The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy Read Online Free PDF

further, up the stairs and down the road to damnation. But she gives the effigy a cold stare and carries on, and will regret it just as Kirsty does.
    Larry’s religious beliefs are just as indistinct. It’s unclear whether he gets rid of all the religious artifacts simply to please Julia, or for his own benefit. Has the death of his previous wife shaken any faith he might have had in the Lord? He does choose Sunday for them to move in, indicating that he cares little for religious tradition. In The Hellbound Heart it says, “It was the Lord’s Day up this end of the city. Even if the owners of these well-dressed houses and well-pressed children were no longer believers, they still observed the Sabbath.” 14 All except Larry and his clan. But perhaps there’s another explanation. A man so apathetic about everything else, his family, pleasing his wife, the state of his marriage, might also be lackluster when it comes to believing in something spiritual.
    Like Julia, Frank is another contradiction in terms. On the surface he’s everything reprehensible and amoral about the human race. Selfish, lecherous and downright vicious: the true villain of the piece. So one has to ask why he allows the religious artifacts to remain in the house while he conducts his transaction with the Cenobites. Is it for protection in case things go horribly wrong—in which case, they offer none at all. Or is it because he believed they might well be angelic beings, come to provide him with pleasure: if they are, then they have more in common with the angels from The Forbidden than with any biblical text. Frank realizes all too late that Hell is not the place he thought it would be. By seeking to escape, therefore, he seeks to redeem himself. He is, quite literally, born again. Either that or he’s resurrected, which has the same religious connotations. A shame then that his base nature comes to the fore again as the film progresses. Despite this he still plays the martyr when the Cenobites catch up with him. Strung out with arms wide in a re-creation of the crucifixion, he recites a line from the Bible: “Jesus wept.” It doesn’t save him, just as his victims who called out “Christ!” before their death were shown no mercy.
    It might sound odd, but the Cenobites are even more ambiguous from a religious standpoint. They are demons, true, but not in the typical sense of the word. They do not seek to bring about chaos; rather, theirs is an order of discipline. They have to follow codes insomuch as they can only take back people who have opened the box, generally those who have been searching for them in the first place, with the right frame of mind. As Pinhead says, they are, indeed, “Angels to some, demons to others.” Theirs is a religion in itself, and the Hell they come from contains none of the reported fires or pits; its corridors are gray stone, just like a church or monastery (the very name itself, Cenobite, is derived from the term coe’nobite, which means member of a monastic community). And as actor Doug Bradley recalls, “There was this stuff that was filmed for Hellraiser and I don’t know whether it exists, but it was certainly filmed. Clive ... had us in these little monkish cells with the walls covered in taboo fetishist quasi-religious iconic things, pacing backwards and forwards.” 15
    The arrival of the Cenobites in this realm is heralded by the chiming of a bell, similar to the one we hear on the Sunday as Larry and Julia move into Lodovico Street. And when they are gathered together only three are generally shown in a shot at a time—A trinity: a darker Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, with Pinhead’s crown of nails replacing the thorns. Like Kirsty, they are also bathed in light when we see them properly for the first time in the hospital. The Cenobites are not merely evil for evil’s sake, rampant creatures causing devastation and destruction like the monsters from so many B movie horror flicks. They only