When one thinks of horror, the long series of films which began primarily in the nineteen-eighties come to mind almost immediately: Halloween (yes, I know the original was in fact 1978, but close enough), Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm St. and tonight’s feature, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. Hellraiser is not as scary as I would have imagined it would be, and perhaps this is a sign of the point to which society has disintegrated into banality since 1987, though I have my doubts about that.
Hellraiser is part of a distinct drama based horror genre which seems to aim more at telling a story which involves some kind of horror as the driving force of characters’ motivations as opposed to horror for the sake of horror à la Eli Roth. In this case, the central theme of Hellraiser seems deeper than some might give it credit because, despite what the DVD cover and posters indicate, this is a story about human desire first and foremost. Everyone has it, and everyone will pay a certain price for it, depending on how far they want to go with it. If you choose to go outside the known worldly pleasures, you must open a possessed puzzle box which, Clive Barker may or may not have been using to allude to the idea of leaving the metaphorical box of sociological norms. The puzzle box summons daemon like creatures called Cenobites who will lead you to new pleasures and pains which, according to one of the anti-heroes, Frank, are ‘indistinguishable.’
We begin the film where Frank has done just that and, after a short stay in an alternate universe, escapes back to our dimension. In order to entirely retake his human form, however, he needs the blood of other human beings who will be brought to him by an ex-lover and wife of his brother whom he has convinced to help him. He must also regain his human form before the Cenobites he escaped from find him. In this way, along with a number of side plots, Hellraiser is surprisingly complex and for the most part, the story works. The characters are interesting, their motivations are understandable and the first hour or so has all of the elements of a Shakespearian tragedy.
Hellraiser is not perfect, however, and it falls on its face almost exactly where one might expect it to begin to pick up. When the Cenobites show up, the story begins to shift focus; in the beginning the story seemed to mostly revolve around Julia and her decision to help Frank. This part of the film was amazing until it changes entirely over to Frank’s niece, Kirsty who follows a much more pedestrian and expected pattern of the young girl who cries a lot and runs away from Cenobites only to figure out the key to a mystery which no one else could put together just in time to save her own skin.
The Cenobites are not nearly as interesting as they seem when you are in the video store, either. While they are creepy, and absolutely necessary to make the story work, they are by no means any more important than any other character. In retrospect, though I have never seen any of the films, it is funny who survives in cultural memory and who falls away because Pinhead has become known as a pop icon of horror, even though he is of no particular importance in the film- that is to say, no more than any other Cenobite, and yet the others never really made it big. Just Pinhead.
My major gripe is that there also seem to be some fairly large continuity errors. The whole regeneration of life through blood thing seems to work in exact proportion to how fast Clive Barker feels like advancing the story at any given moment and in some cases, fresh blood seems to have little to no effect, like the life bar of a bad video game. Also I’m not sure to entirely understand this film’s ending. I mean for some reason we pass an entire hour and a half trying to evade an otherworld evil which seems to condemn you to a never ending dimension of sufferance if you should be so foolish as to open their gate. Fair enough, but then why is it that the movie resolves itself by simply putting the puzzle box back the way you found it? Why didn’t Frank and all of those before him do it? I was almost waiting for a last second reappearance of Frank back in the other dimension who would say ‘Oh! Is that what I was supposed to do!’ It all just seems a little too easy and anticlimactic.
Also, towards the end the Cenobites return the same way they did in the beginning of the movie. Frank yells out’ What’s going on!’ Wait a minute! What do you mean what’s going on? The same thing that went on when the most horrible and painful moment of your life occurred, the entire reason you have been killing people for an entire hour and you honestly have no idea what is going on, even though it is the exact same images as before. In fact, I am not even sure they bothered to go film those scenes a second time, they very well may have been the same clips from the beginning of the movie.
Like a lot of horror movies, it appears that writers and directors are rather good at setting up difficult situations to escape, but are nowhere nearly as talented as resolving the very problem they set forth. Nevertheless, Hellraiser is indeed for the most part a Halloween and horror classic that fits in with all the good late night pretend to be scared films for the season, though I stop short of calling it timeless. A hint to anyone who ever wishes to make a film with timeless quality: do not use fashion trends of the moment. They might look cool on opening weekend, but as Hellraiser teaches us, what was considered to be beautiful in 1987 makes a woman look about as silly as Pinhead in 2009.
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