First off, dear reader, I'd like to let you know that Thoughts Mostly About Film will be on hiatus for somewhere in the vicinity of two weeks while I ramble around off the grid. When I return, however, I'm hoping to add a new feature to the site: a series of interviews with folks working in the indy film industry, doing piecemeal jobs on big money productions while pursuing their own projects by hook, crook, blood, sweat, janky c-stands, and tears. Every one of these people I know has amazing, funny, and often scandalous tales to tell, as well as fascinating insights into the world of making movies. So stay tuned if you want a peek into the way the machinery works on the ground floor of the industry. And now, on with the show!
It's come to my attention that a remake of the campy and unsettling 1987 horror film Hellraiser is soon to be released. As I'm a fan of the original, I'll certainly watch the new version and will put some thoughts down about it in one of my upcoming "What to Watch This Week" pieces. I'm neither one of those people who thinks that everything old is better than everything new, nor one of those people who thinks that everything new is better than everything old, so I have no idea how the two films will compare. Nor do I have much interest in making prognostications about the quality of the new film before I've seen it.
But I do have one prediction: the new Hellraiser will, I suspect, probably be different from the original in a very specific way. My guess is that, insofar as the remake will have a thematic element to it, that element will operate in a contemporary mode, one which I like to think of as issue-driven. In other words, I suspect that the viewer will be able to identify quite directly what in-the-contemporary-mind issue the film is tackling, and what political angle it takes. (Here's a hint that nobody probably needs: it will almost certainly not take a conservative position on the issue, at least not intentionally.)
This will make it, I suspect, quite different from the original, which is a strange, seething film that trades in quite a different kind of horror altogether. Or maybe I'm wrong, and the new version will be a direct remake, right down to the thematics. Who knows? I guess I will, after I watch it. I'll give you my thoughts once I do.
Anyway, all of this is a rather long preamble to the idea I want stick in your grill today, which is about how evolution can help us understand horror movies (and other kinds of movies) like the original Hellraiser.
This may sound like a complicated, pseudo-academic idea, but I promise you, it's not. Actually, it arises from a pretty straightforward observation: the body evolved before the mind.
The easiest way to understand this is to remember that back in the day, before the primates that eventually became us were conscious in the way we are, they had already developed many of the same physical impulses and responses that we still have. They were afraid, they felt pleasure, they were driven to have sex and find food, they struggled through all sorts of social interactions. And then, after a long slow process, they developed consciousness, or perhaps developed "full" consciousness, in the way we know it. (This timeline is reflected, of course, in the physical structure of our brains: the "older" parts, back toward the brain stem, are where we process the more, as the saying goes, "reptilian" emotions, and the "newer" parts are where the thinky stuff happens.)
Now, in this story, it's vital to remember that evolution does not anticipate. It's not as though it (evolution) is some kind of engineer, who's thinking, "You know what? In five hundred thousand or a million years, consciousness is going to develop, so I'm going to make this body in such a way to prepare for that." No. We are animals, with animal bodies, and our brains evolved into consciousness long after those bodies were already pretty close to being were what they are now; in other words, our sense of fear is a lot more similar the sense of fear of something like a rodent than are our mental capacities, as are our sex drives and our penchant for aggression and all those sorts of things.
Which means, very simply, that as consciousness evolved, it was presented with (to vastly simplify) two sorts of problems. The first problem involved what was out there. Can we make this stick sharp and poke that animal if it attacks us? Is there a cleverer way to store water? What happens if we keep this hot orange thing going and then pile some more wood on it? Oh, yeah, and what the hell (although it should be pointed out that there was no concept of hell yet) are the stars, anyway?
The second problem involved what was inside us. Where do these urges in me come from? Why do I feel an uncontrollable need to run away? What is that sensation I feel after I've done something bad? Why the hell do I find myself so attracted to that other person?
