The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (45 page)

The Surgeon 1:1 scale head. Replica sculpted by Ian Frost (courtesy Ian Frost).

Kage Alan of Modamag.com felt cheated by the cuts made to the movie: “While it’s fantastic to see Kirsty again, the director didn’t want to alienate viewers who weren’t familiar with the
Hellraiser
series by giving too much exposition about events in previous installments, so he cut much of those sequences out. Personally, I find this extremely insulting. The people who are watching this 5th sequel are the ones who have stuck with it all along, even through the unforgivable
Inferno
, so why alienate us?”

Still, the reaction seemed to be in favor of
Hellseeker
, certainly over
Inferno
, in spite of any similarities. Of course, by this time Bota was already hard at work not just on the ensuing film, but on the next two
Hellraiser
films.

26

DEADER CERTAINTY

Aping
Inferno
’s genesis somewhat,
Hellraiser 7
began life as a pre-existing script, this time written by Neal Marshall Stevens. Stevens’ first writing credit was on the TV show
Monsters
in 1988. From here he went on to direct
Stitches
(2000), about an evil sorceress who sews together the body parts of her victims, and then to write Dimension’s
Thir13een Ghosts
(Steve Beck, 2001). Stevens’
Deader
script was sold to Dimension as a stand-alone, an intriguing horror story about the boundaries between life and death. In it, we’re introduced on page one to a feisty reporter called Amy Klein, who works for
The Underground
, a weekly newspaper in the
Village Voice
mode. The poster outside their offices promotes her most recent story “How to Be a Crack Whore.” She’s dressed all in black, with black sunglasses, except for a white complexion “so translucently pale that it bespeaks only the most rare and grudging familiarity with daylight,”
¹
so much so that she is described sarcastically by her editor, Bud, as an “Angel of Light.”
²
He plays her a low resolution tape he’s received set in a dingy apartment where people drift in and out of frame and the narration is provided by a girl of Chinese descent called Marla Chen, Official Deader Archivist.
³
Amy watches as Sheila—a new recruit—mouthing the mantra that she “isn’t real,” lies on a mattress, puts a gun against her head and pulls the trigger. Their leader, Winter, kisses a Deader called Carl, who then straddles her and apparently brings her back to life in a non-penetrative sexual orgasm of heavy breathing.

Colleague Larry believes the tape is a hoax, but Amy takes the story, the return address on the video envelope leading her to Marla’s apartment. There’s a rancid smell coming from inside, so she gets the super to break down the door because he doesn’t have a key. The super’s unwilling to come in, so Amy steps inside—to find Marla’s dead body. She’s hanged herself on the toilet with her own bootlaces. Next to the sink is another manila envelope that looks like it, too, has a tape inside. Amy tells the super to go and phone for the police, while she enters the bathroom and grabs the video. Searching the flat, Amy finds a stiletto knife and photos of another Deader party Marla attended. Hearing noises from the bathroom, Amy sees Marla’s fingers twitch and her head turn, which causes her to scream and flee the building. Later, Amy watches the video at home, which was made just after Marla’s own initiation. When Marla removes her sunglasses we see a pair of dead eyes looking out of the screen. It is at this moment that Larry calls Amy, startling her. When Amy calls Marla’s number to see what has happened, she ends up speaking to the dead woman herself.

Amy subsequently enlists the help of Joey, who let her inside the drug scene to do the crack whore story. She finds him in the subway, having a private party in one of the coaches:

The interior of the car has been transformed into some oddball cross between a very small nightclub and an opium den. Anyway, there are PERFORMERS at the far side who start playing as the train pulls out....

In the uncertain light Amy can see the various CELEBRANTS hanging out—some on the seats, some on the floor, some dressed, some partially undressed, some engaging in desultory drug use, others in desultory sex acts.
⁴

Joey tells her all he knows about the Deaders, that they’re more than simply the Frankensteins or zombies Amy thinks. “It’s all about minds, and believing and what’s real and what’s not.”
⁵
They are playing with the concepts of the real and unreal, and it was all started by a man named Winter. Joey gives Amy the address where the group hang out—Avenue B and Third Street—but warns her away from the place.

Upon leaving the carriage, Amy sees a dead figure in a green plastic raincoat. Then she spots Winter dressed in black. He falls backwards in front of a train, but when she reports this to the police they can find no sign of his body on the tracks. When she sees Winter again she chases him, only to be arrested by the police. Bud bails her out and in a conversation between them it’s revealed that Amy has an appetite for information, but he’s the one who is curious about what’s on the other side—and what the Deaders might have discovered. Amy herself is not tied by any religious guilt, which makes her the perfect person to find out.

After tracking down the Deader hideout, as she moves through a darkened corridor with only her lighter to guide the way, Amy feels the walls closing in on her. Finally, she arrives at the room where the first video was made and finds it full of people staring at her. Amy is sent in to see Winter and tells him she wants to join the Deaders. It is here that Winter elaborates about the real and unreal. Taking her hand he explains that it is not the flesh that defines this, but the spaces around it and in-between. “In all essential qualities, it is less than nothing. ... you are less than nothing. Not solid, not here, not real.”
⁶
The reason Marla is decaying is that she’s still clinging on to the real world instead of letting go. There follows an impressive special effects sequence in which he forces Amy to place her hand on the table and close her eyes. The surface feels wet, something is sucking at her fingers, and when she opens her eyes she sees a baby’s face embedded in it; then the table turns into Sheila, who bites her.

