I’ve previously made mention of how Clive Barker played a key role in bringing me into the horror genre. Though I’d always loved Halloween, monsters, and the gothic, I really wasn’t a horror kid. I enjoyed themes of supernatural otherness, of dark modern fantasy, of a reversal of expectations wherein what seemed bestial is actually noble and what seemed good and just is in fact cruel, but I wasn’t ready for horror per se – I had an active imagination, and I was just too easily scared. And so, it seems somewhat surprising that a “splatterpunk” author whom Stephen King had crowned the “future of horror” ended up serving as my gateway to darker fare.
One day I happened upon a copy of Barker’s epic novel, ‘Imajica’ while grocery shopping with my parents, and a door was opened. This was not, mind you, a work of horror, so much as dark modern fantasy/mythologizing, spanning many realms of being, doing deep, weird, intriguing world-building, centering on a kind of amnesiac Christ figure who goes on a journey of supernatural otherness, and comes into his own, ultimately rebelling against the cruel, patriarchal, fascistic authority of the many worlds (it was right up my alley). It occupied such an ambitiously large canvas; it was surprising and transgressive in the extremity of its events – narratively, sexually, in terms of violence and action, and also in how character did not seem totally fixed, but was somehow more fluid, in flux, as was everything else in existence. And the writing was cinematic and visual and striking. My imagination was captivated. I’m sure I read it multiple times in those first years and I tried to push it on others – people needed to know about this strange, wonderful book.
From there, I first tore through the other large scale weird fiction epics Barker was writing at the time (‘Everville,’ ‘The Great and Secret Show,’ ‘Weaveworld’) before venturing into the work that had made him most famous, his horror fiction, such as his collections of short stories, ‘The Books of Blood (Volumes 1-6),’ ‘Cabal’ (on which Nightbreed was based), ‘The Damnation Game,’ and ‘The Hellbound Heart’ (on which Hellraiser was based). And I loved it all.
How much I loved it was quite the surprise given how I hadn’t thought of myself as a horror fan yet. I might watch a horror movie occasionally with some friends, but I didn’t really seek it out. In fact, I clearly remember renting Candyman (based on Barker’s story, ‘The Forbidden,’ collected in Volume 5 of the ‘Books of Blood’) with a friend in high school and being so scared part way through that we had to turn it off. But when I finally read the original story, I was so enamored of its gorgeous central conceit (an embodied urban myth seducing the protagonist to willingly be his victim, living eternally in beauty, as story, free of the burdens of being, a cautionary tale told to children, a reason for lovers to clutch each other more tightly in the dark) that I finally returned to the film and fell for it as well (it stands as one of my favorite films of any genre).
Something that struck me as I worked my way through his horror writing was how little it scared me. It was clearly horror – incredibly gory and gleefully perverse, transgressing any and all boundaries of propriety, morality, flesh, or reality, but while it could frequently elicit a delicious shudder of disgust or tragic appreciation, it never made me scared of what lurked in the dark under my bed. It really took a different approach, implicitly introducing me to the fact that horror need not scare to be ‘good’ (thankfully, as these days, I’ve watched so much that new scares are truly hard to come by).
And so, this week, I’d like to dig into Barker’s work a bit, and to do so through the lens of one of his most known works, namely Hellraiser (1987), which Barker wrote and directed (his first feature film) based on his own aforementioned novella, ‘The Hellbound Heart.’ Honestly, I don’t exactly consider these the most “Clive Barker-esque” works of his oeuvre, but they clearly contain representative samples of the elements that make him so special, and what’s more, given how large Hellraiser looms over horror cinema (as a great film of its era, as a long running (mostly not great) franchise, as a source of iconic horror imagery), I think it is worth focusing on a piece that is simply this well known. I’ll start with the book and the first film, but will also dig into the first sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) (to which Barker contributed a story treatment), and the most recent entry, Hellraiser (2022) (a strong reboot that I feel does justice to Barker’s ideas and gets a lot of things right). There will be spoilers for all works, so you’ve been warned…
Hellraiser (1987)
As I’ve seen reported, Barker wrote “The Hellbound Heart” with the direct intention of later filming it. He’d had a couple stories adapted and hadn’t been satisfied with the result, and thus set out to write a story that he could pull off as a film – something contained that could be made with a low enough budget that producers would allow him to direct, though he’d never made a feature before. Thus, Hellraiser is a strikingly faithful adaptation, the two works being alike in tone, theme, and with one big exception, narrative.
