The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (29 page)

A more modern spin is put on this in
Hell on Earth
, when Elliott uses television to talk to Joey—fitting, as she works in the TV industry. He does this through the set in her bedroom and the monitor where she works. The latter comes just after Joey has watched the tape of Kirsty that Channard made. This in itself is communication through time—and a passing of the baton from one heroine to another. “I don’t know what else to call them,” Kirsty informs Joey through the blue-gray tinted screen, “Demons ... demons live in the box; it’s a gateway to Hell.” Her hand movements show Joey how to work the Lament Configuration, information that will prove vital later: “It kind of opens itself. Your fingers move and you learn. It wants to open, that’s the thing.” Then Elliott appears in a haze of static to reinforce her words. “She’s telling the truth, Joey,” he cautions. Like the ghosts of
Poltergeist
(Tobe Hooper, 1982), Elliott is forced to choose an up-to-date piece of technology to commune. In a similar way to Carol Anne (Heather O’Rourke) in that movie, Joey will have to pass through a barrier in order to meet the ghosts on the other side. But like the TVs in David Cronenberg’s surreal cult classic,
Videodrome
(1983), the recorded images have much more sinister overtones.

Joey’s unplugged TV shows her reports of mayhem from the Boiler Room club, which spur her to go. But she calls Doc first to meet her there. He flips through the channels but cannot find the report she means (only a quick glance of Anthony Hickox being interviewed and a clip of
Waxwork
). This is why she feels so guilty about his death, because
she
sent him to the club, all of which makes the next scene so much more compelling. When Joey stops to rest in the street during the climactic chase sequence her likeness appears on the multiple TV screens behind her in a shop window. Just as she was at the start of the movie, Joey is framed by Doc’s viewfinder, trapping her in the square. Now the camera is housed in Doc’s head, replacing his right eye, a cable running from it into his chest. The Pseudo Cenobite uses his zoom to kill an innocent man passing by—and he is somehow also able to fire projectiles at the police cars out of the lens. Yet he is not the only one to employ technology for killing.

C.D. Cenobite is the epitome of technology used for evil in
Hellraiser III
. Replica figure by NECA (courtesy NECA; photograph credit: Nicolle M. Puzzo).

Pinhead utilizes moving piston parts from Monroe’s beloved motorbike to slay him initially, implanting them into the side of his head. Joey then sees the club owner hanging from the ceiling on his bike, dead. At the end he is brought back as another Pseudo Cenobite, the pistons pumping in and out, imitating the Japanese film
Testsuo
’s fusions of man and machine (Shinya Tsukamoto, 1988). “Relax, baby. This is better than sex,” he promises Joey, flicking his tongue in and out of his mouth. The DJ who works in Monroe’s club suffers a similar fate. One of the victims of Pinhead’s massacre, his own spinning C.D.s hover above his head, then imbed themselves firmly into his skull and mouth. Pinhead subsequently brings him back as the C.D. Cenobite (a particular fan favorite) with the compact discs still protruding, a uniform distance apart. These are the weapons he uses to murder people, with a robotic whirring sound.

Hellraiser: The Next Generation

Though there are no actual family ties between the characters in
Hell on Earth
—if anything one of the few things they have in common is their very lack of family connections—they can very easily be read as the antecedents of the characters in the first two movies. Joey is able to take on Kirsty’s role in the series as the female protagonist, almost “becoming” Kirsty for the purposes of this story. And there are overwhelming parallels between the two women. Both have been left fatherless, though Joey’s loss happened much earlier in life. Both are independently minded, with a knack for thinking on the spot and getting themselves out of trouble. Both have been drawn into the mythos by accident. But, perhaps most importantly, both have been given young charges to look after. In Kirsty’s case it was Tiffany, her “sister” and guide in Hell. Joey’s lost soul is Terri, who will guide her to the club, and eventually to Hell on Earth.

