hellraiser [1987]

even when i was in my late teens i considered myself a veteran of horror, both as a reader and as a viewer. i wasn't a kid who read fangoria magazine religiously nor did i have gore posters posted on my wall. my love of the genre was more circumspect and found its expression in late-night tv and hanging out at matinee movie houses and drive-in theaters. but by the 1986 i had discovered the british writer clive barker's collections of short stories, the books of blood, and i would literally haunt the horror section of my favorite bookstores. barker was a revelation, a gifted writer who wrote fluently with one of the most perverse imaginations i ever encountered. also, and this is no small thing, he was the first writer i saw, from his dust-jacket photos, that wore an earring. i mention this insignificant detail only because at the ages of 18 and 19 i knew i wanted to be a writer and i began gravitating toward poetry, but i didn't know any writers at all and it seemed from the bios of dead writers and in the pages of the varied lit mags available that serious writers didn't have their ears pierced nor were they tattooed, as i was and still am. discovering a writer that is even remotely dressed like you is incredibly bracing to the spirit. these small details are deeply important, at least for me. so in barker i found a kindred spirit both in dress and in a little way the imagination.

so then anyway, barker's first movie hellraiser was kind of an event in my life but i don't recall getting real jazzed about seeing it. i think i was skeptical that a writer can also be a good filmmaker. i don't quite remember if stephen king's awful, yet enjoyable, venture into directing a feature film, maximum overdrive, was yet released. but i remember interviews by king before his movie was released where he described it as his own plan 9 from outer space. in other words, my expectation for barker was at a very low threshold.

i find myself writing about my first experience watching this movie, i think because it was seminal in my viewing life. i watched the movie at the drive-in, the sac 6 which i'm heading to tomorrow night with my dear friend b. because the drive-in is hosting a classic car show, and i was not in the best of mental health. it was released in the summer and i figured the movie to be typical drive-in fare. yet, barker's ability behind the camera broke my prejudice of the writer trying to be a director theory. it literally freaked me out.

for the first time in my life i watched a horror film that used elements of s/m imagery and sexuality. the perpetrators of the violence are three very creepy masters called the cenobites. they behave in a perverse religious order as they meet out a harsh sensuality to their victims. and it is this sensuality that has the biggest creep-out factor. the story concerns opening a puzzle box that if opened successfully summons the cenobites. the cenobites, lead by pinhead - a man with hundreds of pins stuck to his head and face - assume that you called them for some serious play. in barker's world however there is no such thing as vanilla bdsm. if you call forth the cenobites then you are going to be torn apart in the most sexual fashion.

the direction for a first-time director who is using his own novella 'the hell-bound heart' as the source material, is solid. some of the fx are rather cheap but doesn't distract from the story. the photography achieves a rather smouldering blue tint that recalls porn films and '70s era exploitation. yet for all that the movie is neither gritty in look or feel nor slick as in some euro productions. this flick is a solid tour de force of horror.

still, i'd hesitate to call it a masterpiece of the genre. not that i'm a fair judge of what a masterpiece looks like anyway. i will say that the movie freaked me hard and it took many years before i could watch it again. perhaps that has more to do with my own mental health at the time as i sat on the gravel on a hot sac summer night at the drive-in watching a difficult flick. perhaps it hit me on a deeper level as barker uses the religiosity of certain sorts of sex drives. whatever the cause of my being freaked by this flick it has held up to repeated viewings over the years and i consider the movie to be a perfect halloween horror film in look, tone and attitude. pinhead is one scary monster, but even scarier is our own complicity in our destruction, which is the subject the film skirts around. pleasure and pain dressed in leather carrying a whip and chains crying out, i am my own destroyer. such is the source of this movie's power yet it also behaves as a very good b-grade horror flick too. i find this film to be powerful with whatever lens i choose to watch it. but be warned it could freak you too.