After the deed is done and he is about to walk away, she implores him: “Please, I’ll do anything you want.” This bargaining chip doesn’t work the first time, but Frank will hold her to the promise when he is the one who needs her. Essentially, he uses her longing to make good his escape and swindle the demons. The deal is simple: in exchange for luring and killing men to feed him, Frank will stay with Julia this time, or so he has her believe. If she’d felt overtly threatened the first time they’d met, there would be no way she’d
want
to bring Frank back.
A scene was actually shot of Julia and Larry’s wedding, which would have illustrated a further pact. Barker chose not to include this in the finished cut of the movie (it actually turns up in
Hellbound
), perhaps for running time purposes or because it was already quite obvious that the deal Julia made with Frank was always of greater import. The symbolism of Frank and Julia having sex atop her wedding dress, Julia’s fist crushing the material, and her flashback occurring just as Larry is hauling the matrimonial bed up the stairs, is enough. It makes a mockery of the legal and religious contract between Larry and his wife. Regardless of this, it would have presented a nice contrast to later parallel scenes where Julia and Frank exchange twisted wedding vows. In the first of these Frank asks if she’ll spill more blood for him and Julia replies, “I will.” In the next, Frank swears to Julia, “We belong to each other now. For better, for worse. Like love, only real.” Theirs is the only wedding that counts in
Hellraiser
—a warped bonding of a skinless man and a murderess. But just as pleasure and pain are indivisible for the Cenobites, so, too, are love and desire for Julia and Frank. This is something Frank substantiates when he kills Julia at the end. “Nothing personal, babe,” he sneers.
Cracks are apparent, though, in Larry and Julia’s union from the second they open the door to the house on Lodovico Street. Barker highlights this in the screenplay.
We see the pair on the doorstep. LARRY is an American in his early forties, an attractive man who has lost his edge in recent years. He looks harassed; he smirks too much. A little, but significant, corner of him is utterly defeated. JULIA, his wife, is English: and looks perhaps ten years his junior. She is beautiful, but her face betrays a barely buried unhappiness. Life has disappointed her, too, of late: and LARRY has been a major part of their disappointment.
4
Thanks to the adroit acting of Robinson and Higgins, this
is
conveyed to the viewer. When Larry mentions the difficulties they had in Brooklyn and states unconvincingly, “We can make it work here,” it only confirms our suspicions. And when Julia agrees to Larry’s “So?” with a “Why not?” we realize that instead of strengthening their covenant they are heading for its complete dissolution. Furthermore, because Julia has stolen a picture of Frank we also know that he will be the principal cause of this annulment. Her powerful attraction to Frank means that any deal they made will always have priority, though both deals have serious repercussions. Her pact with Larry has left her trapped in a loveless marriage. Her pact with Frank might lead to transient sexual fulfillment, but it also forces her to kill and initiates her own death.
An unfilmed scene from the novella has a bleeding Julia wearing her wedding dress at the end, further emphasizing the hideous mistakes she has made and her wish to turn back the clock:
And there, in the middle of this domestic wasteland, sat a bride. By some extraordinary act of will, Julia had managed to put her wedding dress on, and secure her veil upon her head. Now she sat in the dirt, the dress besmirched. But she looked radiant nevertheless; more beautiful, indeed, for the fact of the ruin that surrounded her.
5
More hopeful is the alliance between Kirsty and her new boyfriend, Steve (played by Robert Hines). The pair meet at her father’s housewarming dinner party and we sense immediately the first blossoming of young love. The eye contact and laughter is genuine, as opposed to Julia’s false smiles when placating Larry or luring her male victims to the house. There is a hint of sex when Steve wants to pour more wine and Kirsty insists she won’t be able to stand up. “So lie down,” says Steve with a grin. But compared with the animal passions of Julia and Frank this is all very tame, and when the couple kiss for the first time in the underpass we definitely feel there is potential for a real relationship. However, this shot then pulls back and dissolves to a scene with Larry and Julia in bed—a cynical extrapolation of how the romance might culminate. Barker himself has wickedly said of this, “We cut to Julia and Larry and what marriage actually is: someone lying snoring and farting on one side of the bed while the other one has a good smoke and curses the moment they ever got married.”