Amy escapes and returns to her flat, ringing Larry to tell Bud that she is off the story. But while she is in bed that night, trying to sleep, she is shocked to find blood on the pillow—and a knife sticking in her back. She manages to remove the knife and stem the bleeding. Realizing the blade belongs to Marla, she returns to the woman’s apartment by traveling on the subway, encountering a strange old man on the train. When Amy arrives, Marla says, “I’m sorry.... It’s the way it’s supposed to work. The one who initiates you is the one who has to be your guide,”
⁷
a guide who makes it easier to believe in coming back. She tells Amy that the apartment is too solid and that she’s been drifting in and out of its reality all night. A crack appears in the window, but it’s more than just a hole in the glass: the shafts of light illuminate figures from the real world, like the policeman from the subway. “In their world, in the daylight, a knife in the heart is fatal. If you stay ... then you’ll have to live by their rules. The rules that make you dead.”
⁸
So the choice is clear: the light is reality, the dark is unreality, and the women slip into the Night side.

In the Nightworld anything is possible, as we see in a series of hallucinatory scenes, the first involving a restaurant with dead cats hanging from the ceiling and a cluster of grotesque chefs. Following these incidents, Amy wakes to find herself in a hospital bed with Larry and Bud beside her. She’d been found in her apartment covered in blood, just as Marla had been found in hers. As night approaches, she tells the doctors that the things that lurk in the dark are coming for her, but, as they’ve done before, they put this all down to a psychotic episode she’s having. The faces of the dead are not quite human here (there’s a fantastic description of a shark-mouthed creature) and in the end Winter appears. Amy has misplaced her guide, but she must still leave everything behind in the real world. After finding Marla, she repeats the “I’m not real” speech we heard right at the start and accepts her fate.

The effective ending sees Larry quitting because he thinks Amy and Marla have been killed by the cult, while Amy pays a visit to Bud and initiates him into the Deaders. Taking off her sunglasses in an action that mimics Marla, Bud sees that she has no eyes now, just dark, gaping holes.

Similar to
Ring
(Gore Verbinski, 2002), with its video mystery and determined news reporter as central protagonist, the
Deader
script would have made a decent movie in its own right. Stevens’ initial idea draws on concepts explored in films like
Flatliners
(Joel Schumacher, 1990) and
Jacob’s Ladder
, but it does so in a unique way. The screenplay, however, after being acquired by Dimension, was then selected as having potential for a
Hellraiser
movie. It was handed over to Tim Day, co-writer of
Hellseeker
, for him to insert the mythos elements. He would also cut some of the other more expensive or extraneous bits.

To this end, the character of Larry is the first to go. His presence serves only to hint at a possible relationship with Amy, which goes against the grain of her character, anyway. By taking him out, the
Hellraiser
Amy becomes more of a loner, who rarely asks anyone for help. Thus, Joey becomes not an informant she has used before but one of the Deaders himself, whom Marla directs her to. In actual fact this tightens up at least part of the script and reinforces the investigation side of it. The “baby table” sequence and other Nightworld hallucinations were all removed, replaced by flashbacks Amy keeps having of childhood revolving around her father. Day tied the abuse aspect in to the stabbing scene, by having Amy use a very similar weapon on her Dad: the personal demons Winter must force her to remember before she can become a Deader (which results in another recurring line: “Fear is where we go to learn”). Therefore, although it is still Marla who stabs Amy, the reporter finds no knife now in the woman’s apartment. It is instead a replica of the one she herself used to kill her father that winds up in her back.

A pre-credits scene showing Amy actually inside the crack den was also added, which says more about her character than dark clothes ever could. This is someone who will go that extra mile for a story, someone willing to brave the seedy underbelly of society and won’t stop until she’s uncovered the enigma of the Deaders. Two shifts in location were also required. The first made the paper English because the majority of actors used for these scenes would be of this nationality—necessitating a name change to
London Underground
. Because the star had to be American, her new job is explained away in a conversation with her editor (now named Charles), who refers to her having been sacked from the
New York Post
, though Amy prefers to call it “reassigned.” This has the added effect of bolstering her bad girl image. In addition, Day connected the dots between Amy and Charles by simply having a photograph in his office of the two of them together on an assignment in the past, hinting at a long-term history.

The second shift in territory reflected the movie’s budget. Dimension knew that it would be much cheaper to shoot the film in Romania than in either the UK or the U.S.—so cheap, in fact, that they decided to shoot
Hellraisers 7
and
8
back to back over there. So, rather than filming in Bucharest and pretending they were in the lower East Side of Manhattan—where Stevens’ script was initially set—the home of the Deaders was changed to Romania where, according to Charles, “All the Eurotrash kids looking for a good time are heading these days.” If nothing else, it would open up the
Hellraiser
world again beyond the confines of Britain or New York. Romania is also steeped in horror genre history, having direct links with Dracula and vampires in general.

Day’s other principal task would prove much harder.
Deader
arrived with a fully fledged mythology of its own, so the problem was how to integrate the already established
Hellraiser
components. The notion was put forward that Winter should somehow be connected to the maker of the box. In fact, it was in the script right up until almost shooting that Winter’s great-grandfather was the creator of the Lament Configuration. It was Doug Bradley who pointed out that Lemarchand had done this in both the original Barker novella and in the complex storyline of
Bloodline
. In the finished film, Winter’s association with that particular family is left extremely vague.