Hellraiser: How the horror film was born
The subversive classic celebrates 30 years of British punk glamour
It is a grey afternoon in late 1986 and, in an anonymous suburb of northwest London, a Hollywood executive is on a mission of considerable urgency. His destination is a dilapidated studio complex in Cricklewood, where a rag-tag of fledgling filmmakers is burning through a million dollars of someone else’s money.
The first-timers have vowed to make a visceral horror movie which, in an era of camp schlock, will reconnect the genre to its roots. But when early footage was screened for the project’s backers at New World Pictures in Los Angeles there was concern that, rather than summoning unspeakable terrors, the newcomers appeared to be cobbling together an off-beat home improvement video.
“None of us had made a film before and we scheduled that all the scenes on the stairs were shot first,” recalls Christopher Figg, today an esteemed producer whose credits include Dog Soldiers and Lynne Ramsay’s 2011 adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s We Need To Talk About Kevin. “We sent the rushes over by ship to the studio in America. There was a distinct sense of panic: “what is this stairs film they are making?” They sent an executive over who sat on us for the rest of the shoot.”
The movie was Hellraiser and, though it would indeed include copious shots of people running up and down the same flight of steps, it also birthed one of the most idiosyncratic franchises in horror cinema. Horror was, by the mid-Eighties, in one of its periodic slumps, the “video nasty” scare of the early VHS period giving way to endless tonguein-cheek Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday 13th sequels.
Hellraiser, which this year marks its 30th anniversary, was something else entirely: a sadomasochistic fever-dream that sank its hooks into parts of the psyche run-of-the-mill fright-fests were incapable of reaching. It was gory and disgusting (the shoot had its own “maggot wrangler”) but also swaggering and glamorous and illuminated by a distinctly British punk spirit.
As with many unlikely triumphs, Hellraiser had its origins in failure. Clive Barker, the film’s 36-year-old writer and director, was a cult horror author determined to break into cinema. But alas, his dalliances with the industry up to that point had not gone well. His first scripted feature, Underworld (1985), was an undercooked mess (its chief legacy was inspiring a then obscure dance group who composed the soundtrack to take the movie’s name as their own).
Heaping even greater humiliation upon the ambitious and occasionally pretentious Barker was the 1986 adaptation of his psychosexual-horror story Rawhead Rex. With Barker locked out of the creative process, Rex was a dead-on-arrival calamity. The setting was moved from Barker’s original rural Kent to Ireland and the resulting film was an unintentionally side-splitting mash-up of Hammer Horror and Father Ted.
The eponymous monster looked like nothing like Barker’s description of a “nine-foot phallus with teeth” while Irish comedian Niall Tóibín was tragically miscast as a heroic priest: the equivalent of bunging Ronnie Corbett into the Edward Woodward role in the The Wicker Man. Rawhead Rex has its fans — yet it is generally appreciated today as a guilty pleasure. At the time, it was panned. As he surveyed the ruins of his fledgling career in film, Barker concluded he had no option but take the reins himself.
“He wanted to do a better job,” says Figg. “Horror was a very good genre to do your first film in. It’s never easy to raise money for a film. But there was a sense that horror was perhaps easier than other genres”
Barker was introduced to Figg through mutual friends in London. The latter had worked under David Lean as an assistant director on A Passage To India and was keen onbecomingaproducer.In the pub one night, the would-be collaborators discussed a horror project and soon a rough idea for a villain had been hashed out. Barker conceived of a bald man with a multitude of nails driven into his head: horrifying, with a whiff of sadomasochistic élan.
“I’ve always had a toe in the BDSM world and I’m interested in it,” reflected Barker who, as an aspiring playwright and author in the Seventies, had supported himself with occasional stints as a male prostitute. “In my younger days, one of my sources of great pride was that I did an illustration. It went into a magazine called S& Min London, and the magazine was arrested for the obscenity of my illustration.”
Though yet to acquire his iconic ally minimalists obriquet,P in head had been born. Barker made the character, leader of a dimension-hopping coven of sadomasochists called the Cenobites, one of the antagonists in his novella The Hellhound Heart. Published in 1986, it was a dry run for the Hellraiser script.