6
We can’t help but contrast this with a more innocent, or naïve, pre-wedding Julia. “I’m very happy,” she affirms, talking about her impending nuptials, and it seems as if she really means it. What would have happened if Frank hadn’t come along is certainly cause for speculation. Would she have been a different person without his corrupting influence? Even though she denies any feelings for Larry, she still initially resists the idea of killing him for his skin.
There are signs that Kirsty and Steve’s association could last, nonetheless. They don’t yet share a bed, for one thing; when they wake from a nightmare about Larry dying, they are shown in two single beds. Steve comes to visit her at the pet store where she is working, and worries when he can’t find her at the hospital, enough to follow her to Lodovico Street. Here he attempts to rescue Kirsty, although it is she who ends up rescuing him. To all intents and purposes the dynamics of the relationship switch after their first date. Steve is the one who initiates the kiss after the party, but at the end Kirsty is definitely the one in control. There is a danger here that Steve might become just as weak and ineffectual as Larry, but it does at least suggest that Kirsty will not be forced into any deals like the one Julia makes with Frank. She has a mind of her own and is strong enough to use it; she won’t be manipulated by anyone—apart, perhaps, from her father, for reasons we will come to later.
One last thing to mention about the relationships between these couples is the significance of the kisses traded. Of them all, only Kirsty and Steve’s is genuine and seals what could potentially be a good partnership. But, as in
Salome
, the rest mark betrayal, deception, or even impending death. We do not see Frank and Julia kiss at all until the very end, and this is only so Frank can feed himself. The kiss Julia gives Larry is to distract him from investigating the Damp Room, then she shuns his attentions. And the one she shares with her first victim, angrily instigated by him and over in seconds, signals that his end is not far away.
The final pacts to be made involve Kirsty. Inadvertently, she opens the puzzle box in the hospital, thus unconsciously striking the same deal Frank made at the start. The Cenobites are summoned and verify what she has done. “The box. You opened it. We came,” says their leader. It doesn’t matter that she has done this in ignorance; her curiosity was the catalyst, just as Frank’s desire was his undoing. When Kirsty tells them to “Go to Hell!” the female Cenobite confirms her worst fears: “We can’t. Not alone.” The box has been opened and Kirsty must live up to her end of the bargain. Swiftly, she counters this with a deal of her own, offering them something they crave even more than her: Frank. The lead Cenobite barters from a position of weakness now, in spite of his apparent dominance of the situation. He argues that no one has ever escaped them, but all evidence points to the contrary. We have seen Frank, he
has
escaped them. The lead Cenobite is forced to contradict himself seconds later, then reluctantly agrees to this new bargain. But they also close their end of the deal with a threat. If Kirsty deceives them they will tear her soul apart!
Just like the pact between Julia and Frank, this one is wholly unstable—and it is the Cenobites who ultimately double-cross Kirsty. She fulfils her promise and delivers Frank, but that is not enough. They want to take Kirsty back as well, their hunger for her just as great as Frank’s for survival or Julia’s lust. As a result, Kirsty is perfectly within her rights to send them back. They have the one soul as agreed, and so the puzzle box now complies.
Cotton Family Values
The second major theme running through
Hellraiser
is that of the family, or, more correctly, an undermining of the traditional family unit.
Hellraiser
was by no means the first horror movie to do this, and we can trace the concept back to genre films of the 1960s and ’70s. In earlier U.S. and UK horror films the moral supremacy of the nuclear family and all it stood for tended to be asserted. Heterosexual couples and stable family units fought against threats from the outside, like the overtly supernatural vampire, mummy or werewolf. This can be seen in the Universal and RKO movies of the ’30s and ’40s, and also in certain Hammer productions from the 1950s. By this time, though, American horror films were also considering the danger from within, fueled largely by the fear of communism, classic examples being
Invaders from Mars
(William Cameron Menzies, 1953) and
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
(Don Siegel, 1956). Hitchcock’s
Psycho
(1960) completely internalized the threat, fixing the attention firmly on the mother-son relationship and its effect on Norman Bates (Anthony Perkins). As we’ve already seen,
Psycho
was the first adult horror film Clive Barker ever saw and it had a huge impact on him.