Hellraiser is often mistakenly grouped in with the slashers – I think because it was a gory product of the 80s, it had a poster featuring a creepy, pale faced killer (with nails hammered into his head), and it spawned a franchise (as 80s slashers were in the habit of doing), but at the end of the day, it (and the book it’s based on) is more of a darkly fantastical haunted house tale, rooted in family drama. Furthermore, the threatening character on the poster (the being who would come to be nicknamed “Pinhead”) is less the main ‘bad guy’ of the story than a kind of force of nature (or something alternative to nature) – an implacable spirit who is not ‘evil’ so much as dutiful in the performance of his admittedly excruciating responsibilities (though he does clearly enjoy them – when he utters the iconic line, “we have such sights to show you,” he sounds genuinely proud of his work).
No, I think the true villain of the piece (who could also be argued to be the protagonist as well) is Julia, a woman languishing in a deeply unsatisfying marriage to a nice enough, dependable fellow for whom she has no passion (Rory in the book, Larry in the film). Of course, she should have known better given how, shortly before their wedding, she had fallen into bed with his brother, Frank, a sleazy, hedonistic, criminal ne’er-do-well, with no redeemable qualities other than the fact that he turned her on. Years later, Julia and her husband move into an old family house where Frank had previously, unbeknownst to them, performed an arcane ritual in search of sensual pleasure beyond all limits, resulting in him being torn apart by extra-dimensional beings called “Cenobites” and pulled into a kind of hell dimension (like you do).
The main story concerns Julia, chasing the dragon of the way he’d made her feel those many years ago, luring men home to murder such that Frank might feed upon their bodies and their lives, thus rebuilding a body for himself, and finally escape from the realm in which he’d gotten himself trapped. Along the way, I think Julia comes into her own, the flush of life returning to her cheeks as she brutally dispatches her victims and courts her returning lover, a half-formed, skinless man – raw, bloody, and domineering, but no less charismatic and enticing for her than he ever was.
The big change from book to film is in the final character of significance, Kirsty. In the novel, she is a coworker of Rory’s, and is perhaps similarly milquetoast, and thus, a seemingly better romantic match for him than the imperious, demanding Julia. In the film, Kirsty is Larry’s daughter from an earlier marriage, casting Julia into the part of “wicked step-mother.” In both cases, Kirsty becomes the secondary protagonist, an audience surrogate pulled into a twisted tale of murder, betrayal, resurrection, and interdimensional sadomasochistic hell-priests, who alone survives the ordeal. And she’s fine – a solid “final girl” (though, again, this is not a slasher) who gives us a “good character” to root for – but I think there is a narrative tension between the external-threat-final-girl-type-horror film Kirsty represents and the internal-threat/fascination-horror-tragedy-dark-tale-of-obsession-and-becoming film that Julia represents (and nothing against Kirsty, but I unreservedly prefer the latter).
The main praise I would lavish on both the film and the book is to do with their content (themes, characters, ideas), but I expect neither really gets enough credit for its technical quality. Barker was famously a first time feature director who spoke of going to the library to find a book on how to direct a movie, but he was surrounded by professionals who really knew what they were doing, thus enabling him to confidently steer the ship creatively and make something unique and special. It really says something that even with some studio interference (e.g., the unfortunate demand, after it had been shot in the UK that some actors be re-voiced with American accents – the dubbing is…not great) and cuts required to get an R rating (with substantial reductions to both sex and violence – both integral elements of the work), this still somehow feels like such a whole, uncompromised, artist-led, serious-minded piece of work. Even though it has its moments that don’t land for me (cricket eating guy, the weird winged demon at the end, the extra spectacle of Kirsty being hounded by Cenobites after it feels like the story’s already finished), it shines as an absolute classic and casts a long shadow (can it both shine and cast a shadow – does that make sense?).
And in terms of the novel, wow – the prose is just gorgeous: propulsive, evocative, and encompassing. The opening scene alone, of Frank first opening the puzzle box and finding how drastically his notion of pleasure diverged from that of those he’d sought to summon, is exciting and sensual and wickedly, playfully sinister. I’d first read the book probably 30 years ago, but when I read it again last summer, I had to go back and re-read the whole first chapter, such a joy it had been. Then to write this, I just went through it once again and its pleasures were undiminished. And as a novelette, you can really tear through it all in one sitting. So, yeah – both are truly great – I won’t go on ad nauseam about this shot or that special effect (but, wow), but they are all pretty special.
