The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (49 page)

Writer of
Hellworld
, Carl Dupré, on the steps of the Hosts house (courtesy David Robinson).

His involvement in the film came after Bota bumped into him in a restaurant in Romania on the director’s first day there; Henriksen was just finishing up duties there on
Mimic 3: Sentinel
(J.T. Petty, 2003). Bota told him how much he admired his work and that he really wanted to use him in something. There were no parts appropriate in
Deader
but Henriksen told Bota to send him something to look at. This turned out to be
Hellworld
, with Dupré being in the fortunate position of writing the part of The Host with Henriksen in mind. When the actor read the script back in America, he was so excited by it he got on another plane and flew back to Romania. “I was very happy and very fortunate to have Lance Henriksen step into the role of The Host,”
⁹
said Bota, who immediately put him to work when he got there, digging the holes that the teens would eventually find themselves in. Professional that he is, Henriksen also made a request of the make-up department that they glue his ears back so he would look more feral—like a wolf or a Doberman.

As with
Deader
there would also be some peripheral members of the cast who were sourced from Romania itself. To begin with, there were the two girls actually from the train carriage scene with Joey in the previous film, who would now stand in for Gratuitous Tit-shot Girl and Sister Ursala. Ursala (Catalina Alexandru) would be required not only to strip this time but also to play a ghost nun who seduces Jake and sleeps with him in an attic room of the house. The police officer victim who gets staked in the mouth by Pinhead (Costi Mirica) and the smoothie who tries to pick up Chelsea (not credited) couldn’t speak a word of English and had to have their lines dubbed over. Someone else who didn’t get to say much, but wasn’t Romanian, was writer Dupré himself, who turns up as a barman in one scene, following in a tradition set by Peter Atkins back in
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth.

Crew-wise, Gary Tunnicliffe was a given, although he did find time to go back home briefly between shoots. In early drafts of the script there was something called the Hydro baby, which would come from inside a jar and run around attacking people à la Chucky. Bota asked Tunnicliffe to design this, but the cost of operating it would have been prohibitive. They then thought about a CGI one, which would have fallen—as always—under the remit of Jamison Goei’s visual effects department. In the end, it was decided to just fill what came to be known as the The Specimen Lab set (meant to be the basement of the house) with lots of Area 51-type deformed babies in jars. Tunnicliffe was also responsible for rounding up as much
Hellraiser
paraphernalia as he could for The Host’s “museum,” such as boxes, chains, and the Cenobite tarot cards. Other than that, it was business as usual, with the effects maestro going to work on the cast and generally piling on the gore, whether it be on hand during Tolputt’s Sacrifice Chair scene or lying just below Winnick to pump spurting blood out of the wound when she is stabbed by mistake. “Actually, all the cast were great,” said Gary. “We did a lot of prosthetics stuff to them and beat them up all quite badly at various points in this, everything from burying them in the ground in the freezing cold to having dirt on them, and they were all real troupers.”
¹⁰
The cast were no less complimentary of him, Winnick stating, “Gary was a hoot!”
¹¹
and Payton saying, “God gave him a gift, and it was to bloody up the world!”
¹²

Tunnicliffe was also in charge of the Cenobite make-up again, which included Doug Bradley’s distinctive look and the return of Chatterer and Bound, albeit in a slightly different form. Bound—now called Banded—was male this time and responsible for raising one of the teen victims up on a meat hook, taking the scene from
Texas Chainsaw Massacre
just that little bit further. The Cenobites would be played on this occasion by a combination of Tunnicliffe himself, Mike Regan and Snowy Highfield. But Tunnicliffe could also be seen right at the very end, when the coffins are discovered, with notepad in hand standing next to a police car—a character he maintains, with tongue in cheek, is the reporter from
Deader
who talks to Amy at the start, the only character apart from Pinhead to make it into both movies. He also handled the second unit direction, including various inserts to the film.

Most of Goei’s postproduction contributions to
Hellworld
were more subtle but had no less an impact on the overall film—the white mask, for instance, which suddenly takes on a hideous appearance during Mike’s fellatio scene, the extra blood spurts for Allison’s death, and the removal of the floor when trying to give the appearance of a whole room full of dead partygoers hanging from hooks and chains. But his tour de force would be the death of The Host, the Cenobites slicing him in pieces with blades on the end of chains—a homage to Bishop being ripped apart by the Alien Queen in
Aliens
. And the cinematographer on this shoot was another Romanian technician, Gabriel Kosuth, and the aim this time was to go for an American feel rather than European, because the movie is supposed to be set in the U.S. The DP’s previous credits included 1992’s
Filmare/Filmage
, which Kosuth also directed, and
The Secret Kingdom
(David Schmoeller, 1998).

The music score would come from Lars Anderson, who had worked on
Anacardium
(Scott Thomas, 2001) and the James Bond video game,
Nightfire
(2002). Anderson would provide some haunting piano music to match the tone of the ghost-house completely (in particular when Jake and Sister Ursala make love). But the thumping rock soundtrack would be mainly the department of music supervisor Melanie Miller, who brought in stacks of music from bands that the production could afford. The result was even more tracks than
Hell on Earth
boasted, such as some standouts from Bosshouse like “It Ends,” “Haunted,” “Bug Spray” and the number that ends the movie with perfect irony, “Look Who’s Standing Tall.” Other tracks included “91” by Skipngonaked, “Stay With Me (Unlikely)” and “Frozen” by Celldweller, “1 Man” by Sons of Poseidon, “Glass Procedure” by CIRRUS, “Berlin Wall” by Stumbling Mumbler and “I Funk Therefore I Am” by Sonicanimation.

