There we were – newlyweds at our
first duty station in San Angelo, Texas.
The year was 1988. I had just
received my commission in the Air Force and I was in San Angelo at tech school
for the next six months. We had basic
cable, but one of the few “premium” channels we got was The Movie Channel. Every Saturday night they showed horror
movies on a show called Joe Bob's
Drive-In Theater. The host
was a guy named Joe Bob Briggs, self-proclaimed “Drive-In Movie Critic” of The
Movie Channel from Grapevine, Texas. He always rated movies based on the
number of naked breasts, the number of dead bodies, and how many gallons of
blood were spilled during the movie. We
watched his show religiously while all my classmates partied and got
shitfaced. Anyway, during one such show
there appeared a movie called Hellraiser. This was a new movie by a first-time director
named Clive Barker. Joe Bob praised Hellraiser as his favorite horror movie
of the year.
What was Hellraiser? Before I tell you what it was, first let me say what it
wasn’t. It wasn’t a typical slasher
movie that was en vogue at the time – no Jason, no Michael Myers, no Freddie
Krueger. In Hellraiser, the villain is a guy named Pinhead - but more about him
later. The story centers around a guy
named Frank Cotton. He’s a hedonist that
looks for any kind of pleasure wherever he can find it. His hedonism takes place before the movie
begins. The opening scene has Frank
buying some sort of puzzle box from a street vendor somewhere in Asia. This puzzle box is some sort of gateway to
another dimension where one wishes to experience all kinds of
sadomasochism. By the time of the
opening scene, Frank has experienced all the different kinds of sexual pleasure
there is to experience, so he’s gotten to the point where he isn’t feeling any
pleasure from anything. Having heard of
this puzzle box, he’s desperate for extreme experiences. After he buys the puzzle box, he retreats to
his house. Once he solves the puzzle
box, the box opens a portal to another dimension from which many chains with
hooks come out and impale him. The
chains drag him into the other dimension.
Once that is done, the box closes and the room where Frank was returns
to normal.
Larry Cotton is Frank’s brother –
Julia is Larry’s wife. The relationship
between Larry and Julia is strained because Julia slept with Frank prior to
Larry and Julia’s marriage. Kirsty is
Larry’s daughter. She and Julia don’t
get along well. This family puts the
“fun” in dysfunction. Larry and Julia
move into Larry and Frank’s childhood home.
It’s infested with rats, maggots, cockroaches, etc. While Larry was
moving a mattress into the house, his hand got caught on a nail. The nail opens up a nasty wound on Larry’s
hand. He goes upstairs into one of the
vacant rooms to find Julia so she can bandage his wound. While the two of them are in the empty room,
Larry bleeds all over the floor. Instead
of the blood pooling and drying up, it gets sucked into the floor. After the floor sucks up the blood, all sorts
of strange things happen, the end of which a skinless Frank emerges out of the
floor. This is where the movie starts to
get cool because you get to see the process of Frank’s rebirth. Frank’s arms are the first to come out of the
floor, then he pulls himself up a little so that the rest of his skeleton can
reconstitute. The only problem with this
rebirth is that Frank doesn’t have any skin.
This is where Julia comes in.
During her previous fling with Frank, she promised him she would “do
anything” for him. Frank calls in his
marker. So Julia starts to go to bars to
pick-up guys. She takes them back to the
house. The guys she flirts with and
ensnares think they are going to have sex with Julia. Instead, she clobbers them over the head,
leaving them for Frank to drink them dry, and in the process he grows skin.
Kirsty had her suspicions about
Julia. She thought Julia was cheating on
her dad. She saw Julia bringing all of
these men to her dad’s house. When she
got there, she found Julia, and Frank was feeding on yet another victim. She and Frank struggle. Somehow she got the puzzle box away from
Frank and threw it out a window. She
gets out of the house, but after she fetched the puzzle box she passed
out. She awoke in a hospital room, where
one of the doctors gave her the puzzle box.
Not knowing the power of the box, she solved the puzzle and opened the
portal to Hell. Her she met Pinhead and
the Cenobites. The Cenobites are
half-human, half something else. They
are grotesque creatures that have been mutilated somehow. That is a key to what the Cenobites do - they
torture people who venture into their realm.
It is a sadomasochist’s dream come true.
Pinhead is their leader. Unlike
other horror villains like Freddie Krueger, he doesn’t make wisecracks. He just tells it like it is. If he means to kill you, he’ll tell you as
much, and sound really smart while doing so.
He’s very articulate if not exquisitely menacing. His personality is a lot like that of
Hannibal Lector, which makes him even more scary. When Kirsty asks about the Cenobites, Pinhead
replies that cryptically that they are “angels to some, demons to others.” The Cenobites want to keep Kirsty and torture
her for eternity, but she tells Pinhead that one of their captives [Frank] had
escaped from them. She makes a deal with
Pinhead. If she can deliver Frank, they’ll
let her go.
Kirsty went back to her father’s
house, where she found her father and Julia talking. Her dad told her that he had to kill Frank
because he’s crazy. They all went to the
attic, where Julia shows Kirsty a skinless dead body [presumably Frank]. Julia locked the door and the Cenobites
appeared. Kirsty tried to escape but was
prevented from doing so by Julia and Larry.
Larry then reveals that he is really Frank, who is wearing Larry’s skin
[yes, the skinless corpse is Larry]. Frank
lusts after Kirsty, but after she rejected him he decided to kill Kirsty to
complete his rejuvenation. He also
kills Julia by accident, but being the sociopath he is he drinks Julia dry
without a thought. The Cenobites asked
who turned Larry into a skinless corpse.
Frank figures out the Cenobites are after him, and shortly thereafter,
hooks and chains appear from out of nowhere.
Frank can’t move because he’s got so many hooks in him. He utters the phrase “Jesus wept” right
before the hooks and chains pull him apart into a million pieces. Kirsty pried the puzzle box from Julia’s cold
dead fingers, reverses all the moves of the puzzle box and seals the portal to
Hell, leaving Frank’s pieces with the Cenobites. All the electricity generated by the puzzle
box set the house on fire, which Kirsty escapes.
Did the story end happily ever
after? Not by a longshot. Hellraiser
spawned eight sequels. The first sequel,
Hellbound: Hellraiser II, saw Julia resurrected [and
killed again]. It was almost as good as
the first Hellraiser. But with so
many sequels the Hellraiser series
became like Friday the 13th
and The Nightmare on Elm Street -
wash, rinse, repeat. As much as the
story became diluted over time, the first movie was brilliant. It dared to be different.
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