The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy Read Online Free PDF Page B

practice their trade on those who deserve and desire their attentions.

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    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.” 1 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.” 2 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....” 3
     

    Skinned Frank concept sketch for Hellraiser (courtesy Clive Barker).
    Later he would get to see Cocteau’s other movies at Film Societies in Liverpool, and another that holds a tremendous significance here must surely be La Belle et la Bête , Beauty and the Beast (1946). The poster for this alone should be enough to send chills of recognition through any Hellraiser fan, for its depiction of the two major players is an almost exact replica of Julia and Frank