Other U.S. horror movies that challenged the family’s stabilizing role included
Rosemary’s Baby
(Roman Polanski, 1968) and
Night of the Living Dead
, while
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
(Tobe Hooper, 1974) remains the epitome of dysfunctional family life: a cannibalistic clan who butcher and eat passersby. Similarly, the stalk and slash films of the late ’70s and ’80s depicted killers who had uneven upbringings: Jason from the
Friday the 13th
series had a psychotic mother, Michael Myers from
Halloween
(John Carpenter, 1978) was put in a secure psychiatric facility when he was young for killing his sister. Or else they targeted weak families, as Freddy Krueger does in
Nightmare on Elm Street
(Wes Craven, 1984). For a British equivalent, one could go back to Michael Powell’s
Peeping Tom
(1960), in which a father’s experiments on his son turn him into a voyeuristic murderer.
Because of the commercial sense of casting American
and
British actors, and thanks to Barker’s broad international outlook,
Hellraiser
could claim a lineage to both U.K. and U.S. “family horror” films. But, at its very core, it is a British film with a British writer/director. If anything, the film’s bland domestic setting, the suburban environment against which such an extraordinary story plays out, has its origins in the black and white Kitchen Sink or British New Wave dramas of the late 1950s and 1960s, typified by films like
Look Back in Anger
(Tony Richardson, 1958) and
A Taste of Honey
(Tony Richardson, 1961)—a realism which helps immensely when it comes to suspension of disbelief. At the very least, the saga of the Cottons, on one level, is pure British soap opera in the
Eastenders
mold.
But there is a massive difference.
Hellraiser
scratched beneath the veneer, in much the same way David Lynch did with small town America in
Blue Velvet
(1986). Barker’s film is a metaphor for what really goes on behind the net curtains in certain British households, and not just because of its S&M overtones. This concentration on verisimilitude, on human and family situations, could also be the reason
Hellraiser
has been dubbed “Ibsen with monsters.”
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The relationships between family members are key to the understanding of
Hellraiser
and how it subverts conventional roles. The four primary characters are all introduced to us by way of their position in this family. Julia and Larry are man and wife; Kirsty is Larry’s daughter and Julia’s stepdaughter (we discover the real matriarch has passed away when the removal men comment that Kirsty has her mother’s looks. “Her mother’s dead,” snaps Larry), while Frank is the black sheep brother and Kirsty’s uncle. As a primary player in this story, Frank states his affiliation every time he encounters a new character. “I’m Frank,” he tells Julia when he turns up just before the wedding, “
Brother
Frank.” Later, when Kirsty comes across him in the attic, he says: “Kirsty, it’s Frank. It’s Uncle Frank.”
Barker then deliberately contorts the roles so that they often result in uncomfortable and disturbing viewing. Julia is Larry’s wife, yet there are times when she acts more like his mother. When he cuts his hand he seeks Julia out. “You know me and blood,” he says, looking like he’s about to faint. Julia immediately adopts the position of caring parent, holding his arm up, preparing to rush him to the hospital and comforting him by saying, “It’s all right.” Here is another reason their marriage is on a collision course for disaster. In true Greek tragedy form, Larry is fulfilling some subconscious Oedipal desire to sleep with his mother (or a figure who represents his mother). But this situation is fundamentally wrong and Julia knows it. As stated earlier, she uses her sexuality to divert Larry when he is about to investigate the attic room, but cannot go through with the act itself: for one thing her
real
lover is watching close by.
Conversely, there are moments when Julia becomes the child and Larry the parent, the most obvious example being when he thinks she is ill, after she has committed the first murder, though this could just as easily translate as subservience. His throwaway joke of, “Wanna cookie, little girl?” is disquieting, especially when one scrutinizes his relationship with Kirsty in more detail.