The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (40 page)

Firstly, noir pictures are usually cheaply made, and the ones these critics were originally referring to were B movies. Secondly,
Inferno
mimics the visual style favored by so many noir films of that age, contrastive lighting being a specific example of this, used to objectify a protagonist’s psychological states of mind. In
Inferno
the lighting switches from soft and warm when Thorne is with his family, to hard and cold—and even shadowy—when he is on the streets. The noir setting is usually an urban one, highlighting the grimy underbelly of the city, in this instance the world of prostitution and drug dealing.

Minor characters are expected to be stereotypes: the weaselly snitch (Bernie); the loving and long-suffering wife (Melanie); the by the book partner (Tony); the whore (Daphne). The only female character who counteracts this is the
femme fatale
, an intelligent, active woman who manipulates the protagonist. Granted, one is not present as such in
Inferno
, but Dr. Gregory/Pinhead certainly manipulates Thorne by the use of these women.

Thirdly, the main protagonist himself is morally ambiguous. Thorne might be a cop, but he has more in common with Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade from
The Maltese Falcon
(John Huston, 1941) than he does with the clean cut heroes of other police dramas. For most of the movie he operates alone, keeping things from Tony. (He even comments, after Thorne has withheld information about the case, “Thanks for keeping me informed,
partner
!”) Only when he requires Tony’s help, or backup, does he ask him along—such as when they cover up evidence at the scene of Daphne’s murder or when they visit Parmagi. The rest of the time he is a loner, a drug addict with a cruel streak and a hidden agenda.

Thorne is a thoroughly dislikable character, but like all noir heroes he has one or two redeeming qualities. His love of children and their innocence is what compels him to catch the killer. “That child was still alive,” he says to himself as he looks through the missing children on his computer screen, “and if I could just keep it that way I knew it would be the best thing I could do in my lifetime.” This extends to devotion for his own daughter, signaled quite early on by a close-up of him pressing his face against hers while she sleeps, though the tilted angle warns that something is wrong with this picture. Thorne would be the perfect family man were it not for his warped views on marriage. “I believe in loyalty, fidelity,” he tells us as he picks up Daphne. “I understand the concept. My parents have been married for forty years. But I live in a different world. Most marriages fail, most men just leave; I know that would kill her. But if she doesn’t know, if doing this keeps me coming back, then who’s to say what’s right and what’s wrong?”

This constant use of the voice-over is our fourth film noir prerequisite. Most of the early noir films relied upon this device to convey the protagonist’s internal thoughts to the viewer and it is still used in many modern noir movies, from
Blade Runner
(Ridley Scott, 1982) to
Memento
(Christopher Nolan, 2000). We are privy to Thorne’s thoughts right from the beginning when he gets changed in the locker room: “Even as a little kid I was wanting to examine things closely. The world was full of riddles and mysteries and puzzles. I learned early on I had a gift for solving them.”

Whipping Boy Bernie, with make-up by Gary J. Tunnicliffes crew (courtesy Gary J. Tunnicliffe).

Closely linked to this is the use of flashbacks to tell the story, often facilitating the solving of the central mystery. As Thorne has commented, he is the ultimate solver of riddles, but the one he must solve now will explain what’s happening to him and where exactly he is—and only through the flashbacks to his boyhood can he do this. Not only that, time itself is looping, as it does in
Groundhog Day
(Harold Ramis, 1993). Thorne is reliving the same events over and over, waking up in the bathroom with the box, waking on the bed at home after visiting his parents. Such is the way
Inferno
has been constructed, the flashbacks are intermingled with real time, and vice versa.

