Review: Hellraiser (1987)

Hellraiser (1987)

Rated R

Score: 4 out of 5

Hellraiser, written and directed by Clive Barker and based on his novella "The Hellbound Heart", is perhaps best described as an '80s version of a Hammer horror movie. On one hand, it's got gothic British atmosphere in spades, between its setting, its characters, its eroticism, and the twisted family drama at the center of its story, and on the other, it's got an archetypal final girl heroine and all the gnarly gore and creature effects of any proper '80s splatter flick. It's a movie that starts slow (though that could just have been me trying to watch it late at night when I was already getting tired) but closes strong, a journey into depravity that's filled with psychosexual overtones beneath its fleshy exterior while still leaving much to the imagination. The cast is stellar, the score by Christopher Young is perfect at setting the mood, and the makeup effects on its villains are grisly and grotesque, even if I do think it held off on showing off its now-iconic demons for too long. There's a reason why this is a classic, one of the (at least superficially) classier creature features of the '80s, and one that set a high bar that its many sequels were never able to match.

The film starts with a hedonistic degenerate named Frank Cotton purchasing a strange puzzle box at a bazaar in Morocco. Upon taking it back home, he solves the puzzle and winds up opening a portal to another dimension, where he is promptly taken and torn apart by monstrous, vaguely human-looking figures. Shortly after, Frank's brother Larry moves into his old house with his new wife Julia and his teenage daughter Kirsty in tow, and after injuring himself moving some furniture and bleeding all over the floor of the attic, accidentally brings Frank's soul back into our world and revives him, albeit in an incomplete manner (for instance, he's missing his skin). Julia, who it turns out had been having an affair with Frank behind Larry's back while he was still alive, discovers him in the attic and learns that he needs more flesh in order to regain his strength and stay one step ahead of the Cenobites, the demons and monsters who had tortured his soul beyond the grave and aren't too pleased that he escaped. Julia is understandably troubled by this, but she always did love Frank more than Larry, and so she, at first reluctantly but eventually quite enthusiastically, starts stalking bars and picking up various men looking for some loving in order to deliver them to Frank, who kills them and drains their life energy to rebuild his body. Julia can't keep her secret forever, though, especially once Kirsty catches her bringing a strange man into their home.

This is largely Clare Higgins' movie as she plays Julie, one half of its main villainous duo and the one who gets a lot of the heavy lifting in the story. Watching her, you can tell that what Frank is asking Julia to do for him is tearing her apart inside, as she feels sick to her stomach the first time she murders a man. However, each subsequent time sees it come easier and easier to her, causing her to slowly turn from a sympathetic adulterer to a classy villainess who comes to dominate the screen, losing her humanity piece by piece as she eventually realizes that she'll have to do something about Larry if she wants to be with her true love Frank. Frank himself, meanwhile, is not only a freakish special effects showcase between the horrifying scene of his resurrection (his body rematerializing, organ by organ and bone by bone, done completely practically) and his skinless appearance for most of the film, but Oliver Smith, who plays him for most of the movie (barring the prologue of him alive and in human form), also makes him a great corrupting presence slowly leading Julia down the road to becoming a killer in order to bring him back. Together, they feel like a wicked stepmother and her dark secret kept in the attic, a duo who I wanted to see get their justly deserved punishment. As for the rest of the cast, it was fun seeing Andrew Robinson, the Scorpio killer in Dirty Harry, play a good-hearted but clueless father who doesn't realize the danger he's in until it's too late, and while I would've liked to see Ashley Laurence's Kirsty a bit more earlier in the film, once she became the clear protagonist in the latter half she did a fantastic job.

And behind the camera, Barker proves that he's just as good a filmmaker as he is a novelist. This film endured a very troubled production that saw Barker stretch his budget to the breaking point, using every trick in the book to get the most out of what he had, and it paid off remarkably well. An old, creepy mansion is one of the oldest and most cliched horror settings possible, but Barker leaned into it by giving the film a creepy, gothic tone, updating classic Hammer horror iconography for the '80s with only minor changes to the aesthetics. He also injected the film with the kind of raw sexuality that Hammer was famous for, never showing actual nudity (though by all accounts Barker wanted to go further) but always making it very clear that, whether human or monster, these characters fuck. And when that got into the relationship between Frank and his niece Kirsty, or the design of the Cenobites that resembled bondage gear and gave very clear implications of what exactly they mean by "pain and pleasure," that only added an extra layer of "ick" atop the proceedings as it was obvious that the torture being inflicted on these characters was, in no small part, sexual in nature.

That brings me to the Cenobites, the trademark demons of this film (well, "demons to some, angels to others") and the series in general. You may notice that, as iconic as they are, I haven't really talked about them all that much, and that's because they're only minor characters, albeit important ones who have a key role in the plot behind the scenes. As with the rest of the effects here, their creature design is outstanding, resembling humans who have been badly mutilated but in a fairly artistic manner more reminiscent of extreme body modification than anything. The lead Cenobite, retroactively named Pinhead in later films, is the only one who gets much of any characterization, and Doug Bradley makes him a hell of a monster, a figure who speaks in an affect that manages to be both flat and brimming with emotion and whose lack of explicitly ill intent (he and his fellow Cenobites just want to "explore the outer reaches of experience") makes him that much creepier, like the Cenobites' concerns are so far above those of us mere mortals that our lives don't even matter to them except as part of a purely transactional arrangement. If there was one big problem I had with this movie, in fact, it's that we don't get enough of the Cenobites. They take over as the main antagonists in the third act, but while Frank discusses them earlier in the film, they barely have any presence in the film before they make their grand introduction to Kirsty. I would've done something more with the mysterious vagrant who's seen stalking Kirsty, revealing him early on to be working for the Cenobites instead of making that a big twist at the end and simply implying before then that he's up to no good, because while the final scene did work as a nice closer, the tonal shift from having Frank as the villain trying to kill Kirsty to having her and her boyfriend running away from the Cenobites was pretty sudden and jarring, like I'd started watching a completely different movie out of nowhere.

The Bottom Line

Hellraiser is a combination of old-school gothic chills and modern creature and gore effects that still holds up, a film dripping with creepiness and some great monsters of both the human and otherworldly sort. A must-see for fans of '80s horror -- and hey, fingers crossed, maybe the sequels aren't all terrible either.