At his best, Clive Barker is a genre bender, adhering to the gothic tradition of hinging the realist to the fantastic through the use of florid, or at least lurid, language. His first short story collection, the Books of Blood, bent familiar story lines into disturbing pretzels of insanity. My favorite of these, In the Hills, the Cities, started with a relationship-building sex act and transformed into an expression of tragic insanity as thousands of people strapped to each other in the form of a giant stomp around the hills of Yugoslavia.
In 1987, Clive Barker combined a gothic romance, a family drama, and a Lovecraftian alternate dimension horror story. The stew is spiced with S&M fetishism, AIDS-fear, and even a dash of homosexuality. The final product became Hellraiser, which spawned eight sequels (with a 9th being filmed this year), 2 story collections, a litany of comic books, and, almost, a video game (due to content restrictions, they let the license run out and made Super 3D Noah’s Ark instead). Clive Barker has not participated in the series since the original, having sold his rights before the first movie was even released.
Julia Cotton (Claire Higgins) is the bored second wife of boring milquetoast Larry (Andrew Robinson). As they move into Larry’s childhood home, she spends her time yearning after Larry’s dark and dangerous thrill-seeking Frank (Sean Chapman) whom she had fucked on her wedding dress. Unfortunately, Frank was ripped apart in an alternate pleasure dimension with a puzzle-box gateway. It’s not too late! When Larry bleeds on the attic floor, Frank’s skeleton comes back to life and demands Julia to sacrifice unscrupulous men to rebuild her fantasy. As Larry slaves away at his job, Julia seduces random men in bars and kills them in the attic, rebuilding her lost love Frank.
Hellraiser hails more from the unnervingly disturbing side of horror cinema than the frightening and scary. And, thanks to the sultry, scruffy, deep-voiced, pouty-lipped Sean Chapman, it’s kind of hot. Right at the beginning, Barker has him shirtless and sweaty, lit by candlelight opening a puzzle box and then getting pulled apart by hooks. And that’s when he catches a steamy death sentence that he spreads through aberrant sexuality (seducing a married woman, and a married woman seducing more men who end up feeding Frank with their bodily fluids). When Larry’s daughter finds Sean’s porn stash (aka the puzzle box), she diddles with it a bit but manages to escape the plague.
What most people are fascinated by is the fantastic alternate dimension with gruesome humans morphed into Cenobites through their search for the highest pleasures through the deepest pains. Lead by Pinhead, the Cenobites travel around the dimension so they can pass on their knowledge to anybody who seeks it. They appear mutilated and pierced in a variety of non-normative places. Somehow there’s also an alternate dimension monster who roams the halls determined to murder anybody who dares trespass into his path. Sure, the special effects have really not aged well, but the story is demented enough to overcome the limitations of the movie’s budget.