I titled this post with the phrase “permeable bodies and minds” and I think that is a dominant theme in Barker’s oeuvre that can clearly be found here. He is a creator unafraid of getting his hands dirty – this is one gory, disgusting, bloody, goopy piece of work. Flesh is hooked and rent; bodies are literally ripped apart (as souls are likewise threatened to be); other bodies are held in eternal states of extreme experience, opened, stretched, reformed, maintaining a transcendent state of pleasure-pain; skins are removed and worn as a disguise (sometimes more convincingly, occasionally less so), their identities stolen and perverted; or skin is gone without entirely, the raw self bared to the world, unshielded from sensation, not masked by artifice or civility: unguarded and whole. The physical border of the body is far from inviolate – it is in play.
And just as there is so much focus on the violent penetration of the body, so too is this a deeply sexual work; another mode of penetration – the points at which the borders of the self are opened/passed/transgressed. But interestingly, there isn’t actually a lot of explicit “sex” in it (partly due to the MPAA, partly because the sexuality of the film is not so obvious). Rather, the focus is on the desire that drives one to act, a physical hunger for more. This surfaces clearly in Julia’s lustful willingness to murder strangers to bring Frank back, but it is also the same drive that pulled Frank into the hands of the Cenobites to begin with, those “explorers in the further regions of experience” whose look is so directly inspired by the leather/S&M/piercing/body modification scene at the time.
One thing that it isn’t though (in my opinion) is terribly scary. This is a different kind of horror. Whereas much in the genre concerns a scary danger from without endangering the protagonist (which does happen, as mentioned above, with the character of Kirsty), I think Barker is often more interested in following the character who meets this darkness and embraces it, and is thus changed by it. We go with them on that journey and there is a delicious attraction/revulsion in vicariously sharing their story (as we do with Julia). I think the first Hellraiser stands as a testament to the fact that great horror need not deliver the “scare” to be horror.
All of these ideas live in the character of Julia. It is clear from the beginning what a mismatch she and her husband are, and we get the sense that if her tryst with Frank had lasted much longer, she might have found him wanting as well, but as it stands, she’s been left yearning for this scumbag who made her feel something, and I think it’s hard not to sympathize. She is not a “nice person,” but she doesn’t need to be for us to understand her very real, human frustration with having settled for a life that does not satisfy. When the accidental spilling of blood brings Frank back, however partially (in the beginning, he’s little more than a slimy brain stem with arms), her hunger/lust/addictive impulse is contagious – though the object of her desire is so abject (even she is disgusted by him, but she also craves his touch). An itch that has so long needed scratching finally can be, and therefore, must be scratched. The need for something outside of the self pulls and redefines the self, causing it to open, to potentially change, to become.
I love the first scene when she brings a man home for Frank to feed on. She’s gone out to a bar in the middle of the day and brought back an unpleasant character, some schmuck in a suit who’d thought he’d been the one picking her up. They both seem somewhat hesitant upon passing the threshold of her house, but he immediately becomes aggressively entitled when she balks at a kiss, strengthening her resolve to take him upstairs to the killing floor. Everything about the scene that follows is awkward and halting until, pants around his ankles, he turns his back on her and she takes up her hidden hammer. The two or three brutal strikes that follow obliterate his mouth and lay him out. It all happens in the matter of a couple of seconds, but when we cut to Julia’s reaction, we are brought back to that sexual element.
Covered in the red stuff herself, Julia’s blood is up, she’s breathing hard, there’s life and lust and power in her eyes – it’s hot. When she goes to wash up as Frank sucks the stuff of life from the corpse, a mad grin breaks out on her face. Returning to the room, Frank is more whole but far from complete, and she finds herself both pulled to and repelled by his still fleshless form. But before they can go any further, her husband comes home and she has to go cover her deception. It’s a great scene and Clare Higgins couldn’t be better in it, bringing nigh Shakespearean notes to the performance.
Ultimately, Frank betrays and discards her, resulting in them both being (re)claimed by the Cenobites who have been put on his trail by Kirsty, and though Julia makes an engaging return in the sequel, it too sadly passes her by in the end (as we will get to in a moment), but she is the beating, bloody heart of the story (well, I suppose her, and the literal one we see beneath the floorboards). Watching her claim ownership of her desire, though it take her down a dark, gory path, we see her flourish; just as Frank must knit himself back together, growing sinew, nerves, and bone, we see her build herself as well. Kirsty gives us the “good person” we can root for, who gets to survive to the end of the story, but I really think that story belongs to Julia: Lady Macbeth, Macbeth, Dr. Frankenstein, and Madame Bovary wrapped into one – you know, just a typical, disposable teen slasher flick.
