Vintage postcard by Memory Card, no. 289. Clive Barker and Doug Bradley as Pinhead.
Vintage postcard by Memory Card, no. 290. Pat Miller as Butterball in Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987).
Inspired by Punk fashion, Catholicism and S&M clubs
After being disappointed with the way his material had been treated by producers in Underworld (George Pavlou, 1985), Clive Barker wrote 'The Hellbound Heart' as his first step in directing a film by himself. Barker wrote it during the height of the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween film series. The concept of a cube being used as a portal to hell has its basis in the urban legend of The Devil's Toy Box, which concerns a six-sided cube constructed of inward-facing mirrors. According to legend, individuals who enter the structure and then close it will undergo a surreal, disturbing phenomenon that will simultaneously grant them a revelatory experience and permanently warp their minds.
Clive Barker drew inspiration for the cenobite designs from Punk fashion, Catholicism and the visits he took to S&M clubs in New York and Amsterdam. For Pinhead specifically, Barker drew inspiration from African fetish sculptures. Christopher Figg agreed to produce and New World Pictures agreed to fund the film for $900,000. After securing funding for the film adaptation in early 1986, Barker and Figg assembled a team to design the cenobites. Among the team were Bob Keen and Geoffrey Portass at Image Animation and Jane Wildgoose, a costume designer who was requested to make a series of costumes for 4-5 "super-butchers" while refining the scarification designs with Image Animation.
In Hellraiser (1987), Frank Cotton (Andrew Robinson) buys a magic cube-shaped puzzle from a mysterious Oriental market merchant at a Moroccan bazaar. The puzzle is said to open, for those who solve it correctly, a realm of otherworldly pleasures. At home in his bare attic, Frank solves the puzzle but it creates a portal to another, otherworldly dimension and hooked chains emerge, tearing him apart. A black-robed figure resets the puzzle and the room is restored to normal.
Frank has disappeared completely. Sometime later, Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Clare Higgins) move into the house in which Frank disappeared and which is also Larry's childhood home. Their daughter Kirsty and her boyfriend take a room nearby. While carrying household goods into the house, Larry gets his hand open on a protruding nail, spilling a lot of blood on the floor of the room where Frank tries to solve the puzzle and is drawn into the world of the Cenobites. Larry's blood is absorbed by the wooden floor of the room and this revives Frank, and he returns to the world dimension. Julia, who was previously secretly having an affair with Frank, is irresistibly drawn to the empty room. Here, to her dismay, she finds Frank, who has a hideous, monstrous appearance.
The newly resurrected, partially formed, body of Frank requires a series of blood sacrifices to escape the clutches of a gang of other-dimensional demon sadists, Pinhead (Doug Bradley) and the cenobites. Julia secretly lures men from bars into the house, who are killed there by Frank, to absorb their blood to fully recover. Larry's daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) gets wind of this and follows Julia into the house, where, to her horror, she finds a dead man whose blood has previously been ingested by Frank. Then Frank appears, and he grabs Kirsty. Kirsty fiercely resists, however, and tries to hit Frank's head with the cube she saw on the floor. When Frank commands her to give him the puzzle, she throws the puzzle out through the window and flees the house. She walks dazedly through the city with the puzzle in her hand, only to collapse a moment later. When she recovers at the hospital, the doctor gives her the puzzle and says the police want to speak to her.
Vintage postcard by Memory Card, no. 291. Eric Willhelm as CD Head in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Tony Randel, 1992). CD Head is a cenobite, who only appears in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992). It was an uncredited performance by the then 23-year-old Eric Willhelm who was fresh out of college and working as a delivery guy at Domino's, when the film crew of the second Hellraiser sequel descended on his town, Greensboro, NC. Working as an extra on the film, he was asked to play a cenobite called CD Head, named because he used to be a DJ. As a cenobite, he makes CDs come out of his chest and throws them into people's heads. Eamon Jacobs at Business Insider: "Some of the clubbers face grim fates, including being turned into some brilliantly designed cenobites, like CD (Eric Willhelm), who churns out discs from his stomach to use as throwing knives. It's a shame he doesn't pop up elsewhere though."
A serious, intelligent and disturbing horror film
Since its release, Hellraiser (1987) has divided critics but the film generally received praise. Time Out London referred to the film as "Barker's dazzling debut" that "creates such an atmosphere of dread that the astonishing set-pieces simply detonate in a chain reaction of cumulative intensity" and concluded that the film was "a serious, intelligent and disturbing horror film". Melody Maker called it the greatest horror film made in Britain.
In the United States, The New York Times stated that Barker cast "singularly uninteresting actors" while "the special effects aren't bad - only damp", and Roger Ebert decried its "bankruptcy of imagination".
Clive Barker intended to portray Pinhead as an articulate and intelligent character, but initially, this was not well received by the producer. They suggested that Pinhead should act more like Freddy Krueger and that he should be a silent character like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Pinhead is present in Barker's book, but is not the lead Cenobite (Butterball is), although Pinhead is not designated as either male or female, the novel's description hints at feminine characteristics.
The female Cenobite, Butterball, the Chatterer and the Engineer all had more prominent roles in the book, but the film adaptation prevented this: Butterball and the Chatterer had some lines in the original script, but due to the makeup preventing the actors from speaking (and the Chatterer from seeing), their lines were either cut or given to Pinhead and the female Cenobite. The Engineer was demoted and completely remade to the point of being unrecognisable, and the female Cenobite - while capable of speaking - had makeup that severely limited the actress' head and facial movements. Though fixed by the sequel, these problems meant Pinhead took point, making him the face of the film.
Many viewers have commented about the poor quality of the FX at the end of the film. Clive Barker has explained that, due to a very limited budget, there was no money left to have the FX done professionally after the primary filming. Instead, Barker and a "Greek guy" animated these scenes by hand over a single weekend. Barker has also commented that he thinks the FX turned out very well considering the amount of alcohol the two consumed that weekend. Hellraiser (1987) had nine sequels, but for a long time, it was one of the few successful Horror series-starters to escape the remake treatment. In 2011, Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer were considered to write and direct a remake, but this never happened because the studio wanted it to be rated PG-13. Barker attempted one himself in 2013, but this project got stuck in development hell. After 45 years, the reboot was finally made, Hellraiser (2022), co-written by David S. Goyer and directed by David Bruckner.
Vintage postcard by Memory Card, no. 292. Peter Atkins as Barbie in Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987).
Vintage postcard by Memory Card, no. 293. Grace Kirby as female cenobite in Hellraiser (Clive Barker, 1987).
Sources: Business Insider, Teen News, Wikipedia (Dutch and English) and IMDb.
No comments:
Post a Comment