Interlaced with this are the serial killer aspects, where Throne tracks down the killer using police procedural techniques, as Agent Starling (Jodie Foster) does in
The Silence of the Lambs
. But the film is closer in tone to
Se7en
, in that it offers a gimmick for the murders. In Fincher’s masterpiece it was, of course, the Seven Deadly Sins, whereas in
Inferno
it is the loss of innocence represented by the severed fingers. “Doesn’t this guy usually give us the finger,” deadpans Tony at the scene of Bernie’s demise. The calling card of this killer is to leave a child’s digit with each victim, thereby doubling the jeopardy—not only must Thorne stop the killings, but he must also rescue the little boy. As is common in so many slasher movies, the murderer wears a mask. Here it is a little different because the mask appears to be his own skin: like the Wire Twins, he has no eyes to speak of, just healed over holes where they should be. This is what a Cenobite would look like if he were to take up serial killing: the triumphant lick of Bernie’s cigar with a black elongated tongue is his proof of allegiance. Yet we’re also furnished with the reveal at the end, where the rubber of the mask is peeled back to show Thorne’s bloody face beneath, a trick worthy of a Scooby Doo mystery.

This peppering of surrealism is what draws the comparison to Lynchian crime narratives. The discovery of the ear in
Blue Velvet
, for example, is what leads Jeffrey (Kyle MacLachlan) inexorably into the seedy and disturbing world of gang lord Frank Booth (a chilling performance by Dennis Hopper). The death of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) in
Twin Peaks
opens up the door to another dimension inhabited by the backwards dancing dwarf, one-armed Mike and the evil spirit of Bob.

After finding the puzzle box at Jay Cho’s house, Thorne enters his own world of insanity, where characters and events are just slightly off kilter. When he visits Leon’s parlor, he sees the tattoo on the man’s back come alive. At first it is the Wire Twins, then a hand with a nail driven through it, an essential clue as to who is behind all this. But the one blatant homage has to be the encounter he has with Mr. Parmagi, a character straight out of Lynchian mythology. A gambler with six-shooters on his hips—“I have a license for these”—he is flanked by two karate-kicking cowboys, too weird even for fans of Derrickson’s work. “Even my friends who love the film give me shit about that,” he told
The Hellbound Web
. “It was the one thing about the movie that Bob Weinstein didn’t like. Oh, well. Live and learn.”
¹

But
Inferno
also lifts an idea from another recent crime film. The notion of an almost mystical underworld boss comes directly from Bryan Singer’s
The Usual Suspects
. In that movie we are told a camp fire tale about Keyser Soze, who apparently vanishes into thin air after committing his crimes. Instead, we have Bernie’s story about The Engineer (itself a reference to the monster from Barker’s original, and a new moniker for Pinhead). In it he describes how The Engineer leaves a severed head—Godfather style—in the bed of one of his enemies. The moral of this: “Hunt for the Engineer and the Engineer will hunt you.”

Ultimately, the punishment meted out for the crime is what Thorne is doing to himself. It is implied that he killed all the murdered people in real life (utilized again in
Hellraiser: Hellseeker
) and will have to live with this knowledge in his own personal Hell.

Loss of Innocence

The theme of childhood and innocence is one of two carried over from
Bloodline
,
Inferno
’s immediate predecessor. When Pinhead snatches John Merchant’s son, Jack, he says as he strokes his hair: “Young, unformed. Oh, what appetites I could teach him.” Later, when John comes to his rescue, the lead Cenobite once again alludes to this theme: “Oh, I understand. You love this boy, you have plans for him. Hopes and dreams, a whole imagined future where you love him and watch him grow.” In
Hellraiser V
Jack is substituted for Chloe, Thorne’s daughter. She is his hope for the future and, as such, represents a way for the Cenobites to hurt him most.

When he returns home at the end to find her and his wife strapped up to a torture pillar, dying of exposure, Thorne realizes that his dreams for the future are dying also. The twist is that by living the life he has, Thorne has himself destroyed these: the vision he is seeing only reflects what he has done to them both mentally. When his daughter asks him, “Daddy, are you home yet?” he replies, “No, sweetheart, I’m here for a little while then I’ve got to go.” Which initiates the plea: “When are you coming home?” The next time we see her, she’s crying that she wants her Daddy, but in his rush to get to the hospital and check on his mother, he completely ignores her. “Daddy’s gone,” Chloe’s mother says. This neglect will come back to haunt him at the end. Thorne might state that “Children are the only sacred thing left in this world,” although in his quest to save the child that’s missing he is forced to sacrifice his very own daughter.