They, too, could be described as sisters. Terri looks up to Joey and even unconsciously emulates her. Terri’s behavior after she meets Joey definitely changes; we would not have seen her reading books before, and the investigation into the Pillar of Souls gives the young girl a taste of what Joey does for a living. She tells Monroe on the phone with hope in her heart, “Joey’s going to get me a job at the TV station, and I’m meeting a lot of new people.” Even so, there are moments when Joey adopts a more maternal position. It’s obvious she disapproves of Terri’s smoking, saying, “I’m trying to quit,” when she’s offered a cigarette. She takes over in the kitchen after Terri makes a mess, and the expression on her face when Terri is about to break into the Pyramid gallery is one of concern—even though it will get her the answers she wants. This is why we get a sense that Terri is actually leaving home when she departs from Joey’s. Disappointed by her surrogate mother’s behavior, she retreats into the arms of the bad boy lover, a scenario familiar to many parents with teenage daughters or sons.

For his part, J.P. Monroe’s resemblance to Frank is uncanny. He could almost be one of the bastard children Frank Cotton must have fathered in his travels around the world. Monroe sports the same dark hair and good looks, the same hedonist tendencies, and the same attitudes towards women. Like Frank, Monroe has bedded countless women over the years and none of them have meant a thing to him. He has used them for his own gratification, then told them to get out, just like he does with Sandy. “Who do you think you are?” she says. “I’m J.P. Monroe, right? You stupid little bitch. Gimme back my shirt and get the fuck out of my life.” But, like his predecessor, he has to turn on the charm when he wants something from a particular woman. In this film, Terri stands in place of Julia, and Monroe is able to talk her into returning to his apartment. The difference is, he doesn’t ask her to kill for him so he can be whole again. He needs to kill
her
.

If we are even the slightest bit unsure about his origins we need only listen to his supplication when trying to persuade her to join him by the statue. “Come to Daddy,” he sneers. And his phallic weapon? Not the flick-knife that Frank preferred, but a large silver pistol. Terri once again becomes the Julia figure when she takes her revenge on Monroe, rolling him closer to the pillar so that Pinhead can feed on him. “Hell hath no fury,” Pinhead utters, “except for a woman scorned.” Like Julia in
Hellbound
, Terri delivers her reprisal for all she has endured at the hands of her very own Frank. She may not take as much delight in it, crying as she struggles to kick the prone body, but one cannot help making the comparison.

In another reading altogether, Pinhead himself becomes the Frank figure. Imprisoned in the Pillar of Souls, just as Frank was trapped in Hell, he waits for someone to set him free. This occurs when Monroe, alone in the club and hearing a noise inside the statue, reaches inside one of its crevices (a scene, Hickox says, which was modeled on the tree beast test from
Flash Gordon
[Mike Hodges, 1980] where novice Peter Duncan has to play a form of Russian Roulette with Timothy Dalton’s Baron). He is bitten by a rat for his trouble, the creature’s own revenge for what happened to its cousin in the first movie, when Frank sliced it open with his knife. Here it is Monroe’s blood that wakes Pinhead, so in this sense J.P. is an imitation of poor Larry. But when Pinhead is talking him into supplying more flesh and blood, Monroe becomes Julia, sweet-talked into doing what the more charismatic figure demands.

It could be said that Elliott is the true father figure in the film—at least to Joey. There is an ambiguous admiration between them, love possibly, which also perfectly mirrors what was happening with Kirsty and Larry. Hickox has stated outright that there’s more than a hint of this in their relationship:

Elliott manages to bring her to his domain by entering her psychic level. Because she is concentrating on her career, Joey does not have any love interests. So Elliott offering her the task of fighting Pinhead is probably the closest thing to a love interest. He comes along and offers her responsibility, something which people have not been doing because she is a woman. In the end, he makes Joey feel useful.
⁵

But it’s much more than this. It is appropriate that Hickox should say that Elliott “enters” Joey’s psychic level. He connects with her on a level no one has ever done: in her mind, in her dreams, the kind of intimacy only lovers share. He respects her; he respects her abilities. This is why in the earlier draft of the script, when Pinhead and Elliott merge, Joey is taken as their bride. It is a desire that spills over into Pinhead’s consciousness as well.

