The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (10 page)

So Barker’s message to the costume designers was quite specific when it came to the Cenobites. Says Jane Wildgoose of a meeting she had with him:

He gave me some very clear indications of what he’d like and then I did my research.... My notes say that he wanted: 1) Areas of revealed flesh where some kind of torture has or is occurring; 2) Something associated with butchery involved. And here we have a very Clive turn of phrase. I’ve written down “repulsive glamour.” And other notes I’ve made about what he wanted is that they should be “magnificent superbutchers.”
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The “repulsive glamour” comment is imperative, as it’s something Barker has referred to a lot—the beauty of horrific images and even the attraction we as observers have to them. To quote him: “I certainly get a lot of letters from people who think that Pinhead in
Hellraiser
, for all his strange disfigurements, is sexy, endearing. There are more things going on, in other words, in these kinds of strange disfigurements than simply saying this is disgusting, this is repulsive.”
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Pinhead is very much the embodiment of this mode of thinking, which is one of the reasons his character has endured and reached the heights of horror movie icon. But what are the others?

The horror genre is one that lends itself exceptionally well to iconography. The vampire with fangs and cloak, the hairy werewolf and shambling zombie with tattered clothes. Every so often a film comes along that delivers a momentous villain; and usually the actor playing the role will be forever linked with it. From the Universal stable, Bela Lugosi as Dracula, who became so interlinked with his character he was buried in the cape, and Boris Karloff as Frankenstein, with his flat head and stitches. Later, there was Christopher Lee playing the famous Count in Hammer productions, who must surely be a forerunner to Pinhead in every way. He is dignified but capable of unspeakable acts, tall and elegant but with an underlying barbaric quality. Bradley himself has commented, “That was very much an important element to me, that he had this love affair with the English language. Which as a demon from hell, committed to the sado-masochistic disposal of people, struck me as very exciting. When he spoke it was like an echo of Oscar Wilde or Noel Coward.”
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In the ’70s and ’80s, slasher killers like Robert Englund’s Freddy Krueger fulfilled the role of iconic horror monster in a very different way: with visual or verbal one-liners complementing their distinctive masks or ensemble. Then came Anthony Hopkins’ portrayal of Hannibal Lecter to take us into the 1990s, which again has something in common with the Cenobite mentality. Fans of horror have always coveted their antiheroes and famous examples become such a part of popular culture they are recognized by all. This isn’t something a director can plan in advance, although many have tried and failed. It is simply that certain characters immediately resonate with audiences.

Doug Bradley’s Pinhead is just such a character. To quote Barker again, “I think people came out of
Hellraiser
that first time they saw it, they probably said, ‘Hey, check out the guy with the pins in his head’.... I would love to say that, oh yeah, God, it was all planned. It wasn’t.”
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The actor that brought Pinhead to life, Doug Bradley (courtesy Doug Bradley).

This popularity trend is due chiefly to three factors. First, the performance Bradley gives is exceptional. He pitches the character exactly right, understated when necessary, authoritative when required, quite simply a powerful and terrifying screen presence. In this respect he was following advice from Barker to “Do less. Do less,” ensuring even the slightest expression in make-up had a dramatic impact. What then comes across is a figure very much in control of the situation, and very confident in his own abilities. Pinhead is not a person to be crossed. The fact that Bradley takes the role seriously makes us as viewers take him seriously. When questioned about the popularity of Pinhead, Bob Keen, who came up with the make-up, had this to say in two different interviews: “It’s the combination of several elements. Perhaps the most important is that Doug gives an absolutely straight performance, and it was Clive Barker’s genius in
Hellraiser
to present a character who was significantly different, strange and aloof from his surroundings, for the audience to be drawn to him.”
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“Ninety-five per cent of what Pinhead is, is what Doug Bradley brings to the role.... And Doug’s voice was just fantastic. You hear him and he has these wonderful lines and the whole thing just grew and grew. So I think the look’s important, but I think that if the wrong actor had been wearing this, Pinhead would never be the success that he is.”
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It is a testament to Bradley, and more proof of his iconic status, that his lines in the film are the most quoted. Some were even used as taglines for the movie (“Angels to some, demons to others” and “We’ll tear your soul apart.”) His choice for the voicing of Pinhead should also rate a mention here. Obviously, he couldn’t have pitched it like the asexual character from
The Hellbound Heart
. “The voice I gave to Pinhead is anything but ‘light and breathy,’ and certainly sounded like no ‘excited girl’ it’s ever been my pleasure to know.... For the voice I simply went with how I was hearing the lines in my head, which was low, slow menace.”
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And the audio was enhanced even more in postproduction.

Secondly, as already suggested, the mystery surrounding the Cenobites at the start of the movie is vital. Who are they? Where did they originally come from? Why do they do the things they do? These questions are only vaguely answered in
Hellraiser
, and no background information is given at all. This mystique is part of what makes the Cenobites, and Pinhead especially, tantalizing. In conversations with Barker, Bradley was told that the character had once been human, but gave him no indication as to when this had been. Consequently there is also a melancholy behind the performance, a remembrance of something Pinhead had once been but can’t go back to, a longing for his humanity. In successive films, this was expounded upon and he was given a back history: a British Army captain who sought the box after enduring the horrors of World War I. The other Cenobites, too, were depicted as once being human before their transformation in the labyrinths of Hell. It could be argued that the characters lost something that contributed to their success in the original film. Granted, the history gave the Cenobites much more emotional depth—allowing us to relate to them. But the unknown is often more frightening than the familiar. In
Hellraiser
, for the time being, that enigma, the puzzle of the Cenobites themselves, remains a secret.

