Directed by Clive Barker
Review based upon the US Anchor Bay DVD release
“I have seen the future of horror and its name is Clive Barker”, the film’s trailer quoted Stephen King as saying. At the time Clive Barker was a rising star, having in a very short while emerged first as a playwright (“Frankenstein in Love” and “The History of the Devil”), had produced one novel (“The Damnation Game” in 1985), and two screenplays that made for mediocre films – “Underworld” and “Rawhead Rex”. But it was Barker’s six-volume collection of short stories and novellas, “The Books of Blood” (published between 1984 and 1985), that garnered him the most critical attention. Then, with the success of “Hellraiser”, Barker became a cult name.
“Hellraiser” was one of those rare occasions when a production company had gambled a million dollar budget on a then unproven director. It just so happened that the gamble was on Clive Barker. The results far exceeded expectation, and “Hellraiser” not only became a cult hit but spawned many sequels (seven in total, with a remake currently in production), and a whole stack of the requisite merchandise. Although his star has faded now, for a while Barker really did seem to be the future of cinematic horror. Certainly his brand of dark nihilistic no-holds-barred viscera topped the crest of the new wave of horror fiction.
The story concerns Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Clare Higgins), who move into his family home in England only to find it recently abandoned by Larry’s brother Frank (Sean Chapman), a petty criminal. However Frank had opened up a puzzle box which summoned The Cenobites, demons who offer ultimate pleasure through ultimate pain, and had been torn apart by them. When blood from a cut on Larry’s hand drips onto the floor in the attic, it manages to partially revive Frank’s remains underneath the floorboards. Gaining the aid of Julia, with whom he once had an affair that was unknown to Larry, Frank gets her to lure men to the house during the daytime on the promise of sex, so that he can devour their bodies in order to reconstitute his skin.
Unlike other contemporary horror filmmakers and writers such as David Cronenberg or Stephen King, Barker’s work is rooted in a Medieval Gothic universe. Like Cronenberg, flesh for Barker is a battleground. In Cronenberg’s work it is like a warring ground between desire and technology, with protagonists always on the cusp of transforming into a fusion of the two. But science never enters the universe of Barker - his is a universe of perverse beauty and ornate splendour filled with demons, angels and deformities. Barker’s names and places always evoke something Medieval and quasi-religious, with book titles like “Cabal”, “Sacrament”, and
“Galilee”. In “Hellraiser” for instance, the Cenobites have been named after a 17th Century monastic order. In contrast to Cronenberg, flesh for Barker is not a laboratory of transformation but more akin to a torturer’s rack. Barker’s protagonists live in perpetual sense of Gothic ecstatic dread, where their relationship to the monstrous is invariably a sadomasochistic one – one in which they and their flesh play a role of submissiveness to the demon, and the exquisitely dreadful tortures and mutilations it will inflict upon them.”Hellraiser” is worth comparing to its contemporary “A Nightmare on Elm Street”. Both “Hellraiser” and “Elm Street” chart similar terrains, featuring young female teen protagonists (Heather Lagenkamp and Ashley Laurence even look remarkably similar) and a middle-class suburban family environment, which is invaded by monstrous beings from alternate realities (dreams in “Elm Street” and Hell here, which is perceived as an alternate dimension of sorts). “Elm Street” essentially features middle-class America being attacked by a force of guilt literally emerging out of its repressed subconsciousness. “Hellraiser” on the other hand, takes a similar premise and plants it firmly in England. For both “Elm Street” and “Hellraiser” there are hidden secrets beneath the veneer of middle-class suburbia and nuclear family life. In reality, the mid 80's was a period where those in government were using the myth of middle-class family life and squeaky-clean morality as a call for a return to decency and for greater censorship. The era produced a number of films that subversively speared family values, such as “Gremlins” with its gleeful overturning of smalltown suburbia; “Blue Velvet”, a film very similar to “Hellraiser” with its vision of a college kid leaving suburbia and discovering hidden sadomasochistic desires; and “The Stepfather”, where a man’s desire to find the perfect family had him slaughtering all imperfect contenders. But where “Elm Street” sticks to black-and-white divisions and creat
es no sympathy for its bogeyman, “Hellraiser” muddles the moral line in fascinating ways. Not far beneath a thinly drawn picture of family life (Barker doesn’t really concern himself with drawing his human characters, and all the life they have is given to them by the actors), is a torrid cesspool of infidelity and unfulfilled desire. Barker taps into this cesspit of forbidden territory, and links it to the Christian notion of sin. But then he ingeniously subverts it; Hell rather than being a pit of damnation is a baroque Gothic sadomasochistic dungeon, where the protagonists seem to welcome as much as dread torture, dismemberment and damnation.The images in the film have a perverse beauty. The Cenobites are genuinely original creations - they all come in half-shadow, their pale bodies in black leather with sewn-up wounds, with either nails impaled through the head or body piercings. One can't argue with the intensity of images like the shot in the opening moments, which pans through a room of hanging chains and torture instruments to watch as one of the Cenobites pieces together the flayed sections of Chapman’s face on the floor. There is also the daringly blasphemous moment of symbolism (which codifies Barker’s inversion of damnation and torture as perversely pleasurable) where Andrew Robinson gives an ecstatic sigh “Jesus wept” as he is torn apart by hooks.
Barker is operating on a low budget, but does miracles with it. The film is economically restricted to the single location of a dreary suburban home for the most part. The effects work of the Image Animation group is a remarkable credit to the limited budget - particularly stunning is the sequence where Chapman’s body is reconstituted from slime. Barker’s handling of actors is not the best, nor would it really improve with subsequent films, but he has a good cast on hand in young Ashley Laurence, Andrew Robinson who makes a fine mid-film transformation, and especially the cold-blooded Clare Higgins. Also, before the sequels overworked it, Christopher Young creates a memorably sepulchral score.
A modern British genre classic that Barker would unfortunately never better, "Hellraiser" is a film that really stands the test of time. A gruesome and thought-provoking film, this is one of the best genre pieces of the 1980's, and one which the multitude of sequels would never be able to match.
9.5 out of 10
One of the most visual and impressive British horror films of all time... one that still has power even today
