The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (32 page)

One of the Gamblers from an original version of the script (courtesy Gary J. Tunnicliffe).

The script then jumps forward to present-day New York, where Phillip’s descendant, John Merchant, is having terrible nightmares involving his grandmother. He also dreams about a beautiful dark-haired woman and wakes up screaming, frightening his wife, Bobbi, and son Jack. Much of the following section runs exactly as it does in the finished film, with Angelique tracking him down via the building he has designed (from the end of
Hellraiser III
) and summoning Pinhead in the basement. The main differences concern the fact that there’s more rivalry between the two demons. Angelique represents Hell’s past and Pinhead represents Hell’s “more ordered” present. Atkins even comments during their first meeting, “It’s already clear that these two aren’t going to like each other.”
¹⁴
This lends more credence to Pinhead’s impatience when Angelique tries to seduce John, forcing him to take matters into his own hands. Hence, we are privy to some excellent exchanges between them:

ANGELIQUE: Your Hell has forgotten not only chaos and laughter but the slow delight of temptation.

PINHEAD: I’ve harvested more souls than you could dream of and their suffering is with me always.
That
is a slow delight.
¹⁵

We get a magnificent showdown at the end of this section where Pinhead asserts his authority over her when she double crosses him and uses the Elysium Configuration. Her motivation: she no longer wishes to be a slave, neither to Pinhead nor his new Hell. During the battle, Pinhead spits out a chain from his mouth which anchors itself in the ceiling and he flies it, “like a spider sucking itself back up a web strand.”
¹⁶
Then he virtually cocoons Angelique in chains, which wrap themselves around her—the ultimate retort to fans who were aggrieved about the Channard-Pinhead fray.

This is the second of two special effects set-pieces. The first involves a security guard called Valerie Dyson (who would be replaced by twins in the finished film). The 40-year-old single mom comes across Pinhead and Angelique “in conference.” For her trouble she is chased by the Chatter Beast, which Atkins describes as “like something the scientists at Cenobite central made as a joke from what was left of a man and what was left of a dog after a particularly nasty car crash.” It also has chattering teeth, “showing a distinct family resemblance to Pinhead’s old ally, the Chatterer.”
¹⁷
She escapes this creature by hiding in a lift, which proceeds to descend at a rapid pace: in effect she finds herself on an express elevator to Hell.

But these effects-laden scenes are as nothing when the script finally takes us into the future—the year 2204 AD—and into space. A speech Bobbi gives to Jack, after his father’s death, about keeping the box in the family ends in a camera track towards the boy’s eye until the blackness of his pupil fills the screen. We cut to a passenger shuttle in deep space. Government Ship
Endeavor VII
, then shift to the Minos, a crater-covered asteroid (named after the king from the Greek Minotaur myth), with towers and buildings laser-cut from the rock. (In a production note, Atkins stipulates that corridors shouldn’t be the stereotypical metal sci-fi fare, but rather partially rock.) A TV broadcast—originally an in-flight briefing onboard the
Endeavor
—presents us with the necessary exposition. The trillion-dollar facility has dropped out of radio communication and is also out of its geo-stationary orbit. We’re then introduced to Paul Merchant, another descendent of Phillip. His room is a shrine to his family’s history.

In the screenplay, Paul has been helped by Minos’s administrator, Corrine Cotton, a woman in her mid–20s and, one can only assume, a descendant of Kirsty. In a previous draft there was also a character called Gary Gerani—possibly a mirror character of Auguste? Paul leaves the task of aligning the station to Corrine while he operates the robot that opens the Lament Configuration box. We also see that the computer is using a holographic image of Paul, which prefigures his subterfuge at the end. The shuttle arrives, bringing with it four military figures and two civilians, themselves almost reflections of the gamblers from the first part. Edwards is a government official sent to take over from Corrine, and Chamberlain is a young scientist, while the soldiers include two males, Commander Carducci (presumably Mama Carducci’s descendent) and Parker, and two females, Roscoe and Rimmer (originally a male prior to draft number six).

Paul is arrested by Roscoe and placed in jail, then spends much of the remainder of the script trying to persuade Edwards and Carducci that there are now demons on Minos. When Parker and Rimmer let the Cenobites out of the holding pen—tricked by a monitor showing frightened and hungry children—they are immediately dispatched. Angelique’s Cenobitization has more of an impact here because we know she has been made a slave once more. Moreover, Pinhead’s line “No time for games” is a complete contrast to her philosophy in France. Chamberlain is killed by Cenobite twins and Roscoe by the Chatter Beast; Carducci is dispatched by Angelique using a mirror—dragging him so far through and slicing him in half.

Corrine is forced to strike Edwards in order to free Paul, who tells them both to flee. Corrine makes it only after blasting the Chatter Beast with the exhaust of her escape vehicle, but Edwards isn’t so fortunate and encounters both Angelique and the Twins. The scene is then set for Paul to face off against Pinhead, and there is another dramatic release of chains before Pinhead grasps he’s been fooled by the hologram. It also allows for a final scene between Angelique and Lemarchand’s descendant. In the end, the hologram only buys time for Corrine to activate the Elysium Configuration, not for Paul to escape, and he shares the Cenobites’ fate as Minos breaks apart. The camera then tracks in on a piece of the debris—the puzzle box—and suddenly we pull out to show the box resting in the hand of Phillip Lemarchand in his workshop in France, bringing the script completely full circle.