If we are to read Joey as a replacement for Kirsty, then that longing is now transferred to Joey. Pinhead recognizes the similarities himself when they first meet face to face at the club. “I’m here to stop you and send you back to Hell,” she says, which straightaway sounds very familiar. “Oh, spirited? Oh, good, oh,
very
good,” he finally says to cap off their exchange. Just like old times, the pleonastic banter, the sexual tension. Pinhead and Kirsty played an identical cat and mouse game in the first two movies, but he gets closer than ever before with Joey, even to the point of wrapping her up in leather bonds and suspending her from the ceiling. One imagines that Pinhead would be anything but a gentle lover.

Finally, the Pseudo Cenobites, though the offspring of Pinhead in
Hell on Earth
, are more correctly the progeny of the three main Cenobites from
Hellraiser
and
Hellbound
. Immature and, as Pinhead points out, over eager, they might be a shadow of his former underlings, but they do correlate to them quite closely. Just as Chatterer preferred the hands on approach—grabbing Kirsty and silencing her in the first film—so too do C.D. and Doc. And Barbie, comparable to Butterball in size and shape, crashes through walls just like his forefather smashed through the debris of that collapsing house on Lodovico Street. Terri, who also looks suspiciously like the Female Cenobite, is just as eager to get Joey to play as her “mother” was to entice Kirsty. While the former ran her hook along the wall and made it bleed, the Terri Cenobite runs her hands over Joey’s body and burns her with lit cigarettes. Their demise is also akin to that of Barker’s Cenobites. When the puzzle box is solved at the building site, it blasts them with a beam of light—blue this time instead of yellow—which causes them to vanish.

Alter Egos

The last theme to consider is that of the alter-ego. Every main character, and some of the peripheral ones, in
Hellraiser III
has a dual identity. The Pinhead and Elliott scenario exemplifies this in the most extreme way possible, by splitting one personality into two. Elliott and Pinhead are two sides of the same coin and can’t—or shouldn’t—exist in isolation. Without Elliott, Pinhead is even more terrifying than he was before and less in control of his anger. His performance at the Boiler Room proves that he cannot restrain himself (indeed, he doesn’t want to), and his lack of patience when dealing with Joey is telling. Elliott is therefore Jekyll to Pinhead’s Hyde, a necessary part of him that needs to be returned.

Terri, Monroe, the Bartender, D.J. and Doc are all transformed into Pseudo Cenobites, monsters that reflect what they once were. Like Channard before them, their Cenobitization contains some element of their human selves. For example, we see the barman mixing drinks behind the bar at the Boiler Room, while a sudden gush of flame erupts behind him. This translates into him spitting fire from his mouth and throwing cocktail bombs. The others we have already discussed, all changed but with something linking them to their former selves, whether it be CDs, a camera, motorbike parts or cigarettes.

Joey’s alter ego is her dream-self. The Joey that struggles to make it through the day in the real world becomes a vision in white gliding through this other reality. Her personality changes when she makes this transition, regressing mentally to a young child (yet another trait she shares with Kirsty). But what of the means she uses to travel to Elliott’s plane of existence? Like the Lament Configuration being disguised as a puzzle box, this particular doorway is the window in her apartment. Obviously based on the mirror doorways from Cocteau’s
Orphée
, and continuing the trend of putting hands through mirrors set in
Waxwork
, some credit must also be given to Lewis Carroll’s famous tale,
Through the Looking Glass
, from 1871.
⁶
The thematic likeness between Joey and Alice is plain. As Camille Paglia observes in her introduction to a reprinted 1990s illustrated version: “On her travels over meadows and through the woods, Alice never turns into Huck Finn, a smudged vagabond scamp. She remains the well-bred young lady, her crisp apron and pinafore undisheveled even when she falls into a pool of tears or rockets up and down, bizarrely changing size.”
⁷