CW: sexual assault
Alrighty, we’ve got this horror stuff up and running with Clive Barker’s 1987 classic Hellraiser. I’d watched this probably seven years ago and forgotten almost all of it. There is a first in here though: I read my first Clive Barker book. I read the novella The Hellbound Heart, which Hellraiser is based on.
Here’s what I got from the book and the movie (they are very similar until the very end):
Frank likes to bang and is also The Worst. Those are his two character traits. Julia is unhappily married to Frank’s brother, Rory (named Larry in the movie), and also banged Frank one time. She might be in love with him. Rory/Larry is kinda a dope. Kristy, a random lady who’s in love with Rory in the book and Larry’s daughter in the movie is….just those things. Hopelessly in love with a married dude and a dude’s daughter respectively.
Frank, squatting in his childhood home, summons torture demons (cenobites) with a fancy puzzle box (thinking he will get to bang) and they take him away to Tortureland.
Frank’s brother Rory/Larry and his wife Julia move into Rory/Larry and Frank’s childhood home (unaware of Frank’s ritual). While working on the house, Rory/Larry accidentally cuts himself and bleeds on the floor of the room where Frank did his ritual, which allows Frank to kinda-sorta regenerate.
Frank reveals himself to Julia and tells her he needs more blood to be fully healed. Julia agrees to do some murdering because apparently that’s easier than marriage counseling. She murders two people before Rory/Larry starts to think something’s up and asks Kristy to investigate, because, again, that’s easier than marriage counseling.
Kristy suspects Julia is having an affair. When she sneaks into the house to get confirmation, she encounters Frank, who is consuming the guy Julia brought home. Frank tries to assault Kristy. He says “come to daddy.” It’s the worst. Kristy fights him and is able to get away by chucking the puzzle box out the window and running.
Kristy picks up the box as she runs away, and at some point she passes out. She wakes up in the hospital, with the box. Bored, she starts playing with the puzzle box and accidentally summons the Cenobites. They tell her that even though it was an accident, they still have to take her. She makes a deal to give them Frank instead, and they let her go.
Kristy returns to the house to find Julia and Rory/Larry hangin’ out, and they very calmly tell her that Frank is dead. Kristy freaks out, and Rory/Larry tries to comfort her. Rory/Larry says something off, like, I dunno, “Come to daddy,” and she realizes it’s not the man she loves/her dad. Frank has stolen Rory/Larry’s skin. A fight ensues, Julia gets stabbed, and Frank eventually lets his real identity slip. The cenobites return and literally rip him apart.
Here’s where the movie and the book diverge. In the book, Kristy runs away, bumping into someone she later realizes was a cenobite. It had given her the puzzle box back, and now she’s the box’s keeper.
In the movie, the cenobites aren’t satisfied with just Frank, and go after Kristy as well. Kristy runs through her father’s crumbling house, un-solving the puzzle box and sending the cenobites back to Tortureland. The movie ends with Kristy attempting to burn the box, but a creepy dude walks into the fire, turns into a dinosaur skeleton and flies away with the box. He takes it back to where Frank bought it: a racist approximation of a street market in some unnamed Asian country. And the cycle begins again.
First of all, I forgot how absolutely grody the special effects for this movie are. Frank’s initial reanimation scene is a thing of nauseating beauty. The stop motion is on-point. Everything is gooey and gross. I love it.
Story-wise, here’s what the movie did better: making Kristy Larry’s daughter. Giving her an actual place in the story instead of “random chick who is maybe a neighbor? idk she showed up at a party once and 50 pages later she’s the main character?” She feels like she belongs, where in the book she really feels like she doesn’t belong. And maybe that’s part of the point, but if it is, it’s a really distracting one.
I really feel like the book had a stronger ending. The cenobites felt like a neutral evil, and the movie makes them just straight-up evil. It totally overshadows the actual villain: FRANK, who I have already established, is The Worst. In the book, the cenobites keep their deal with Kristy, and the ominousness of them giving her the box to keep watch over (and not taking it back to Unnamed Asian Market) is excellent.
I wanna talk about Frank some more. Frank makes me so mad. Because he’s terrible and manipulative to everyone in his life but he’s also dumb. Like. So dumb. In the book, to summon the cenobites he collects needles, severed dove heads, and SEVEN DAYS OF HIS OWN URINE as offerings. And he thinks this will summon “a carpet of virgin whores.” Dude. Needles and severed dove heads and urine will SO CLEARLY NOT GET YOU THAT.
I got this far into the blog and realized I haven’t talked about the most famous character in the movie: Pinhead. I just don’t have a whole lot to say about him. He’s a cenobite with pins in his head and he’s intimidating. Like I said before, the book cenobites are a neutral evil, and not the villain of the story. Pinhead maybe says one thing and he appears maybe twice. I will admit that Pinhead is a testament to memorable character design. He stands out against his fellow cenobites, and the precision of the needles and grid make for a striking visual.
I did enjoy both the book and the movie. Neither scared me, but both creeped me the heck out. Frank creeped me out. Frank sucks. It’s a common theme in horror movies to have people with “moral failings” be punished by the narrative, but it’s nice to see someone that’s an ACTUAL asshole gets what’s coming to him. Man. I hate Frank so much. I’m so glad he explodes.
Sad Magical Creatures 