensual element, merely infelicitous curiosity. What is needed is not to dismiss the sensual, but to moderate the sensual, to insert a judicious prophylactic between the natural impulse of sexual curiosity and the wretched consequences of imprudent impulse. The problem is not sex but the consequences of sex - a fine but important distinction.

Sex is dangerous and leads the viewer to strange places. The Cenobites are symbols of unbridled sexual energy turned dangerous and deadly – gleaming leather sewn into pale flesh, self-mutilation turning from expression into compulsion and from compulsion into ritual. Monsters should be repulsive and fascinating at the same time, grotesque and glamorous in equal measure. All the great movie monsters combine a strong visual with a distinctive personality: from the graceless exterior and childlike naiveté of James Whale’s original Frankenstein, through to the mute, silent hunter of Ridley Scott’s original Alien on through even to the (tasteless but certainly memorable) corny jokes of child-murderer Freddy Krueger. The Cenobites (especially Doug Bradley’s “Pinhead”) combine the appearance of physical abandon with the cruel implacability of aristocratic authority – authoritarian charm. They are every inch sexual beings, and as such they confront and threaten the most intimate, most carefully guarded caverns of human appetite and fear - not merely mortality, but something far more disturbing.

Fuck You, California

Hey, let's all be happy Barack won, at least for a minute. It's nice. I'm officially not pissed at Ohio anymore, and I'm ready to forgive Virginia for that whole secession thing. Florida, however - you got us in this mess to begin with, you've still got a ways to go to get off my shit list.

But before we let the warm & fuzzies overwhelm us, let's focus our attention on California. Now, I think I've mentioned this before, but I grew up in California. Spent the first two decades of my life in California. My parents still live in California, my best friends too. Hell, I'd like to return to California again myself, hopefully sooner rather than later.

But maybe not quite so much now. There are a number of reasons I am ambivalent about living in Massachusetts, but one reason I am proud to live here is that we're not afraid to give equal marriage rights to all citizens. I would have thought before yesterday that California, being almost as progressive as Massachusetts in most respects, would follow suit. But no.

It's not like I need to tell gay people to keep fighting - obviously they're going to do that whether or not they receive my papal imprimatur. But I think it behooves everyone else to keep up the invective. A while ago I heard one of these pro-discrimination wingnuts on the radio, talking about Prop 8, saying that all of the setbacks to their reactionary "movement" came as a result of the fact that the opposition succeeded in defining the struggle as essentially a civil rights struggle, which necessarily painted the "defenders of traditional marriage" into the unenviable rhetorical inevitability of being bigots. I thought this was an incredibly perceptive comment from an ideological perspective not exactly known for incredibly perceptive leaps. It's 100% true, although not in the way the undoubtedly intended: they are bigots, pure and simple. Talking around the problem or being conciliatory or trying to hew a path to moderation won't work. Racism and sexism didn't become topics of serious national conversation until minority and feminist groups had successfully redefined the terms of struggle in such a way as it became obvious to a growing majority that opponents of equal rights and equal protection were bigots and chauvinists. Sure, the argument became shrill, the opposition was fierce, but progress was made.

So, I say: use every opportunity possible to loudly decry the results, and don't hesitate to use the most incendiary language possible. It's a question of bigotry, pure and simple, accompanied by its usual lackeys, hatred and fear. Monday was a setback, true, but not a permanent one - time and inevitability is on the right side. Let's hope the state of California gets sued by every one of the 18,000 couples married to date. I'm not a lawyer but I know that it's going to get ugly - and I for one hope it does. With the wind at our back it's time to wage our own culture war - a war for common sense, decency and equality.

Shame the bigots, and shame the children of the bigots. Because if you cast a vote in favor of Prop 2 in California, you are a bigot. There is no way around this, and we are going to keep screaming it in your face until you realize it.

Your Belated Halloween Post