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988)
Released only one year later, directed by Tony Randel and written by Peter Atkins, Hellraiser II retained a connection to Clive Barker in that he served as an executive producer (which could mean anything) and, probably more significantly, he provided a story treatment. And while I don’t think it could be argued that this film is anywhere near as good as the first, it does feel so deeply, deeply Barker-esque? Barker-ian? Barker-y – so much so that when I first watched both films many years ago, I kind of preferred this one. I wouldn’t still say that’s true now, but there are elements in here that are deeply cool, as well as some stuff that is off the wall wild and fun, and then some other parts that are, shall we say, regrettable.
The story picks up immediately (like the next day) after the first film, with Kirsty in a mental hospital, shattered by the events she’s just experienced. It’s a shame though that she was brought to this hospital, because it’s run by one Dr. Channard, who just so coincidentally happens to collect Cenobite summoning puzzle boxes (small world, huh?), using his corral of mental patients as Guinea pigs to try to solve them, thus gaining him all the forbidden occult knowledge he desires. When he hears Kirsty’s story, he uses connections in the police force to get his hands on the blood-stained mattress on which Julia was killed and sets out to bring her back as she had done for Frank in the first film. Concurrently, Kirsty sees a vision of a skinned man whom she believes to be her father, begging for her help and believes that she needs to go to hell to rescue him.
Much of the rest of the movie takes place in the otherworld of the Cenobites, referred to as “hell,” but bearing no relation to any Christian interpretation of such. I think it’s just a convenient concept to throw at this realm – a land of eternal torture and pain – but it should be said, with no concept of punishment or justice. The whole place is lorded over by a sky-spanning, darkness emitting, diamond shaped presence which Julia refers to as ‘Leviathan,’ “god of flesh, hunger, and desire…the lord of the Labyrinth.” We also learn that all of the Cenobites we’ve met were once humans who were not destroyed by their encounter with the box, but rather thrived and ascended to their current status. It is in this exploration of this very weird and specific other realm that the film feels so like a Barker property. As mentioned earlier, the first books I read of his were contemporarily-set weird fiction, spanning strange other-worldly spaces, mythic in scope and filled with inversions of what might be deemed ‘natural.’ They could also get quite goopy.
This aspect of the film evoked some of the feelings I’d first had in discovering Barker’s fiction, and though I wish the film went further with its world building in this regard (in this whole hellscape, there seems to be just the same four or five Cenobites that we’ve already seen on earth – and a whole lot of hallways), I do treasure the cosmic horror on offer, and when the matte painting is filmed from above, it has more than sufficient grandeur. It is so big and alien and unique. And I love (as I do with a writer like Lovecraft) being given a vision of the demonic freed from the moralistic ugliness of religion – there is suffering aplenty, but no thoughts of damnation or salvation – only the serving up of experience beyond endurance.
The Cenobites have their own creed and ethos – one of pleasure and pain and leather and chains, worshipping a massive, impassive shape in the sky – weird, but hey, good for them – at least they don’t proselytize or try to encroach their faith on secular affairs (if only other fanatically religious types would so fully stay out of politics).
Sadly, the movie as a whole has some real story issues and, in my opinion, goes off the rails in the final act when Dr. Channard is made into a Cenobite (great sequence), dispatches all the other Cenobites (weird and unsatisfying choice – undercutting their power rather than making him seem strong, but it is intriguing when we see them all transform in the moments of their deaths back to the humans they’d once been – one of them was just a kid – what was his story?), and becomes a wise cracking monster chasing Kirsty around hell and his hospital, making endless cheesy doctor puns until she bests him with cleverness (I’m almost shocked we never get a full Bugs Bunny “Eh…what’s up doc?”).
Also, and I think this is the worst thing about the flick, after raising her from the dead, and allowing Julia a series of chilling scenes where we really see her as something powerful and frightening and cool, the film randomly and abruptly kills her off before we even hit the final act (really –it’s almost as if she steps into an open man-hole cover and, whoops, is never heard from again), freeing up her loose epidermis for a last minute surprise.
