The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (17 page)

Tiffany is the other soul Kirsty helps and frees in lieu of her father. She is the only person who manages to get through to the young girl. In return for her aid as a guide, Kirsty will help her to become more confident and even recover her power of speech. “Look, we’re alone in all of this, and we have to help each other. Yeah?” Kirsty says. It is a bargain of sorts—well, this is
Hellbound
—but it is one of mutual consideration and benefit. This is the only offer of help that actually works, because there is support on either side. All the others fail because they are misguided or one-sided. Browning’s plea for help leads to his spectacularly bloody death; Frank’s supplication was—as always—grounded in deceit; and Tiffany’s mother
definitely
asks the wrong doctor to help her daughter.

Channard’s response to Julia’s “Help me” request is to provide her with fresh bodies from his underground cells. Paralleling Frank’s actions in the original, she uses Channard to make her whole again, finally providing her with skin. The pact they have made is for Julia to be his escort. But like Frank before him, Channard gets much more than he bargained for when Julia hands him over to her master, Leviathan, to be remade as a Cenobite. Though this might be interpreted as a betrayal, chiefly because the transformation process is so painful—both to endure and to watch—Julia is only giving him what he wanted. Furthermore, he has already indicated this himself. When Julia gives him a chance to back out and asks, “You’re sure this is what you want?” he confirms, “It’s what I’ve always wanted.” His own evil, manipulative nature is given an outlet in Hell and he can be the creature he always wanted to be—powerful, sadistic, unstoppable. As he says himself when he comes out of the Cenobitization chamber, “And to think I hesitated.” This is the only person Channard sought to free: the ultimate selfish act of a man who has devoted every waking minute to his own needs. For Frank, this was grounded in pleasure, but Channard’s weakness is knowledge—of the labyrinths of the mind, of the occult, and ultimately of his true self. His eventual downfall is not Julia’s doing, it is his own—attempting to kill Tiffany when his hand-tentacles get stuck in the ground, ripping his head in two.

Of the journeys Kirsty and Channard take into the Underworld, hers is the more successful. She may not have found her father or brought him back, but she did save the Cenobites from themselves and Tiffany from a life spent in solitude piecing together puzzles. Channard, even though he was given what his heart desired most, squandered the power and ended up annihilating himself in the process.

Mazes and Monsters

The Orpheus Legend isn’t the only Greek myth
Hellbound
draws upon. In its depiction of Hell with the Channard Cenobite at its core, it also closely adheres to the tale of the Minotaur in the Maze. This begins with the story of Minos who, before he rose to power as King of Crete, prayed to the god Poseidon to send him a white bull as a sign of his favor. Minos had promised to sacrifice the bull, but instead kept it and sacrificed one of his own. As a result, Poseidon made Minos’ wife Pasipha fall in love with the bull and the offspring of their union was a half-bull, half-man creature. Kept in a labyrinth built by the architect Daedalus and offered sacrifices, it was eventually defeated by the hero Theseus with the aid of Daedalus’ daughter Ariadne, whom he had fallen in love with. She promised to provide the means to escape from the maze if he agreed to marry her, and, using thread, he was able to find his way out again.

For
Hellbound
we can easily substitute the Channard Cenobite for the Minotaur, the beast at the heart of this hell feeding on sacrifices of his patients. In this reading, Kirsty becomes Theseus, aided by Tiffany’s Ariadne. (
Hellbound
has no real love interest, so friendship takes its place.) Together they are able to defeat the monster and find their way out of the maze—much to the chagrin of the monster’s mother (Julia) and father (Leviathan).

You Wanted to See

Another important theme in
Hellbound
is that of voyeurism. Just as Frank was the supreme hedonistic thrill-seeker, Channard is easily his equal in terms of his desire not only to know, but to
see
. The very first time we encounter him, he is peering into a human brain, looking into the most private depths of the mind. The rewritten speech he gives goes:

The mind is like a labyrinth, ladies and gentlemen, a puzzle. And while the paths of the brain are plainly visible, its ways deceptively apparent, its destinations are unknown. Its secrets still secrets. And if we are honest, it is the lure of the labyrinth that draws us to our chosen field, to unlock those secrets. Others have been there before us and have left signs. But we, as explorers of the mind, must devote our lives and energies to going further, to tread the unexplored corridors in the hope of finding, ultimately, the final solution. We have to see, we have to know.

It prefigures beautifully the unseen and unexplored corridors he will soon be venturing down in Hell.

Channard’s underground cells, where he keeps the particularly gruesome cases, come with their own slots in the doors that he can peer through—and we, too, are given a sample of what’s inside. Later, when he is walking with Julia along those corridors of Hell, we can see the similarities between his cells and the private purgatories prisoners are kept in. Channard once again has the opportunity to look through an opening and sees male and female figures writhing with a mixture of pleasure and pain. In a scene dropped from the second draft Channard was also to be granted a glimpse of Browning trapped in another cell at this point, the insects still crawling all over him.

Channard loves to witness the anguish of others, but always surreptitiously, without them knowing. It is his very own secret self. In contrast, Kyle—who is everything Channard isn’t—kind, sympathetic and helpful—almost throws up when he is forced to watch Browning’s demise from behind a curtain in Channard’s house. A couple of glances are all he can take, and even these disturb him so much he has to escape as soon as possible. By the time he returns to the house, he has built up some nerve and compels himself to look inside the slaughter room, ignoring the warning from Julia that, “It’s just terrible.” And this curiosity will lead to his death when, after he sees the corpses, Julia kisses him in a parody of the kiss she and Frank once shared.