When Thorne goes to see Dr. Gregory he enquires about the picture in the frame, a little girl who turns out to be the psychiatrist’s daughter, Melissa. “She’s the best thing in my life,” says Gregory. “I envy children. I envy their innocence” (forming a tangible association to
Bloodline
as we later discover Gregory
is
Pinhead). It is a sentiment Thorne readily agrees with. But he also seems willing to turn a blind eye to the loss of innocence of the children who frequent Bernie’s ice cream truck. (The use of this symbol itself is twisted.) Because Bernie is supplying him with narcotics—his “birthday present”—the detective lets him go about his business even though it is obvious he is a child molester. When he enquires about Daphne, Thorne adds that she’s a little too old for this man despite being barely out of her teens—and bear in mind this is a hooker Thorne has actually had sex with. The beating he gives his “whipping boy” cannot balance out such transgressions. These are contradictions that do not sit well together and give the character a schizophrenic edge. If children are sacred and it is Thorne’s job to protect them, can he really be so cold as to let a known pedophile roam the streets selling ice cream? The reminders of children throughout, playing in the park, crossing the road in the rain, serve only to enforce where his priorities should lie.

But the problems stem from his formative years. “What are you gonna do?” Tony asks as he’s off to see Gregory. “I’m gonna go lie down and talk about my childhood,” is the answer. Except Thorne does nothing of the kind. Not until he is forced to return “home” at the climax does he discover what his flashbacks are about—walking through his first bedroom (filled with icons of his innocence: toy planes hanging from the ceiling, a stuffed animal on his bed), seeing himself completing a jigsaw on the floor, and then ripping apart the idealistic memories he has of his mother and father. The child’s voice he keeps hearing calling out, “Help me,” is actually his own. The fingerprint from the last digit found matches his, and Thorne is at last confronted with the truth. He has been torturing
himself
. For each bad deed he his done, he has lost a part of that happy childhood. “This is the life you chose, Joseph,” says Pinhead, the judgmental words ringing somewhat hollow. “All the people you hurt, all the appetites you indulged. You have destroyed your own innocence, allowed your flesh to consume your spirit.” In
Inferno
the most significant loss of innocence is Thorne’s own.

Winning and Losing

The second theme to feed in from
Bloodline
is that of playing games. This is certainly true of the scacchic opening, with Thorne and his opponent—the Professor (the Vietnam name Jake Singer went by in
Jacob’s Ladder
)—sitting in the typical
Hellraiser
bargaining position: on opposite sides of the frame with the table in the middle. The quick cuts as they make their chess moves and hit the clock not only underscore the competitive nature of Thorne, but also indicate that games will figure largely in the plot. If one needed any more convincing, the setting itself is a basketball court with players still in the background. As if to emphasize his need to win, a call comes through on Thorne’s cell from Tony and he tells him, “We won by seven, but it should have been twenty.” It is not enough that he win, he must win outright—as he proves by trouncing the Professor: “You played right into my game....” It’s also one of the first things he tells his wife when he returns home. On asking how the game went, Thorne tells her, “We won.”

In the word games he plays with Tony, Thorne also likes to be the victor. Tony’s futile attempt to get the better of him (“What’s an eight letter word for slaughterhouse ... ?”—“Abattoir”) is met immediately by a much more complicated test. Thorne throws back, “What’s a ten letter word for your name?” and delights in watching him struggle. The next day Tony begs him, “What’s the answer?” and Thorne replies, “You’ve given up quicker than usual, Tony,” thus implying it is a regular ritual humiliation. Tony’s surname is in fact a palindrome—Nenonen—because it reads the same backwards as it does forwards. “Oh I get it,” says Tony, “it’s like the name Bob. That’s one, too, right?” But Thorne has no idea how pertinent his puzzle is, for he is the victim himself of a much larger palindrome. “It ends the same way as it begins,” he informs Tony—just like his own private Hell. Thorne will be destined to live out the same events over and over on a loop, forwards and backwards.