I’ve heard that the plan had been for her to really rise as the big bad of the series, but that Clare Higgins hadn’t wanted to do any further films, so I guess they eliminated her to make room for other monsters, but after making such a big deal out of her, it is such a letdown to have her slip away with so little fanfare.
But, all the same, Randel’s film does have some tremendous imagery and sequences that well serve Barker’s thematics, such as when Kirsty finds Frank in “hell,” tortured by endlessly unattainable, sighing, sometimes bloody female forms writhing beneath white sheets. Even at the end, when the penis-headed Channard-Cenobite is twirling his mustache and spouting lame one liners, there are inspired touches of idiosyncratic glory like when his hands birth phallic tentacles and each opens to reveal a new surprise – like a blade, an eye ball, a finger gesturing ‘come here,’ or a pretty flower – I don’t know what all that is, but I sure do like it.
Before that, the sexual tension/power exchange between skinless Julia and the good doctor is rich and dynamic, and her attic abattoir, replete with chained corpses hanging from the ceiling that she’s drained to rebuild herself, is properly horrific, but the standout scene of the whole film for me is that of her resurrection.
While an unwitting witness hides behind a curtain, coming dangerously close to getting caught, Channard brings into his office one of his patients, a poor fellow who sees his body constantly covered with bugs. Channard sits him down on the bloody mattress salvaged from the house of the first film and hands him a straight razor. It gets pretty rough. As Channard watches on with clinical disinterest, the patient (played by Oliver Smith, who also embodied skinless Frank in the first film) begins to desperately slice himself open, leaking torrents of blood onto the filthy mattress until arms shoot up out of it, legs follow, and soon he’s being straddled, chased, and finally devoured by a half formed Julia – all muscles and veins. It is an intense struggle as she takes him down, sinks her hands into his neck and begins to feast on his essence, his blood, and his flesh, all inches away from the poor witness behind the curtain, holding his breath not to be noticed. It is gory and suspenseful and triumphant and slippery and messy. For my money, it’s the best moment in a movie full of great moments which simply fail to cohere into a satisfying whole.
But it all still has a strong Barker flavor, which would soon diminish rapidly in the subsequent entries as the original author/director ceased to be involved in any way. The third and fourth films are not great, but have their fun moments (the Cenobite who’d been a DJ and is now a walking CD changer, not to mention going to space), but then it goes way downhill with six subsequent direct-to-video movies, many of which weren’t even written as Hellraiser flicks, but just had the name tacked on and Pinhead inserted into a couple of scenes to retain rights to the property. It wasn’t until 2022’s “reboot” that Clive Barker again had his name attached in any way to one of these films (for which he’s listed as a producer and reportedly had at least some creative input). So let’s take a look at that one as well (though I did already make some mention of it a couple of months back).
Hellraiser (2022)
Other than hitting the festival circuit, David Bruckner’s film (with writing credits for Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski (i.a., Super Dark Times), as well as David S. Goyer (i.a., Dark City) – some real pedigree there) was released primarily to streaming, which really was a shame as some of its visuals are quite striking and would have benefitted from a cinematic release. But I’m just glad it got made. It was labeled a ‘reboot,’ but it’s not like it retells the original story in any way. It could pretty much be another entry in the series (ignoring the fact that some mythos is reworked, but enjoyably so), and quite a good one at that. Honestly, I’m not sure which I prefer, this or Hellbound. There are stylistic changes (most of which I really dig, and aspects of which I understand some people’s issues with), but the film really felt like Clive Barker, and it was so good to have that again after such a long time (there have been plenty of adaptations of other works in the last decade or two, even some based on a few of my favorite stories like “Dread” or “The Midnight Meat Train,” but none of them have quite connected with me).
I think I don’t want to risk spoiling too much as this is a more recent movie, so I’ll keep it general. We follow Riley, a recovering addict trying to hold things together, but clearly hooked by the dull pull of self-destructive compulsion. Through a series of circumstances, she finds herself in possession of a mysterious puzzle box that, upon being solved, shoots out a blade, which she narrowly evades. But the box will have its blood and so if she won’t be its victim, as she falls into a narcotic stupor, chains shoot out of her heart, reaching across the city and pulling to her the only person about whom she still cares. He becomes a sacrifice in her place, leading her down a dark road of discovery as, seeking to save him, she learns about the box, the Cenobites it summons, and Roland Voight, a rich sybarite and the box’s erstwhile owner, who has built his own puzzle box of a mansion to serve his nefarious ends.