The “seeing” motif recurs with other characters as well. The first shot of Kirsty is a close-up of her eye, pulling out and slowly rotating as if to emphasize that she has already seen far too much, but there is more to come. Julia, also, when we first see her on the mattress, is identified by her eyes. Filmed in reverse, the stark whiteness against the red of her skinless body is both surreal and potent. Like Kirsty, she is no longer the person she once was; Julia, too, has seen things no one should ever have to see, the sights Pinhead spoke of in the first
Hellraiser
. Even when she is wrapped in bandages, it is her eyes that stand out, and she can’t help raising Channard’s finger to one orb, trailing it through the blood beneath.

Even the Chatterer Cenobite receives a pair of eyes in the time between our earliest meeting with him and our last. This was meant to be bridged by a scene showing him being altered, but as confusing as it is for viewers it does visually compound what the Cenobites go through when Kirsty tells them the truth, opening their eyes metaphorically to their past.

And it is not just the Cenobites who are shown a reflection of who they actually are. Mirrors may not be a means to travel to the Underworld, as they are in Cocteau’s
Orphée
, but they do feature heavily in
Hellbound
. Julia smashes the oval mirror in Channard’s lounge when she sees herself for the first time (itself a re-creation of the Princess smashing a looking glass when Cégeste dies in
Orphée
). Is it because she has lost her beauty or because the outside now more closely resembles the inside? Once dressed and mummified, she is able to cope better with her reflection, recognizing her potential as a sexual being again, a scene that was initially written with her standing and looking at herself in a full-length mirror in Channard’s bedroom.

It is via a mirror in Hell that Kirsty realizes she has been duped into traveling there. On a dressing table she sees a repetition of the words her father supposedly wrote on the wall, “I am in Hell, Help me,” but this time they are penned in lipstick. The association is clear: that it was the womanizer Frank who called to her using the mirror. Only now it shows her who he really is, if she didn’t know already.

Tiffany is also the victim of voyeurism, and of mirrors. Kirsty is the first to watch her through a crack in the door and is startled when Kyle comes up behind her. Yet one can sense there is no malice there, more a sadness or the recognition of a kindred spirit, as we will see when we talk about their relationship in greater detail. More sinister—as is to be expected—is Channard’s observation of Tiffany through a two-way mirror while she solves the Lament Configuration. Watching safely behind a wall, he and Julia expose the girl to the dangers of the Cenobites and Hell. There is even a close-up of Tiffany’s eyes as she finally slots the pieces into place, indicating that she will soon see what both Kirsty and Julia have seen before her. Fortunately, the demons make the distinction that it is not Tiffany who has summoned them. “Wait,” says Pinhead. “No. It is not hands that call us. It is desire.” He might just as well have said “eyes,” for Tiffany has no wish to see these sights. Unlike Channard.

Having already been subjected to voyeuristic attentions, Tiffany then finds herself in the carnival from Hell, complete with hall of mirrors. Here a sightless clown juggles with his own eyes, the balls plopping down into his bloody hands, the holes in his head weeping red tears. Not only is Tiffany unwilling to see the horrors of Hell, but there is also something that she doesn’t want to see from her own past: a black-gloved hand over her mother’s mouth and the last word Tiffany ever spoke, screaming for her mother. The mirrors throw back a reflection of a baby stitching up its own mouth, before the clown appears again and mirrors shatter. The mirrors can see who she really is, what has happened to her, and why she remains the way she is. It is something she must come to terms with before she’ll be allowed to leave.

Leviathan is Lord of the labyrinthall seeing, all knowing (courtesy Eric Gross).

Channard, meanwhile, is shown his own reflection by Leviathan rather than by a mirror. The black light emanating from Julia’s god has the power to delve deep into his very core, dragging out incidents he would rather keep hidden, such as the fact it was he who attacked Tiffany’s mother. Leviathan is, therefore, an all-seeing, all-knowing deity, but it also coerces Channard to look within himself and face the reality of who, or what, he is. Leviathan strips away the pretense and gives him what he wants, the ability to see beneath the flesh. Only by bringing this monster to the surface can it turn him into a true Cenobite.

As Atkins clarified in an interview: “I think the implication is more that you get something that relates to what you wanted or something that relates to what you were or are, so it is the fact that Channard has
been
the great puppeteer, the brain surgeon, that is relevant here.... So each person’s Cenobitization, let us assume, is personally relevant to whatever it was that drove them there in the first place.”
²
This must surely explain why certain tentacles sprouting from the palms of his hands have eyes on the end, how he is able to find Kirsty and Tiffany wherever they go. The great voyeur has been furnished with the ability to truly
see
for the first time in his life.

Family Reunions

It could be argued that the family connections in
Hellbound
are nowhere near as critical as they are in
Hellraiser
. There are other plotlines to follow, there is more in terms of special effects and sheer spectacle. Director Randel himself has spoken out about this, stating that the scenes with the Cottons slow up the pace of the movie considerably.
³
To him they are requirements to get out of the way as quickly as possible so he can proceed with the next action set piece. But one cannot ignore the threads left hanging from the initial film which were begging to be tied up. It is why we are given not one but two recaps from
Hellraiser
; the first in a pre-credits montage and the second when Kirsty is relating the backstory to Channard and Kyle. It should be clear by now that there would be no storyline
at all
if Kirsty wasn’t returning to Hell for her father. The fact that she doesn’t find him is, for her, disappointing, but does allow her to settle things once and for all with Julia and Frank.