Once more, the shoot was a fast and furious one (twenty to twenty-four days), fun but exhausting.
Hellworld
was shot on location at the big house—with rooms fitted out by production designer Christian Niculescu—and in its grounds, although for the forest shots the crew would have to move about thirty-five miles down the road outside the main part of town. Some interior scenes were filmed in The Writer’s House, the basement of the university hospital and on set (the attic where Chelsea puts her hand through the floorboards, for example). Bota was used to communicating through translators now, but still found it delayed things sometimes. The main problem, however, was the climate. When the clothing for the cast was chosen it was September and still moderately warm. Even when the shoot began in October, the weather held off, allowing Winnick to shoot the scenes where she runs to the car in only her cut-off red top with little difficulty. But by the end of the shoot in December, temperatures for the outside filming had dropped to something like -12° Celsius. A warm trailer had to be standing by between takes for Winnick now, and the steam you see coming from actors’ mouths is very genuine, indeed. As Doug Bradley commented, “There was no getting round the fact that standing in those temperatures was like plunging my head in a bucket of ice.”
¹³
The upshot was Winnick losing her voice at one point and her double catching pneumonia. “It was so cold,” reiterated Winnick, “it was to a point where my lips would freeze and I couldn’t get my words out.”
¹⁴

Shooting of the scene where Adam—also a Romanian who could speak no English (Stelian Urian)—has to set fire to himself had to take place in the open air, too, which was a bit of a problem as he was supposed to be digging a grave in his basement. This required the construction of a three-walled set out in a field, and the borrowing of a fire-suit from
Mimic 3
which had to be filmed in long shot when ablaze. But it was all worth it, as this resulted in one of the best and most harrowing scenes in the entire movie.

When a rough cut was ready and brought back to the States, Clive Barker was invited to take a look and again made some notes for Bota. This included teasing out the story of what’s really happening to the teens with quick inserts of them in the coffins during the hallucinatory scenes, and the appearance of two nuns at the start to foreshadow Sister Ursala’s story. This would mean that The Host’s exposition-heavy explanation at the end would be set up nicely, and Bota worked hard on the editing of this to give it more movement. More inserts were filmed the following spring, such as some sunny landscape shots, but by mid 2003 the movie was completed, although as we have already noted it was not released until 2005. What audiences were given then was a self-referential horror movie, an up-to-date, hip and young
Hellraiser
, made in the post
Scream
(Wes Craven, 1996) era. Henriksen had himself just starred in the third installment of that particular trilogy (Craven, 2000). But was there more beneath the surface gloss than met the eye at first glance?

30

WELCOME TO THE PARTY

A Better Place

The main story of
Hellworld
is based on two crucial, interlinked concepts, of equal importance. The first of these—exactly like
Deader
—is given away in the first scene. We hear the sounds of digging even before we see the initial shot of Adam, on his own, working away at the soil. He is literally digging his own grave, but it is the fact that he is alone that is significant—not just physically, but mentally. (We even discover later that his father abandoned him: “I don’t even think he’s got a dad,” says Derrick, “I think he made it all up.”) When the group go to his funeral, they discuss how they should have seen it coming but didn’t, how they couldn’t get through to him. It forms a massive part of the plot, spawning the guilt complex they—especially Chelsea and Jake—have about the suicide. “Suppose we’re in Hell because we belong here,” Chelsea says to Jake when she’s trapped in the attic. “For what?” asks Jake. “For not saving Adam,” she elucidates. “From who?” Jake says, still not understanding. “From himself. From Hellworld ... We knew what Hellworld was doing to Adam but we kept on playing it.” It is vital to note that when she makes this key speech, apart from the mobile phone—which we will come to in a moment—Chelsea is also quite alone. And like the birds she finds there (in direct contrast to the ones flying from the trees at the beginning) she is trapped.

So, indisputably, the first theme we must take into consideration is that of isolation, including enforced isolation. Each one of the characters is killed alone, first Allison who comes across a door with a Keep Out sign on the front of it, which she naturally opens. Inside she finds the Sacrifice Chair, which she sits in, then she bleeds to death as the spinning blades enter her chest. Derrick drops his inhaler on the dance floor and it is kicked down a grate, but he traces it down to the Specimen Room and retrieves it. Lying on a gurney, recovering from his asthma attack, he is then beheaded by Pinhead. Mike, meanwhile, is lured down there by the dark mystery woman whom he has hooked up with at the party—only for her to shut him in the room on his own. He then faces a painful death on the hook, killed by the Banded Cenobite. The tightly knit clump of teens are systematically separated and then murdered, all alone except for their killers. But then, when the ending reveals that they are actually suffering from chemical induced hallucinations, we realize that not even their killer was with them at the end—and in effect they killed themselves, dying in complete isolation buried inside wooden coffins in the grounds of the house (which itself is seemingly cut off completely from civilization).

Chelsea and Jake are split up as well, the former following the ghost of Adam to a room and then getting locked inside, the latter trailing Sister Ursala to her upstairs bedroom. This leads inevitably to them dealing with nightmare scenarios on their own, Chelsea—when she is finally released—encountering first The Host in the back of her car, then Pinhead in the middle of the wooded grounds. Jake has already experienced the most telling scene linked to isolation, when he tries to engage partygoers in conversation only for them all to ignore him: “Hey, how did you get into Hellworld? ... Is this a joke, hey ... Hey!” Soisson’s original idea here was to have Jake turn them around one by one but still be presented with their backs. The chilling effect we get instead sees Jake turn briefly before leaving and witness the entire population of the room hanging dead from hooks and chains.