The story is engaging and exciting, though there is a stretch in the latter half where it is reduced to a siege with people trapped in a house getting picked off by monsters which is a bit less interesting, but in spite of some pacing issues and running longer than think it needs to, it sticks the landing. I like the new mythos – the box needing to be manipulated through a series of configurations, each requiring a fresh sacrifice, until it finally grants a boon to the one who holds it. And I love the visual design of it all.
I’ve heard some complain about a “de-sexing” of the Cenobites. In their original presentation, they were all leather and hooks and kinky, messy blood play. Here, their bodies have been pulled and stretched and folded almost beyond recognition, but there is a cleanliness to it all, a cold, perfect puzzle-like order to their forms that reflects that of the box in its many configurations. I feel they do right by the concept of the Cenobites, bodies eternally held in extremis as a kind of meditative, transcendent prayer of pleasure-pain, but whereas their original look was reminiscent of a contemporary fetish community, the new look is more alien – less bloody monsters/kinksters, and more unknowable, unrelenting presences, personifications of a concept. It is a different approach, but I think it really works.
Similarly, whenever the box is opened and they appear, the world shifts and slides and reveals hidden depths exactly as the box does. This reflects an effect in the original films where the walls split open, but it takes it further. Between the box, the look of the Cenobites and the opening of worlds, there is a thematic consistency that I really appreciate.
Also, Roland Voight is so a character out of a Barker story: A wealthy bastard, desperate for extreme experience, pleasure beyond anything he can find in the mortal world, builds a complex temple to his obsession, manipulating those he considers below him to sacrifice themselves at the altar of his lust. And in the end, without going into too many details, he both gets a kind of comeuppance and passes a threshold, approaching something akin to glory. Walking that line between horror and holiness is a key offer of Barker’s and we really get it here. In the original versions, I feel we only see characters who expect facile notion of pleasure and discover torment in its stead. In this case, I feel we see Voight pass through torment into…something else, something searing and bright, angelic even. That feels like Barker.
Finally, I really like the element of addiction in the protagonist, though I do wish we got more of it. The box is an object of overwhelming fascination and desire, and it caters to those with the strongest obsessions. When Riley first sits down to explore the puzzle, having relapsed and had an explosive and emotional falling out, her initial interest feels so right. She acts out of a self-eliminating compulsion, and that is inherent in the box’s solving, making her the perfect kind of person to unlock its mysteries. Perhaps this will overtake her chemical dependencies, but it will certainly not serve her any better. In the end, she is given a motivation to keep working the box that is more altruistic (salvation of a loved one) and we don’t exactly follow her down the rabbit hole of an even more destructive addiction, but I at least appreciated that moment early on when it seemed like we might – and it also felt very much like something out of “The Books of Blood.” I wish we got more – in the end, she is more of a Kirsty than a Julia in shaping the narrative, but I still appreciate the echo.
So yeah – there are significant changes, and it is a completely different story than the original – also it is a new cast (plenty of irritating online fanboys had strong objections to “Pinhead” not being played by Doug Bradley, and what’s worse, being played by a woman – forgetting that Bradley hadn’t been in the previous two films and that in the book, the lead Cenobite is never gendered male, but rather is an “it” with a girlish voice), but Jaimie Clayton is tremendously good in the lead Cenobite role – there is a cold pleasure to her delivery that is just so tasty. In one scene, when a soon to be victim claims to pray for salvation, the Hell Priest replies, “And what would that feel like? A joyful note? Without change, without end? There’s no music in that,” and we catch the Apollonian aesthete: a chilling, but also beautiful approach. Yeah – in so many ways, I think this Hellraiser absolutely does justice to Barker’s style and themes and vibe. How satisfying!
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Of the three discussed, I think the first still stands as the most significant, the self-presentation of a fresh, vibrant artistic voice in the world; a work that, grounded in human drama and strong emotion, takes itself and its horror seriously, while delivering jaw dropping (and jaw shattering) moments of horror and glorious excess. But both Hellbound and the 2022 Hellraiser bring valuable elements to the table, and both feel (even if he only served as a producer and an inspiration) like extensions of Clive Barker’s expression, and hence I consider them gifts, as he hasn’t been publishing as much of late (and what has made it to print has, sadly, not been his best work (I’m looking at you 2015’s “The Scarlet Gospels”)). Maybe someday we’ll finally get his purported next novel, “Deep Hill.” One can hope.