Hellbound Hearts (2 page)

Of course, Clive Barker was already established as the author of the six groundbreaking
Books of Blood
collections and the novel
The Damnation Game
before taking on the mantle of both screenwriter and first-time director. He has subsequently enjoyed a successful career as a bestselling novelist, playwright, painter, and film producer—most notably of the Oscar-winning
Gods and Monsters
(1998).

And then there's me, listed way down at the end of the credits under “unit publicist” as “Steve Jones,”
Hellraiser
was the first movie I ever worked on. John Carpenter had sown the seeds while I was interviewing him in Los Angeles, and upon my return to London, I contacted Clive—to whom I had been introduced a couple of years earlier by our mutual friend, horror writer Ramsey Campbell.

Clive liked the idea, and after meeting Chris Figg, I got the job. As a freelance film journalist I had visited the sets of a number of films and had often come away disappointed. So for a relatively low-budget film like
Hellraiser
, I decided to do something radically different.

I invited numerous journalists from all types of publications—but particularly the specialist genre periodicals—down on set to interview key personnel during filming. It helped immeasurably that the location was only two stops away on the London Underground from where I was living in North London at the time. (If only getting to work on a movie was always so easy!)

I also created extensive press kits during shooting so that the writers had all the background material they needed for their articles
way ahead of time, and I produced T-shirts and button badges (“There Are No Limits”) that we gave away to visitors and offered as competition prizes.

As a result,
Hellraiser
received unprecedented publicity for a film of its budget and expectations—while it was still in production. As planned, this extended coverage led to a heightened sense of expectancy long before the movie was released.

Even though my career as a writer and editor was starting to take off at this time, I also had a promising future as a producer and director of television documentaries and commercials. So I used my contacts to shoot an EPK (electronic press kit) featuring behind-the-scenes footage and interviews with the principle cast and crew. Again, this was almost unheard of at that time for a small film like
Hellraiser
. (And here's a piece of trivia for the fans: Many of the interviews on that EPK were conducted by a young journalist just starting out who wanted the experience. His name was Neil Gaiman.)

Anyway, when it finally opened in September 1987,
Hellraiser
was both a critical and commercial hit thanks to its literate script, strong performances, and stylish visuals. I also like to think that my innovative prepublicity campaign helped in some small way toward its success.

I never returned to my old occupation. Instead, I went on to work on a number of other low-budget horror movies on both sides of the Atlantic, including the next two
Hellraiser
films (or “the good sequels” as I like to think of them). Although I had very different experiences working on
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
(1988) at Pinewood Studios, just outside London, and
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
(1992) in High Point, North Carolina, by that time we had formed a tight little production unit that was committed to keeping Clive's creative vision intact.

Unfortunately, this was apparently not the case with many of the films that followed in the
Hellraiser
franchise. Increasingly it seemed that the Lemarchand Configuration Box and Doug Bradley's articulate harbinger of pain and pleasure were shoehorned into existing scripts that had little or nothing in common with Clive Barker's original themes or characters.

But even as the movie series became more and more diluted, so the
Hellraiser
brand profitably expanded into boxed DVD sets, collectable action figures, posters, T-shirts, comics, trading cards, and countless other spin-off merchandise. Despite being produced more than two decades ago—and with the prerequisite remake currently in development—
Hellraiser
continues to hold a fascination for film audiences and readers alike.

Which brings us to this current volume. Let us not forget that
Hellraiser
has always had literary origins. It was initially based on Clive's 1986 novella “The Hellbound Heart” (first published in George R. R. Martin's anthology
Night Visions 3
), and the new compilation that you hold in your hands is merely the next logical step in the story's fictional evolution.

Editors Paul Kane and Marie O'Regan have asked some of the best-known and most creative writers and artists in the horror genre—several of them already intimately connected with the series—to extrapolate upon Clive Barker's original concepts.

Over the past twenty years, numerous people have worked in the
Hellraiser
universe, perhaps not always successfully. However, this book probably represents the most impressive gathering of creative talent yet to add their own unique interpretations to one of the most powerful and enduring horror mythologies ever invented.

As a result, you will find a selection of stories that are guaranteed to shock, seduce, and surprise any
Hellraiser
fan. Prepare to be hooked by tales of puzzles both oblique and obvious, where hellish doorways lead to extreme gratification or endless torment as the unwary encounter some familiar Cenobites and entirely new demonic creations.

This anthology proves that after all this time, the images and ideas behind
Hellraiser
continue to be as vital and imaginative today as they were when Clive Barker first conceived them. Whatever your pleasure may be, the inventive contributors to this volume have such sights still to show you . . .

Stephen Jones

London, England

December 2008

Peter Atkins

It's Mickey Rooney,” Carducci said, as soon as Jack arrived at his table. “Mickey fucking Rooney. No shit.”

The memorabilia dealer's head was twitching in urgent indication and Jack looked back up the length of the convention room in the direction of its spasms.

Flanked on both sides by good-looking young blondes—who, even sitting, had a good five inches on him—Mickey fucking Rooney was indeed seated at one of the autograph tables against the top wall. Jack was surprised that he hadn't noticed him when he came in, but then he tended to ignore the signing tables at these bimonthly events—usually manned only by second-string TV stars from the sixties and seventies—and head straight for the regular dealers' tables.

“What's he asking?” Jack said.

“About the same as the kid from
Rin Tin Tin
,” Carducci said in a can-you-believe-it voice. “Twenty-five if you buy a picture, fifteen for a bring-your-own. You should get something.”

Jack shrugged noncommittally. “Not my area,” he said.

“Not my area,” Carducci mimicked. “Get over yourself. He's fucking
golden age
, man! He banged Dorothy, for Christ's sake.”

