John Carpenter's Halloween, The Exorcist, and The Shining are examples of good horror movies that are also good cinematic works. Friday the 13th (1980), Wes Craven's A Nightmare on Elm Street, and the movie I saw for the first time this month, Hellraiser, are notable horror movies that, as cinematic works, are just good, not great. But these movies have hung around throughout the years because of how they scared audiences, the memorable villains/monsters they had, and they, like better cinematic works, leave an impression on people when they are watched for the first time. Clive Barker adapted and directed Hellraiser from his novella The Helbound Heart. It was his first time directing and it's a very decent debut movie. 
Hellraiser certainly has memorable villains. I remember every Halloween the "Pinhead" mask was in stores and in catalogues and it scared me a lot more than any of the other masks of deformed monsters. I still find the image unsettling. It's not the face of a hideous monster; he looks like a regular person, albeit with albino skin, but the grid pattern impressed on his head and the nails, or pins, at each corner has unsettling implications about body mutilation that stayed with me long after the images of the other monsters faded from my mind. The movie is like that too. 
As I got older and watched more horror movies I learned that the scariest thing about most of the movies down the horror aisle is the picture on the box. That's not true for Hellraiser. With monster movies there's always a chance that when we finally see the monster it will be unimpressive or laughable. That is not true for Hellraiser. A lot of monster movies tend to follow the trend set by JAWS and hold off on showing the monster for as long as possible. In the first 3 minutes of Hellraiser we see a man torn to pieces by hooks and chains. We also see the otherworldly Cenobites. When we see the Cenobites we see them bathed in light. We see every detail of their forms and S&M inspired costumes. You get the impression that these are not the kind of monsters that hide around corners or stay in the shadows. 
But the Cenobites and the puzzlebox that summons them are the background of this movie. The plot concerns and unhappy couple, Larry and his wife, Julia, who move into a house where Frank, the man torn to pieces in the movie's opening, lies under the floorboards of a room upstairs. Larry cuts himself and bleeds on the floor and his spilled blood, later on, regenerates Frank into a skeletal shell of a man. Frank used to be Julia's lover and he convinces her to lure men back to the room and kill them so he can use their blood to further regenerate himself. Julia is still very much attracted to Frank. It's a sick love story. Larry is clueless to all of this because the plot requires him to be, but his character is supposed to be the passive husband. Caught in the middle of all of this is Kirsty, Larry's daughter. She's in her late teens or early 20s presumably, and though she seems like a marginal character at first she turns out to be the film's protagonist. Despite the attention Pinhead and the Cenobites receive, the real villain of the movie is Frank. He gets his ex-lover/sister-in-law to murder for him, wants to kill his brother, and kill and have sex with his niece. Pinhead may be a demon, but Frank is a real monster.
I really like character of Kirsty, played by Ashley Laurence. She's the only innocent character in the movie and, unlike many female characters in horror movies, she's not just a screaming girl. She gets pissed off and fights back. She's smart enough to run away when the monsters show up; she runs downstairs when the monster is upstairs, she only runs upstairs when she's chased up the stairs. At the climax of the movie, her boyfriend shows up while she's being chased all over the house by monsters, and she deals with them herself. At one point she even pushes him out of the way when he tries to help her close the puzzle box. The first time she encounters the Cenobites she's even able to negotiate a deal with Pinhead to let her go. Now that's a heroine. 
You could interpret Hellraiser as having a moralist, conservative stance against sex, like so many teen slasher movies are accused of having. But the subject matter and images are so messed up that it really never occurs to you while you're watching it. If you think about it you'll realize that the movie has a "you reap what you sow" message and not a "sex will destroy you" message. All of the characters lay their own paths of destruction except for Kirsty whose only mistake is thinking that the puzzle box is just a puzzle box. You'll also realize that the Cenobites are indifferent. They don't care who you are or what you've done. You opened the box and now they're here to do what they do and tear your soul apart.
I wouldn't recommend watching Hellraiser unless you're a horror movie fan or want to see something crazy and twisted. It's not nearly as graphic and gory as today's Saw and Final Destination movies. There are gross, repulsive images but the movie's not a geek show; there's a story and reason for what you're seeing. Hellraiser is the kind of movie that probably won't scare you the way you expect horror movies to scare you, but the images and the ideas that go along with them stay with you and make you think about all kinds of things you'd rather not think about. Most of the acting isn't stellar, it's as good as it needs to be, but this isn't the kind of movie you watch for the acting anyway.
There's certainly a cult around this movie. A Google Image search of Ashley Laurence returned a lot of photos of her at conventions and signing autographs. Clive Barker receives fan mail from women wanting to bear Pinhead's children (now that's a social fringe) and in a featurette on the 20th anniversary DVD he begins by saying that this is the last time he'll talk "about that son-of-a-bitch movie." There's a performance art group called Puncture that draws on Hellraiser for inspiration for their shows (they puncture and hang themselves by their skin and do other forms of body mutilation). People say there's an S&M element to this movie, but I think it is more implied than shown; if anything it just makes you think about it. But you don't have to be a freak to watch or even like this movie. It's the kind of horror movie I prefer; one that relies on mood, atmosphere, and ideas more than gore and pop-up scares. There are just a few surprise scares but the movie hardly relies on them. There are impressive visual effects and makeup; and while I can't quite say that it doesn't rely on effects (the main villain, Frank, is a skinless body for most of the movie), that's not where the movie draws it's thrills. The big special effects scene is when Frank regenerates from tiny pieces. It's really impressive and gross and it reminds me of the transformation scene in An American Werewolf in London. Some of the optical effects however, such as the lights the accompany the appearance and disappearance of the Cenobites, seem dated and even cheesy. I spent a lot of time thinking about what the appeal is of a movie that makes the words repulsive, sick, twisted, dark, unsettling, and disturbing all come to mind. Hellraiser isn't really a movie about hell and monsters and pain and pleasure. It's a type of haunted house movie. It's about people misusing each other and misguided desires and curiosities. Ashley Laurence has her own idea about the appeal of the movie, and I think she puts it quite well, "People, I think, like the intimacy and the danger and the rawness and the ugliness. It's so grotesque that I think it's really beautiful, if that makes any sense. It's so human and so flawed that it, I think, makes it more easy to relate to because it's damaged and it's wounded and it's open."
No comments:
Post a Comment