“We started from the premise that it would be good to set the story in a haunted house,” says Figg, mindful that shooting in one location would keep the budget down. “The first studio we pitched it to was New World, because they were big into genre. And they said yes. Their logic was that, even if it didn’t do well at the cinema, it would probably make its money back on video.
“Everybody was out to prove themselves,” he continues. “It was the first occasion a lot of us were in a position of responsibility. We knew something special was happening. There was a tremendous esprit de corps.”
Hellraiser is unsettling but, more than that, subversive. Barker has described it as a twisted romance and it is as much a meditation on the destructive dangers of desire and obsession as a straightforward chiller.
Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites aren’t even the true monsters of the piece. They are mere accessories to the dangerous urges of thrillseeker Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman), ripped to pieces early in the movie when he solves a magical puzzle box called The Lament Configuration. As the final piece clicks into place hooks fly from the cube and rend his flesh: his introduction to an alternate dimension where pain and pleasure are interwoven.
However, while Frank’s physical essence is reduced to extra-planar tatters, his soul endures. Some time later, Frank’s brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) moves into his sibling’s now abandoned house. He is accompanied by his wife Julia (Clare Higgins), who had been having an affair with Frank, and her step daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence). When Larry cuts himself on a nail, Frank is resurrected from the blood and persuades Julia to lure men back to the property, so that he can reassemble himself from their body parts.
Inevitably, Larry is for the chopping block too, with the reborn Frank assuming his brother’s appearance. When Kirsty rumbles Frank and Julia they try to kill her. So she forges a deal with the Cenobites: she will lead them to Frank in exchange for her life.
“It’s a love story,” says Douglas Winter, author of Clive Barker’s authorised biography The Dark Fantastic. “A very, very perverse one.”
On set it quickly became clear the Cenobites weren’t necessarily terrifying. “Repulsive glamour” was the sensibility Barker was after: these were no boogie men hiding under your bed. As portrayed by Douglas Bradley, a friend of Barker’s from his days in independent theatre, Pinhead, especially, was a nuanced demon — droll, world-weary, too jaundiced to have any interest in senseless destruction.
“I don’t think the intention was to make the Cenobites scary,” says Figg. “We were going for originality. The problem with scary is that if you go for it and people aren’t scared, you’ve kind of lost it. It was the psychological situation we wanted to be scary rather than the visceral fear of something scary.”
“Doug Bradley’s pacing and dignity, along with those finely wrought phrases, gave viewers something they’d not seen since Karloff ’s Frankenstein’s monster,” says Winter. “And it also gave viewers something they’d never heard: A monster who could speak to the condition of being a monster.”
Despite the flayed flesh and gushing arteries, Hellraiser was deemed suitable for public consumption by the American censor (it was initially banned in the Canadian province of Ontario for its “brutal, graphic violence with blood-letting throughout, horror, degradation and torture”). The only significant trimmings requested in the US involved a sadomasochistic love sequence between Frank and Kirsty.
“We did a version of this scene which had some spanking in it and the MPAA was not very appreciative of that ,” Barker has said .“Lord knows where the spanking footage is”.
In Britain, the BBFC passed Hellraiser uncut but only after hauling Figg in to ensure no vermin had been harmed in the making of the film. “I had to bring three remote-control rats into the censor’s office and make them wriggle about on the floor,” he recalls. “They wanted to be sure we hadn’t been cruel to them.”
A reboot has been rumoured for years with Barker to direct, though with the author still recovering from the coma he slipped into in 2012 — having suffered toxic shock after a routine dentist’s visit — its status is unclear. On its 30th anniversary, the original stands as a crowning achievement for UK genre cinema — notwithstanding the tarnishing effect of a deluge of straight to video sequels (the latest, Hellraiser: Judgement, due this summer). Pinhead is arguably British horror’s most iconic creation while the fretful executives at New World were more than rewarded for their patience as their $1 million gamble yielded a $14 million payday.
“I knew we had something special when we were shooting the scene where Frank[ disguised as Larry] says ‘come to daddy’ to Ki rs ty ’,” recalls Figg. “I remember we were filming it and there’s a bit where a statue falls out of a cup board door. It came out too soon and the camera operator jumped. I remember thinking ‘crikey — if he is jumping like that, how is the audience going to respond?’.”