Thus, it wasn't just the mystery of the universe that confronted us as we developed our more rational abilities; it was the mystery of why we acted the way we did, of the nature of our intensely strong feelings, of why we and other people were driven sometimes to do things we didn't understand in the slightest.
Jump forward a few hundred thousand years, and you have the horror movie, which often pivots on one or both of those same fears: the world outside of us, populated as it sometimes seems to be by terrifying things outside of our control, and the world inside of us, which just as often seems to be populated by things just as far outside of our control.
Hellraiser was written and directed by Clive Barker, one of Britain's foremost horror novelists. It has its flaws, some of which are simply a matter of bad technology and bad technical choices, and others of which arise from something closer to a failure of nerve or perhaps an inevitable capitulation to market forces. But in the main, it's one of the most original horror films of the 1980s, and a pulpy triumph.
The story it tells has its roots in very odd places (in another piece, for example, I might want to draw out the fruitful comparison to noir movies, and something like The Postman Always Rings Twice in particular.) It opens with a man named Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) who wants to find the most intense experiences imaginable. These are coded as sexual in the film, but as I'll note, I think this is not quite the right way to fully understand them.
Frank buys a small gold cube – called a "puzzle box" – at a market somewhere in a rather squalid foreign country. In the attic of his old family home (the film was originally set in England, but then a silly decision was made during post-production to try to change the setting to America, so it ends up just being set in some vaguely Anglo/American suburb) he figures out how to open the box, and when he does, four black-leather clad, nightmarish figures called Cenobites appear. These monstrosities apparently live in some other dimension, will eventually describe themselves as "explorers in the further regions of experience," and tear Frank to pieces in a maelstrom of agony and ecstasy. And we're only ten minutes into the film!
The story then shifts to Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Clare Higgins), who are moving into the house where Frank was recently dispatched. It's revealed that Julia once had an all-consuming affair with Frank; on the heels of this, Larry cuts his hand, and some blood drips onto the floorboards of the attic. This revives Frank's horrifyingly desiccated and skinless corpse, which confronts Julia and convinces her that if she brings men to the attic and kills them, creepy red skeleton Frank can feed on them and restore life to his body. Lured by the strange sexual hold that Frank had over her, Julia agrees.
Also on the scene is Larry's daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), who's also going through her own kind of sexual awakening. When she discovers what's going on up there in the attic, Julia and Frank try to kill her, but she steals the puzzle box and escapes. Unfortunately for Kirsty, she falls prey to the box's allure and opens it, summoning the Cenobites. She makes a bargain with them, though: if they let her live for a little while instead of doing the old shred-to-pieces routine on her, she'll lead them to Frank, who has escaped their clutches through his escapades with Julia.
In the film's climax, so to speak, Kirsty leads the Cenobites to Frank and they tear him to pieces for a second time. (Julia is also killed in the process.) Then, when the Cenobites try to kill Kirsty, she uses the puzzle box to defeat them, after which a homeless guy who has been following her around turns into a demon and flies away with the box, returns it to the market in the decrepit country where we began, and we see another sorry sucker buying it, unaware of the horrific pleasures that await him. (This is the ending – in which Kirsty and her drippy boyfriend triumph to live happily ever after – that seems to me to be something of a failure of nerve.)
So, yeah. It's definitely the kind of twisted tale you'd expect to emerge from the mind of a prolific horror novelist. But it's also a startlingly original movie, not only because its story differs in such striking ways from typical horror fare, but also because of the uncomfortable power it generates. Because when you ask the most basic of horror film questions about Hellraiser – why and how is it scary? – you get some interesting answers.
Clearly, a part of the scariness of the film comes from what we might think of as external sources, in terms of the story about evolution I told above. The four Cenobites, and particularly their fearless leader Pinhead, who has, yes, a head covered with pins, are pretty terrifying. They're also aided in their hijinks by a monster who looks kind of like a giant larva with a mouthful of teeth and a stinger on his butt, although because of production design decisions and budget (the film was made, amazingly, considering its effectiveness, for less than a million bucks) this larval fellow doesn't really pack the fearsome punch of his leather-wearing buddies.