We must also mention briefly the Cenobites as metaphors for our deepest instinctive fears—and we are always attracted to what we fear the most. Chatterer, with those wires pulling back his lips, revealing gums and teeth, crystallizes a very real anxiety about being eaten, possibly alive. On a more modern level, he brings with him connotations of dental work, too, the anxiety we all feel about this particular profession. Butterball represents fear about gluttony, of having overeaten until fit to burst, as he literally has. The stitches used on his flesh could be seen again as phobia about the medical profession and operations, which combines nicely with the terror of going blind when you realize his eyes are stitched shut under those sunglasses. The Female Cenobite’s vaginal gash in her throat is clearly a representation of man’s fear of female sexuality. The very fact that it is on display, not hidden, gives it the power to shock (and led to a raft of nicknames among the crew to diffuse the alarm, such as Deep Throat and Cunt Throat). As for Pinhead himself, he represents the greatest fear for both men and women, that of being penetrated against our will. He has been violated by the nails, not once, but dozens of times. And they remain there as a constant reminder of his defilement.

The third reason for the iconic status of Pinhead is that he was used to promote the film through posters and cinema trailers. His became the official face of
Hellraiser
. The marketing people at New World quickly recognized this potential, bringing Bradley back in for a photo shoot after filming had finished. When it came time to put the black contact lenses in, they discovered that one had melted, so the actual poster images show Pinhead with Doug’s blue eyes. But it makes very little difference to the overall image, which was exploited in the first instance to draw audiences—up on billboard posters in the U.S., Australia, Japan. Then it was used to make money through merchandise.

Directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg had shown that films could be veritable gold mines when it came to spin-off merchandising, with
Star Wars
(1977) and
E.T.
(1982) both earning more from this than from actual box office returns. With slasher antiheroes doing the same for the horror genre, it was perhaps no surprise that, soon after
Hellraiser
’s release, cups, T-shirts and jackets adorned with Pinhead appeared, backed up by promotional campaigns. Today, Pinhead models, toys, badges and just about anything else are available, further enforcing this icon’s standing in popular culture. Can it be a coincidence that the video and DVD of the film has remained a constant seller, when it has Pinhead on the cover? As intelligent and as interesting as the film is, there should be no refuting the Cenobites’ hand in its cult status.

4

SUCH SIGHTS TO SHOW YOU

As broached in the previous chapter, Barker is a champion of the horrific image as beauty, or what he has sometimes termed “The Revelation Response.” This is, to quote him, “The sheer wonder of monsters and beasts and extraordinary things, which has always been one of the things that draws me to horror.... It’s the appeal of the strange.”
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Without question,
Hellraiser
is a visually extreme film. There are fans who watch it simply to see if they can endure the intensity of the gore scenes. Yet, unlike splatter flicks such as
The Evil Dead
(Sam Raimi, 1981) and
Re-Animator
(Stuart Gordon, 1985), the bloodletting of
Hellraiser
is not the main impetus of the film. And it is shot in such a way as to inspire as much awe as it does repulsion.

The standout episode in this respect has to be Frank’s resurrection. When New World saw the progress Barker was making on the movie, they gave him more money for special effects, and this was one of the scenes added afterwards. Originally the director was just going to cut from Larry’s blood soaking into the floorboards to him reappearing on the night of the dinner party. In retrospect it is difficult to see how the film could work without this added Hitchcockian “ticking bomb under the table.” But it is much more than just a narrative device to drum up unease.

The sequence itself is a carefully choreographed exercise in spectacular distaste, so riveting it is hard to look away. It begins with a heart beating under the floorboards, lifted almost directly from Poe’s “The Telltale Heart,” where the sound of a pumping heart forces a murderer to admit to his crime. As Frank pieces himself together little by little, accompanied by Christopher Young’s score, we cannot help but marvel at the magnificence of the human body, even as we’re reaching for the sick bags. Bob Keen, who was responsible for this scene, explains: “We’d already done it once. The first time we did it, it was a dried-up corpse that came out of the walls. None of us were happy with this. It was decided right at the end that we would go back and redo it, and it became this nightmare of visceral imagery.”
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With a combination of reverse shots and tricks—like using a rig for the floor shake and porridge pumped through holes—Keen came up with the most memorable scene in the entire film. The last shot, exquisitely back lit by Vidgeon, is quite literally breathtaking. Each stage of Frank’s regeneration holds a fascination for viewers that elevates it above someone having an eye gouged out or their head cut off. Stimulated by the illustrations of Vesalius, Barker delivers lasting images which continue to disturb long after the final credits have rolled.

For the surrealism of
Hellraiser
, Barker also looked to the films of a favorite past director and artist, Jean Cocteau, for inspiration. One of his earliest memories is of seeing Cocteau on TV while he was at home sick in the autumn of 1960, and watching a clip from one of his movies: “It was called, though the title meant nothing to me at that time,
The Testament of Orpheus
, and in it this same old man appeared [Cocteau], dressed much as he’d been dressed in his interview. He was wandering in a rather fake-looking landscape of ruins, where he encountered a menacing woman dressed in a cloak and elaborate helmet, armed with a spear. Flanking her were men wearing horse masks....”
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