The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (43 page)

Apart from the time factor involved, akin to that of
Inferno
, there were other pressures on cast and crew, most notably the stunt with the car and the underwater scenes. Because of the low budget ($3 million) other ideas were discussed that could trigger Trevor’s hallucinations and headaches, such as a fall down the stairs or a bicycle crash, but Bota was adamant there be a jaw-dropping incident right at the very beginning that Trevor could keep flashing back to. “The car accident keeps interest.... It had to be a mechanism for Kirsty to apparently die and suddenly disappear, and Trevor to survive....”
¹¹
It would not prove easy.

In the script, the cause of the smash is a goat in the middle of the road—described as “the most exotic one available in Vancouver ... for scale [with] weird twisted antlers....’
¹²
; this would not only have linked in to the old woman on the bus, who we would later see knitting from the goat, but also the theme of Hell and the Devil. In reality it was simpler just to have Trevor nearly missing another vehicle then crashing over the bridge. Bota had one take to achieve this, but the car spun over and landed upside down, which would not have matched the underwater scenes with Kirsty and Trevor. Ingeniously, the director filmed the climax of the movie where the car is being lifted out of the water, then dropped the car in the water upright.

Much of the underwater filming was done in a tank, but Ashley Laurence—famously like Winona Ryder in her aquatic scenes for
Alien Resurrection
(Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997)—wasn’t very comfortable in the water. Bota had to film her scenes just under the surface, which meant that an effect where we see Kirsty’s drowning face in a vending machine had to be dropped. The rest of the footage was shot in water six feet deep, with the car cut in half and a bubble machine working overtime. “I think studios, producers and everyone else, as soon as they read ‘underwater,’ they start to panic,” said Gary Tunnicliffe. “Logistically, it’s a nightmare. Filmmaking is hard enough, but as soon as you’re in an environment that’s more dense than the air we breathe, it gets very, very complicated.”
¹³

Bota also ran into trouble because he was promised that the giant fans that could be heard in the basement of the mental institution would be switched off during the scenes between Lange and Trevor on their way to the morgue. When he came to shoot he found that they couldn’t be shut down, resulting in the actors having to do it as a scratch track then dub in their words afterwards. An asbestos pipe also broke in the abandoned hospital location, causing the production to be shut down for three days.

After Bota had handed in his tentative director’s cut, he asked Clive Barker if he would watch the movie with him and offer advice. “He was gracious enough to take a look at it,” said Bota, “and he actually liked the film.”
¹⁴
The director noticed Barker smiling wryly when references to his original came up (like the money/box exchange with the merchant). Barker made notes during the screening and Bota addressed as much of this as he could in post production, the main suggestion being to add some more graphic imagery. On Barker’s instruction, a cutaway was added during the morgue scene, for example, with some raw meat and mealworms. In general though, the creator of the franchise seemed pleased with the product this time—as did its star, Bradley, who thought it fitted in with the mythos’ ideology: “
Hellraiser
is very much an ‘ideas’ series. I’ve always been impressed over the years that that’s what the fan base has reacted to. The ideas in the
Hellraiser
films bubble under the surface. They rise to the top here and there, but they remain largely subtext.”
¹⁵

But the real test would be when the film was released, straight to video and DVD, to an eager viewing public in 2002.

23

ALL PROBLEMS SOLVED

The Surface of the Real

Like
Inferno
before it,
Hellseeker
is reliant on a surfeit of surrealistic elements to tell its story. Much more than its direct predecessor, it models itself on the narrative of films like
Jacob’s Ladder
and
Videodrome
. In both of these, something sets off a chain of bizarre events—in the former, Jake Singer (Tim Robbins) is wounded in Vietnam and in the latter, Max Renn (James Woods) watches a pirate videotape—and the main protagonist experiences waking hallucinations and time shifts. Singer starts to see faceless demons, on trains, driving cars, and Renn slips further into the body horror nightmares that Cronenberg is famous for, pushing his face into a flexible TV screen, pulling a tape out of a slot in his stomach....

In Trevor’s case, it is the car crash that triggers his hallucinations, which are superficially explained as morphine-related or connected to a head injury. The audience is even led to believe that he might be undergoing emergency brain surgery (“Over the course of this ... procedure,” says the surgeon, “I will be triggering memories, disrupting the unconscious, so our patient may experience some ... distress.”). Nevertheless, like Singer and Renn, he is anchored to that one central image of being in the car with his wife and crashing through the bridge into the lake. It is this that he keeps flashing back to time and again, enforced by all the water imagery in the movie (dripping water, Trevor washing in the sink, the puddles at the warehouse).

He first notices something strange is happening when he sees bowls of blood on the hospital ward. When he comes out of the brain operation hallucination, Trevor comments that, “It felt like a dream but it just seemed so...” “Real?” Allison finishes for him. Then Lange tells him that over a month has passed already since the accident, even though Trevor appears to have just woken up. As the film progresses there are more and more of these: Trevor sees the wet hand inside the vending machine, coughs up an eel, witnesses people being tortured at the police station and Lange splitting in two. He has a conversation with Allison in a corridor, but she suddenly disappears, and he is stabbed with a
Basic Instinct
-style ice pick by Sage only to wake up in an ambulance on his way to the hospital. “Remember what happened back there?” asks the paramedic. “Some woman,” replies Trevor, “on top of me, naked, trying to kill me...” “Ar ... yeah, not quite that good,” the ambulance man tells him. “You were riding on a bus and then you just collapsed on the floor.”

Not only that, wherever he goes a masked man—who Trevor believes might be the killer—seems to be stalking him, and he has a
Videodrome
-style encounter with a camera. Here he is watching himself and Gwen make love on-screen but there is nothing in front of the lens (in a neat trick shot, Trevor waves his hand in front of the camera and it appears on-screen), just before Gwen is suffocated with a plastic bag by unknown assailants. Later, neighbor Tawny is killed—Trevor finds her bloodied body tied to a chair—but the next day she answers her door alive and well.

A further misdirection is offered in the form of the images that crop up on Trevor’s computer at work, throwing back a QuickTime movie of his steamy romp with Gwen in the recreation room and a news clip with the headline: “Accident Leaves One Hospitalized, Another Missing.” This, coupled with Laser Pacific’s manipulation of the film color to give it those blue and green hues, might lead one to believe that Trevor is actually inside an artificial reality like the Matrix. Indeed, the office he works in is almost identical to that of Neo (Keanu Reeves) in the first film. (Neo goes on to have his own hallucinations of a living bug inside his stomach, his mouth being sealed over and his hand puncturing a liquid mirror.)

But there are clues as to what is really happening imbued in the narrative. Allison’s comment, “We’re still going to have to run a few more tests, to see if we can ‘
pin
point’ what’s causing your headaches,” right at the start, followed swiftly by Lange telling Trevor, “You look like Hell warmed over” should have rung warning bells enough. If not, then perhaps the Lament Configuration-style clock on the wall in Trevor’s apartment, plus the detective who practices origami and makes a puzzle box, might offer some insight ... or even the torture that’s going on at the police station or in the morgue.

The main giveaways, however, are the flashbacks Trevor has when he sees the calling card “pinned” to his board at work with the legend “All Problems Solved” printed on it. This transports him into several disjointed recollections about a warehouse where the employees sit at sewing machines, stitching human flesh, and a merchant stands behind a counter telling him, “I can see into your soul.” It is where the transaction took place and Trevor bargained for the puzzle box, which he fully intended to give Kirsty. It changes shape from round to square as it rolls across the counter and the old man reveals, “It is a means to break the surface of the real.... Once you have chosen to cross the threshold, there is no returning.”

So, Trevor is the architect of his own hallucinations, and we shouldn’t be surprised when Pinhead appears at the acupuncturist’s to thrust a lengthy needle through his throat, then again in a mirror and in a puddle reflection (walking
under
the water in direct opposition to that other religious figure). It is Pinhead who resolves the enigma at the end, in his recounting of the deal he struck with Kirsty: how she killed Trevor’s lovers and his best friend as an offering to Pinhead, and finally her husband, too—shooting him in the head and causing the initial accident. If anything, it is Trevor’s recollections of Kirsty, presented as soft focus flashbacks, that are the fantasy. Their life as he remembers it was a sham, something Pinhead confirms: “Welcome to the worst nightmare of all, reality.”

But there is one last surreal moment before the end, when the characters who have populated his Hell appear in slightly different guises, just as they do in
The Wizard of Oz
(Victor Fleming, 1939). Allison and Ambrose aren’t doctors at all, but coroners here to examine Trevor’s corpse, fishing the eel out of his airway. (In the script the ambulance man was the one who drove Trevor away, but this scene was cut.) Only Detective Lange appears to be the same, although there is no sign of his “partner,” Givens. One might extrapolate from this that others featured in Trevor’s nightmare had dual, or even triple roles, the nurse, for instance, a Cenobite, as is the surgeon. Pinhead might well have been the one performing the brain operation, and even the merchant selling Trevor the Lament Configuration (actually portrayed by Bradley). Nothing in
Hellseeker
is as it first appears, and that is the beauty of this complex story.

See Anything you Like?

Hellseeker
taps into the voyeurism aspect of
Hellbound
and simultaneously expands on this, adding another dimension. Whereas Channard’s observation of his patients was limited solely to looking through doorways or two-way mirrors,
Hellraiser VI
takes this concept into the twenty-first century. There are obvious references to people watching using surveillance devices. At work, after he has walked down the corridor and drawn stares from his fellow employees, Trevor is warned by Bret, “Hills have eyes, remember?” and he points to the closed circuit TV camera in the corner of the room. Gwen makes a similar statement after their fumble in the recreation area: “Now get some fucking work done,” she says nodding up at another camera, “we’re watching you.” We’re then shown an electronic image of Trevor from the camera’s point of view This is the means by which his indiscretion has been recorded and broadcast to his computer console, an even more twisted version of Orwell’s
1984
(1949). As we see more of the movie, it becomes clear that the people doing the watching are, obviously, the Cenobites. When characters repeat the phrase, “We’re all here for you, Trev,” what they really mean is they’re here to make him remember as the Cenobites observe him like some animal in a zoo. As Pinhead tells him, “You were an interesting study.”

One of the new Cenobites for
Hellseeker
was Bound. Model painted by Dan Cope and sculpted by Chris Elizardo for CD Publications (courtesy Dan Cope).

Moreover, if one’s own Hell relates to personal preferences, then this voyeurism is a reflection of Trevor’s obsession with videoing everything. When he wants to recall Kirsty he has to bring down the box full of tapes from the closet and watch them. One in particular shows him looking at himself in a mirror, holding the camera, as if to show him who he really is. It’s their anniversary and Kirsty is urging him to put down the camera and come to bed. “God forbid you should let one event go unfilmed,” she says. Which will ultimately be his ruination.