And the notion of fiddling around with a gold Rubik's cube and then discovering that your reward for solving it is that chains with hooks at their ends come flashing out of the darkness to sink into your flesh, is, yes, macabre and fear-inducing. As is the idea of being lured to an attic by a woman and then eaten by a skinless maniac.
But beneath these external horrors is another layer of the film, which plays on our internal sources of terror. The presence of this layer becomes apparent when we start to think about what Frank and Julia are after. Why are they doing all of this? What do they want, really? They are, in some sense, the real villains of the film – they are the ones who do the luring and the murdering, while the Cenobites are more like the representatives of a horrible fate one calls upon oneself – and yet, unlike most other horror movie bad guys, Frank and Julia are in pursuit of something with a real Freudian weight: pleasure.
Which is to say that they're after something that we're all after; or, better, they're after something we're all driven to seek.
Now, the movie clearly (and explicitly, in Barker's telling) invokes a kind of S&M iconography in regard to this (as it does with the Cenobites), invoking the idea of an experience that mingles intense sexual pleasure with intense pain.
But to let things lie there is to let the film off the hook, as it were, because the issue at hand runs deeper than that. The fear, the thing that scares us here, does not stop at sexuality, but touches on something broader and more akin to a shared human fear of the deeper drives inside us all. If you doubt this, think about why the film is able to be scary for audiences who are not into S&M.
We feel terror at the internal, psychological aspects of Hellraiser not (or not only) because we connect with this sexualized element of it – ie. somehow imagining ourselves getting dressed up in black leather so we can be prodded by a surly dominatrix with pins in his face – but because we see in these characters something that drives them toward this darkness, and it stirs recognition in us. Put differently, there is something in the Cenobites that is attractive, something hypnotically alluring – it's no mistake that the Pinhead character is the real celebrity to have emerged from the nine sequels (and this isn't counting the one released this week!) – and we feel a perverse sense that we too might end up confronting them some day if our bodies have their way with us. Put differently again, the film wouldn't be scary if we couldn't in some small way identify with Frank and Julia – it would just feel weird and alien.
Put differently one more time, the entire film is about, in some sense, things inside all of the characters – for young Kirsty feels it too – and all of us, that are inexplicable and terrifying. And these can be fruitfully understood as the goadings of the pre-conscious body.
As much as any film of the '80s (Blue Velvet and several of the movies of David Cronenberg good comparisons here) Hellraiser works because it invokes the primordial fear that comes from the fact that we possess inside us drives, urges, needs, feelings – whatever name you'd like to put to them – that are beyond the ken of our rational minds, and which at times threaten to take us over. In some of us, these take the form of sexuality, in others rage, in others a deafening weakness or an incurable need to be seen as powerful, or many other things, but we all have them.
And they scare us (or can be used to scare us) because our front (consciousness-oriented) brain wrestles with them, but cannot fully control them. They are the animals in us coming to the fore and threatening us, in much the same way that externally-oriented horror movies present us with real animals like sharks or wolves (or scary humans) that threaten us.
Is the the only way to understand the matter? Of course not. If thinking about evolution can give us a vision of our late-developing consciousness struggling with the body which it rides, other lenses – culture, or religion, or materialist history, or many others – can give us other visions. But I think the evolutionary lens is helpful because it touches on the really deep physiological reactions that movies, and horror movies in particular, can cause in us.
To return to the issue of the new Hellraiser reboot, there are all kinds of technical ways that Barker achieves this kind of effect in the original – from the dreamlike and symbol-ridden atmosphere he creates to his usage of a film noir-influenced story structure – but the point is that the horror he's after is a universal one. And it's not rooted in a current, politically-tinged issue so much as it is in the commonalities we all share as thinking animals.
Will the new version of Hellraiser take the same approach? As I said, I'll let you know after I watch it.
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