“No, he didn't,” Jack said, having no real idea one way or the other.

“All right, Ava Gardner, then. Are you a collector or not?”

“Oh, I'm a collector all right,” Jack said. “But apparently not as well informed a one as I'd thought.”

“Yeah?” Carducci said, cocking an interested eyebrow.

Jack lifted his hand to show his friend the item he'd just bought. “How come I haven't heard of this?” he said.

Carducci was an old hand at the poker face but he actually twitched in surprise when he saw what Jack was showing him, and when he reached out to take the front-of-house still for a closer look, he held it almost reverently and was silent for a couple of seconds.

“Where the fuck did you find this?” he said eventually.

Jack had found it while flicking through the four-dollars-per box of eight by tens at some newbie's table. He hadn't expected to come across anything worthwhile and had hardly been paying attention until he'd felt his hands pause.

His practiced fingers, faster than his eye, had frozen in position like they'd just hit a seam of gold in a slate mine and Jack looked down to see what the fuss was about.

The still was sepia rather than simple black-and-white and—judging by the yellowing on the borders and the few tiny cracks here and there in the emulsion—obviously an original. And from at least the mid-nineteen-thirties. Maybe even precode. Jack lifted it out from among the various worthless dupes of anonymous westerns and forgotten melodramas to look at it more carefully.

The image displayed was of an actress—presumably the lead, though she wasn't anybody Jack recognized—who'd gotten herself into a bit of bother. She was in the process of being bound to an upright cruciform pillar in some kind of ceremonial chamber—a pretty fucking big one to judge by the hordes of out-of-focus extras in the far background—and was staring in left-of-frame shock at something unseen that was heading her way. Something that meant
business, if the look of anticipatory horror on her face was anything to go by.

Her dress had been ripped away from her at both shoulder and thigh but it didn't have the artfully disarranged look you'd expect from a set dresser's tease. It looked much more urgent than that, looked like something or someone had torn at the cloth in a genuine frenzy to get to the flesh beneath. And the girl's open mouth and wide-eyed mix of expectancy and fear could have given even the great Fay Wray a run for her money.

The image's weirdly erotic charge was undeniable, of course, and was certainly part of what Jack liked about it. But it wasn't just that. It had that
thing
. That thing Jack loved, the sense that what he was being allowed to look at was something other than simply a photograph of a bunch of overpaid people playing dress-up. That was always the secret to the movies he loved. It didn't even have to be in the genre in which he pretended to specialize. It was as deliriously present for him in the art deco dreams of Fred and Ginger as it was when Lon senior strode down the opera steps in a skull mask and two-strip Technicolor. And this picture had it. In spades. A teasing glimpse from a forgotten world, a world that felt at once utterly real and yet utterly unreachable.

There was a title running across the border beneath the image.
Prisoners of the Inferno
, it said. Which rang no bells at all, other than the generic. Even then it sounded more like a title from the pulps of the same period than it did a movie. Jack wondered if it might have been a serial rather than a feature, though there was nothing in the rest of the minimal text to suggest that it was.

He took a carefully casual glance at the dealer and at what else was displayed on his table and the wall behind it. He could see in a second that the guy knew nothing. There was a
Topkapi
one-sheet that was way overpriced and a
City of the Dead
lobby card that was hilariously under. Some bandwagon jumper who was pricing his shit by voodoo and what other idiots told him.

Deserved what he got, then, didn't he
, Jack thought and, surrounding his find on either side with two stills from
Gorgo
(neither featuring
the beast), he waved the three of them at the guy as if he was considering doing him the favor of taking this crap off his hands.

“Three for ten?” he asked like it was no biggie, and the money already in his hand like it was a no-brainer.

The dealer looked at the box, looked at Jack, and looked at the cash. Didn't look at the stills. So there went his last chance to say there'd been a mistake. Amateur.

“Okay,” he said, prefacing it with a put-upon sigh and treating Jack to a petulant grimace of the you're-killing-me-here variety.

Jack smiled politely, handed over the money, and walked away. The dealer didn't even notice him putting the
Gorgo
pictures back in the box.

Carducci repeated his question, with emphasis.

“Where the
fuck
did you find
this
?” he said.

“In the idiot's come-on box,” Jack said, nodding back in the direction of the other guy's table.

Carducci stared across the room with a devastated look of missed opportunity on his face, like it was the day before prom and he'd just seen the prettiest girl in class say yes to the one guy who'd actually had the balls to ask her.

“Fuck,” he said quietly and regretfully.

“So?” Jack said. “What do you know about it?” And Carducci looked back at him.

“You
have
heard of it,” he said. “Just not under that name. It was recut and retitled
The Cabinet of Doctor Coppelius
and—”

“Oh, fuck you,” Jack said, half disappointed and half relieved. “You are
so
full of shit.
Coppelius
never existed. It's a ghost film. A hoax.”

He remembered the story well. Some buff with a website and too much time on his hands—and, it had to be admitted, more than passing skills at both Photoshop and bullshit—had started a little viral frenzy nearly a decade ago. He'd been smart enough to bury it in an otherwise-accurate filmography rather than write a big splashy piece on the home page. You'd had to be interested enough to be
there in the first place (which, for any demographer, pegged you instantly as statistically likely to be an underachieving white male between twenty-five and fifty) and then choose to follow a couple of links. Even when you got there, there was no flashing sign or anything. It was just another item in a fairly exhaustive listing-with-credits of “Poverty Row Horrors Yet to be Released on Video.” Among the perfectly legitimate and verifiable titles, the webmaster—what was his online name? Cap'n Cadaver? Something equally ludicrous, anyway—had inserted a quiet little entry for a film which nobody'd ever heard of but which the capsule critique made sound like a nasty little treasure: