The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (9 page)

However, Kirsty does not adhere to the moral codes of a Heavenly heroine, or even a heroine from previous horror films. Most noticeably, she does not remain virginal. Whether or not anything happened after her kiss with Steve, it is still insinuated that she has slept with him. In slasher films this is usually the grounds for punishment by the killer, as Carol Clover elucidates in her groundbreaking book,
Men, Women and Chainsaws
. The Final Girl, as she calls the Stalk and Slash heroine, is usually a “spunky enquirer into the terrible place,”
¹²
but never sexually active. Secondly, when Kirsty first arrives at the house on Lodovico Street, she sees statues of saints and Christ on the doorstep, cast out ready for Hell to enter. Her reaction is simply to smile, shrug, and walk in through the door. Such ignorance of the portent leads to terrible heartache later. Perhaps this is why the statue that falls out and scares Kirsty as she is being chased by Frank
has
to be Christ—in retaliation for her apathy? But given this, Kirsty still turns her back on the power of faith and uses her own mettle instead.

There was even a deleted scene where an evangelist spoke to Kirsty directly through the radio to warn her, which would have highlighted her rejection yet further:

INT: KIRSTY’S ROOM. NIGHT

Music from the radio: a love song. The radio is badly tuned: the song sounds tinny. It fades, then comes back into focus again. We move around the room, over an unfinished puzzle, left on the bed; over a few pictures of LARRY, set lovingly beside the bed, and finally, onto KIRSTY, who is drying her hair after a shower.

The radio channel slips. The radio whines. Then, an evangelist’s voice on the air-waves.

EVANGELIST: The Devil is watching you. That’s the message I came here tonight to bring you. The Devil is watching you and he sees the corruption in your hearts. He hears you! He sees you! Every night, every day.

KIRSTY has got up now and is trying to change channels, but the controls defeat her. She gets more and more annoyed.

KIRSTY: C’mon, damn you. C’mon.

EVANGELIST: The Devil knows your soul.

KIRSTY: No he doesn’t! Damn thing!

Eventually she pulls the back off the radio. The batteries fall out.

KIRSTY (to herself): Nice going.

Thunder.
¹³

In addition, Kirsty swears, she fights dirty, and to save herself she negotiates with the Cenobites, offering up Frank. Because Frank is such a morally bankrupt character, we can forgive this behavior, but it blurs the line between right and wrong even more. If there hadn’t been a scapegoat around to give the demons, would she have offered up an innocent? Possibly not, but Kirsty’s strong streak of self-preservation is what makes her such a tough heroine in the first place, and her complexity is what makes her an enduring screen champion.

Ashley Laurence publicity shot (photograph credit: Tom Collins).

By the same token, Julia, for all the terrible things she does, has a compassionate side—evidenced by her response to Larry after he cuts himself. The act of kindness can be viewed as pity, of course, for an inferior person, or—more logically—it can be seen as a natural reaction to anybody in pain. Remember, this is before she has the motivation to kill for “love.” When she first enters the house and climbs the stairs, she, too, sees the statue of Christ on the windowsill. Another warning, this time for her not to go any further, up the stairs and down the road to damnation. But she gives the effigy a cold stare and carries on, and will regret it just as Kirsty does.

Larry’s religious beliefs are just as indistinct. It’s unclear whether he gets rid of all the religious artifacts simply to please Julia, or for his own benefit. Has the death of his previous wife shaken any faith he might have had in the Lord? He does choose Sunday for them to move in, indicating that he cares little for religious tradition. In
The Hellbound Heart
it says, “It was the Lord’s Day up this end of the city. Even if the owners of these well-dressed houses and well-pressed children were no longer believers, they still observed the Sabbath.”
¹⁴
All except Larry and his clan. But perhaps there’s another explanation. A man so apathetic about everything else, his family, pleasing his wife, the state of his marriage, might also be lackluster when it comes to believing in something spiritual.

Like Julia, Frank is another contradiction in terms. On the surface he’s everything reprehensible and amoral about the human race. Selfish, lecherous and downright vicious: the
true
villain of the piece. So one has to ask why he allows the religious artifacts to remain in the house while he conducts his transaction with the Cenobites. Is it for protection in case things go horribly wrong—in which case, they offer none at all. Or is it because he believed they might well be angelic beings, come to provide him with pleasure: if they are, then they have more in common with the angels from
The Forbidden
than with any biblical text. Frank realizes all too late that Hell is not the place he thought it would be. By seeking to escape, therefore, he seeks to redeem himself. He is, quite literally, born again. Either that or he’s resurrected, which has the same religious connotations. A shame then that his base nature comes to the fore again as the film progresses. Despite this he still plays the martyr when the Cenobites catch up with him. Strung out with arms wide in a re-creation of the crucifixion, he recites a line from the Bible: “Jesus wept.” It doesn’t save him, just as his victims who called out “Christ!” before their death were shown no mercy.

It might sound odd, but the Cenobites are even more ambiguous from a religious standpoint. They are demons, true, but not in the typical sense of the word. They do not seek to bring about chaos; rather, theirs is an order of discipline. They have to follow codes insomuch as they can only take back people who have opened the box, generally those who have been searching for them in the first place, with the right frame of mind. As Pinhead says, they are, indeed, “Angels to some, demons to others.” Theirs is a religion in itself, and the Hell they come from contains none of the reported fires or pits; its corridors are gray stone, just like a church or monastery (the very name itself, Cenobite, is derived from the term coe’nobite, which means member of a monastic community). And as actor Doug Bradley recalls, “There was this stuff that was filmed for
Hellraiser
and I don’t know whether it exists, but it was certainly filmed. Clive ... had us in these little monkish cells with the walls covered in taboo fetishist quasi-religious iconic things, pacing backwards and forwards.”
¹⁵

The arrival of the Cenobites in this realm is heralded by the chiming of a bell, similar to the one we hear on the Sunday as Larry and Julia move into Lodovico Street. And when they are gathered together only three are generally shown in a shot at a time—A trinity: a darker Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with Pinhead’s crown of nails replacing the thorns. Like Kirsty, they are also bathed in light when we see them properly for the first time in the hospital. The Cenobites are not merely evil for evil’s sake, rampant creatures causing devastation and destruction like the monsters from so many B movie horror flicks. They only practice their trade on those who deserve and desire their attentions.

3

DEMONS TO SOME

There can be no denying the Cenobites’ contribution to making
Hellraiser
a milestone of the genre. Their total screen time is approximately seven minutes, but their impact is out of all proportion to this. Yet their introduction—or lack thereof—may certainly have something to do with the phenomenon. At the start of the film we are only granted extremely quick flashes of them: the Female Cenobite in close-up, Pinhead’s hands as he picks up pieces of Frank’s face, a shot of him standing up with the nails in his head visible. Then they are gone. After this sudden sensory overload, we are deprived: all is quiet, and the camera is free to pull back and away from the room where we just encountered them. Just as the box does with Frank and Kirsty, this piques the audience’s curiosity and forces them to ask questions about exactly who these strange beings are. How can it not? We know they must be integral to the story, but why?

When we do finally see the Cenobites properly, it is the look of them that captivates. At the time, audiences had never seen characters like these. They were totally original, a tricky thing to accomplish in a cliché-driven genre like horror. The closest precursors are actually from a different, though obviously related, genre: science fiction. They are the members of the Spice Guild in David Lynch’s adaptation of Frank Herbert’s sprawling epic,
Dune
(1984). The entourage who bring on the monstrously mutated Guild Navigator at the very beginning of the film for a meeting with the Emperor are dressed in long leather or PVC robes and have pus-ridden sores. The look of the bald Bene Gesserit witches also resembles that of the Female Cenobite, and Baron Harkonnen’s playthings have open bloodstained wounds. Whether or not this influenced former Dog Company costume designer Jane Wildgoose is open to speculation, but there were other very real and traceable lines of origin.

When he first came down to London, Barker found himself illustrating a couple of centerfolds for some S&M magazines, which later were investigated by Scotland Yard for their content. The magazines were burned, which Barker found to be “the ultimate compliment.”
¹
His interest in the taboos of society has always been great, and when researching the Cenobites he definitely returned to this hunting ground. One magazine in particular proved invaluable:
Piercing Fans International Quarterly
, which showed people with hooks inserted in their flesh, bodies dangling from chains—following the heritage of men like Fakir Musafar, the human pincushion who warranted a feature in
Ripley’s Believe It or Not
. There are also people in the Philippines who regularly practice piercing themselves or hanging from hooks embedded in their skin as a kind of spiritual experience, while Native Americans practiced a similar ritual for their Sun Dances. Going back even further in history, the most prominent examples would have to be the Spanish Inquisition and their various pieces of equipment for deriving pain from their victims, as well as the writings of the Marquis de Sade.
²

Pinhead Cenobite concept sketch for
Hellraiser
.

The look of the Cenobites was to be a kind of modern primitive, but perversely stylish, with clothes that intermingled with the wounds they had inflicted on themselves. Barker also had the initial sketches he’d come up with to help everyone visualize what he wanted, and, of course, descriptions in
The Hellbound Heart
like this one:

Why then was he so distressed to set eyes upon them? Was it the scars that covered every inch of their bodies; the flesh cosmetically punctured and sliced and infibulated, then dusted down with ash? Was it the smell of vanilla they brought with them, the sweetness of which did little to disguise the stench beneath? Or was it that as the light grew, and he scanned them more closely, he saw nothing of joy, or even humanity, in their maimed faces: only desperation, and an appetite that made his bowels ache to be voided.
³