In a post–
Bloodline
interview Doug Bradley described a couple of very interesting variations on this ending that were considered: “The ending originally involved the space station folding up into the puzzle box. Then a hand came through space, picked up the box and dropped it onto a merchant’s table. Back to the first film, we had completed a time loop. When that was dropped, the final shot was going to be the shuttle returning to Earth with a trail of pins following it. Then they dropped the pins, so all you have now is the shuttle flying away.”
¹⁸

This screenplay is definitely one of the best of the
Hellraiser
sequels. It is intelligent, thorough, self-reflective—with superb parallels between the time zones—and hugely ambitious. Therein lay the first stumbling block. To make a film of this script would have required a considerable financial investment from Miramax. What was on offer was closer to that of the original film, an estimated $4 million. Without even taking into account inflation it was an impossible feat. Immediately, certain scenes involving special effects were scrutinized then dropped, and the space effects and Cenobite fights needed to be scaled down. The next step would be finding a director used to making less seem like more, someone able to make the impossible possible.

The search was not an easy one. Barker was an obvious choice, but quite apart from the fact he’d publicly stated he didn’t want to direct
any
sequels, he was also about to film
Lord of Illusions
for United Artists, an adaptation of his own short “The Last Illusion,” starring Scott Bakula as Harry D’Amour. Factor in executive producer duties on
Candyman 2: Farewell to the Flesh
(directed by Bill Condon), and Barker was well and truly crossed off the list. The other main contenders were Guillermo del Torro, whose 1993 vampire film,
Cronos
, had seriously impressed everyone in the genre, and Stuart Gordon, a director who thrived on low-budget horror fare, known largely for H.P. Lovecraft adaptations like
From Beyond
(1986). Gordon was all but signed up for the project when an artistic disagreement forced him to back out. It was now that special effects maestro Kevin Yagher was approached via his agents. Yagher had been in the film business several years, providing make-up for horror movies such as
Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter
(Joseph Zito, 1984),
Trick or Treat
(Charles Martin Smith, 1986) and a couple of
Nightmare on Elm Street
films. Yagher was also well known as the creator of the withering corpse-like Crypt keeper—from the anthology TV series,
Tales from the Crypt
, and designer of Chucky from
Child’s Play
(Tom Holland, 1988).

Pinhead with director Kevin Yagher (courtesy Gary J. Tunnicliffe).

In fact it was these two projects that afforded him the opportunity to direct. Famous producer Joel Silver, who had an office across from Yagher’s effects shop, was instrumental in securing him the
Crypt
effects work. When the technician promised he could shave the costs off a season of the series in exchange for directing an episode, the result was “Lower Birth,” which explained the origins of the Cryptkeeper. This in turn led to Yagher directing yet another episode in 1989, “Strung Along,” and finally to the second unit director’s job on
Child’s Play 2
(John Lafia, 1990). By turning his hand to directing, Yagher was following in the footsteps of other effects men, now filmmakers, such as Brian Yuzna (
Society
, 1989) and Tom Savini (
Night of the Living Dead
, 1990).

“When I got the call,” Yagher said in an on-set interview, “I told my agents that I didn’t want to do
Hellraiser IV
. I mean, what could I possibly do that was different and hadn’t been done before in one, two and three? I thought the original film was great! Then I got Pete Atkins’ script and I fell in love with it.”
¹⁹
Yagher was especially taken with the eighteenth century scenes and going back to the
Hellraiser
origins, or “visual circularity,” as Barker described it to him.
²⁰
So with a director secured, the cast came next. Doug Bradley would be reprising his role as Pinhead, a given after his reaction to seeing some else in the make-up during
Hellraiser III
. However, he agreed that Pinhead should be slightly less prominent than in
III
. For the other characters, just as they had done in previous entries, the makers would hone in on relative unknowns.

Twenty-seven-year-old Canadian-born actor Bruce Ramsey was cast in the three important main roles: that of Phillip Lemarchand and his descendants John and Paul Merchant. After small TV roles and a part as a teenager in Sandor Stern’s creepy horror film
Pin
in 1988, Ramsey went on to star in films such as the cannibal survival movie
Alive
(Frank Marshall, 1993) and
Killing Zoe
(Roger Avary, 1994). Speaking about the part, the actor said, “Phillip is a young man with great ambition and he wants to be recognized, so he is seduced by Angelique’s power.... Lemarchand is not an evil man, but he is attracted to the dark side.”
²¹
About John and Paul, he mused: “In the second story, his descendant, who is a husband and a father, is more mature and understands himself better. The third character is an old and weathered man who has spent his whole life trying to secure the ultimate trap for the horror which has plagued his entire family for several hundred years.”
²²

Cast as principal female villain Angelique was Chilean Valentina Vargas. With her dark, sultry looks she was perfect. Her acting CV began with European TV work, playing Laure in an episode of
Le Petit Docteur
(1986), then a role as La masseuse in Pierre Jolivet’s
Strictement personnel
(1985). But it was in Jean-Jacques Annaud’s
The Name of the Rose
(1986) that she made a real impact starring alongside Sean Connery and Christian Slater in this fourteenth century murder mystery. Parts followed in Luc Besson’s
Le Grand Bleu
(The Big Blue, 1988) and
Street of No Return
(Samuel Fuller, 1989). The uneven
Twin Sitters
(John Paragon, 1994) marked something of a low spot, but did at least prophesy what her character would be doing in
Bloodline
. Though she almost didn’t take the role because she was having nightmares about Pinhead coming to kill her,
²³
she soon warmed to the idea and even embraced tapping into this side of her character. “For the first time in my career, I’m playing a villainess in a horror movie, and I’m really loving it,” she said. “In the first two tales, she’s like a serpent because she’ll trick, seduce and manipulate people. They’ll think they’re in Heaven until she turns around and backstabs them.”
²⁴