Hellraiser

HELLRAISER

Directed and scripted by Clive Barker (based on his novella The Hellbound Heart), the 1987 film Hellraiser features a unique structure: for the first two-thirds, a character named Julia (nefarious and unsympathetic though she may be) appears to be the protagonist.  For the final third, Julia’s stepdaughter (Kirsty) takes over the role of being the most active central character.  Also of note, Pinhead (who became the franchise’s most iconic character) barely appears in the movie and mostly shows up in the final third.

The tale follows Julia and her husband (Larry) as they move into a property that has been in the family for some time and has sat vacant until Larry and his wife arrive.  What they don’t know is that Larry’s brother (Frank, who in the past had a passionate affair with Julia) messed around with a mystical puzzle box in the house’s uppermost room and summoned a group of unpleasant preternatural beings (“demons to some, angels to others” in the words of Pinhead).  These bipedal humanoids tortured and killed Frank, then whisked away his soul.  Larry accidentally cuts his hand and spills quite a lot of blood on the upstairs room’s floor.  When the room’s unoccupied, Frank begins to physically rematerialize in the room piecemeal (little more than a partial skeleton and a brain at first).  Julia encounters Frank when he’s further along in his regeneration and able to speak.  He pleads with his former mistress to bring him more blood to enable him to regenerate further.  She agrees to do so.  While Larry’s at work and nobody else is home (Larry’s biological daughter Kirsty, a young adult, lives in a rented room elsewhere), Julia brings a succession of men she’s picked up (allegedly for sex) to the house and lures them upstairs, where their blood nourishes an ever-more-complete Frank.  To delve into the plot further would be to deprive you of the creepy imagery and surprising story twists that are best enjoyed by actually watching the film.

I’ve never read Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart, so I can’t compare and contrast or discuss this project in terms of how it fares as an adaptation.  As a movie, Hellraiser works marvelously.  Characters generally behave in psychologically-realistic ways (Kirsty is visibly traumatized after an encounter with Frank), the backstory about Julia’s affair with Frank gets revealed through a series of often steamy flashbacks in a way that doesn’t detour too far away from the main narrative spine for very long, and the core concept itself is original and unlike any horror films that came before.  The second edition of the Overlook Film Encyclopedia of Horror (edited by Phil Hardy) states that “for the most part, Hellraiser is a return to the cutting edge of horror…”  Hellraiser in 1987 raised the bar for the horror genre.  The film that launched this franchise holds up well in the present and retains its ability to engross, unnerve, and chill viewers.  Seek it out.