So it was June, “pride month,” (or at least it was when I sat down to start this post weeks ago – this is certainly coming late, but things last forever on the internet, so whenever you read this, imagine it’s still June), and I always try to mark that with some LGBTQ+ related content. Frequently that means checking out some good “Queer Horror” that I’ve not yet seen, but as alluded to in my last post, life is currently more than a little difficult (an understatement) and surveying a bunch of stuff I haven’t watched before in the desperate hope that some of it will be worth writing about is honestly more work than I’m currently capable of putting in.
But you know what I can do? Re-watch a flick I’ve seen again and again a couple more times, a picture that I love, a movie that could be termed a “problematic favorite,” but which I think, while it could be read as harmful and mean spirited, comes across as almost weirdly progressive and open minded – ah yes, the eternally watchable paradox that is Sleepaway Camp.
And I think this will be short. While there is so much to vibe on in this odd, endlessly sleazy, entirely lovable little gem, and there are one or two “big ideas,” mostly I’m just going to rave about it a bit and put myself to bed.
But I must issue a big spoiler warning on this one. It is literally impossible to discuss the significance of this flick without alluding to “the twist” that comes at the end. If you haven’t seen it yet – go, go, go! Watch it first and then come back here. It is more fun than you can imagine, and it’s streaming for free on Tubi (probably other places too) and I know it’s hitting Shudder in July. I probably won’t even summarize the plot – just give it a watch and come back (please come back…).
Sleepaway Camp (1983)
How is this movie so good? It doesn’t at all seem like it should be. And I don’t even mean good in terms of representational issues for its gay and trans characters – a surprisingly positive element which I really don’t feel was intentional, but no, I mean the movie itself, as a whole works. From what I’ve seen, the writer-director, Robert Hiltzik (whose only other credit, outside of producing the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th movies in the Sleepaway Camp series, is writing and directing the 5th movie, Return to Sleepaway Camp from 2008), wasn’t particularly a horror guy, so much as for his first feature, he simply wanted to do something cheap that would make money. He filled his movie to the gills with elements intended to get a rise out of people, almost all of which are, to some degree, in poor taste. While some performances are solid, plenty are, let’s say, unique. There are weird continuity issues. Some dialogue stretches credulity. So many elements seem like they should only be able to be appreciated as unintentional camp, something “so bad, it’s good.” But somehow this movie is so much better than that. Is it campy? Yes. Does it have weaknesses? Yeah – but a) they’re fun and b) who cares?
I guess she cares…
So what makes it so much fun, and beyond that even, what makes it so good? On one level, the outré nature of it all, the over-the-top willingness of Hiltzik to take things to shocking extremes, is genuinely a hoot. I love that this is one of the few camp based slashers that is really about the kids at camp, where one of them is the killer, and most of the victims are kids as well. You don’t often get that and, on a horror level, it’s striking. I don’t know that it’s ever scary, but it does “go there” shamelessly, time after time, and that feels special. I also love how terrible so many of the adults are, like Mel, the camp owner (Mike Kellin, a real treat), who covers up all the murder cause he doesn’t want parents to find out, and who is at least in his 60s and is all a flutter cause he’s going to have a date with the proudly bitchy counsellor, Meg (“M.E.G., Meg”), who’s probably 16 or something. But age inappropriate discomfort doesn’t stop there – we also have the head cook, who is a legitimately predatory pedophile and doesn’t care who knows it, openly lusting after the pre-pubescent children at the camp, all of the other adults mostly ignoring him with a shrug, and laughing it off with a “man, you sure are a creep, ha ha ha.”
And the element with the truly repellent cook brings me to the other side of this movie. While it is definitely campy as all get out and has some weird turns of performance and loads of things that are so much fun because they’re kinda silly (of special note is the cop who in his first appearance has a real mustache, but in his second, it is clearly fake because the actor got another role between shooting days that required him to shave it off), it is surprisingly grounded and weirdly believable.
This facial hair, however, is weirdly unbelievable.
The kids generally know the adults are awful – they get that the cook is dangerous and should be avoided, but they don’t talk to other untrustworthy grownups about it – what would even be the point? – they just have to navigate the dangerous world in which they live. They feel like real kids (and the native Long Islander in me gets a kick out of their accents). And one of the other things that makes the film so ‘real’ is how terrible the kids can be too. They swear a blue streak with great verve and creativity – they are cruel to each other – they bully and belittle – and then they largely get their comeuppance.
Mean girls – Judy and Meg.
And in those scenes of revenge, the movie earns its horror movie street cred – the budget was clearly not large on this one, but the kills (and/or mutilations) are really excellently staged and the practical effects read very well – and this flick has a significant body count. The movie isn’t scary per se, but its gore is solid and its suspenseful kill scenes are legitimately exciting. Scalding burns, death by bees while on the john, decapitations, water bloated bodies with snakes squirming out of their mouths, Judy’s hair curler shoved…someplace left to the imagination – the effects do not disappoint, nor their filming.
But then we get to the heart of it – the characters at the core of the story, and with them, the inclusion of this sleazy little slasher in the ‘queer horror’ canon. I said I wouldn’t really summarize, but the film centers around Angela, a young girl whom we first meet (as a young boy) in an opening scene in which her father and sister are killed in a terrible (and (unintentionally?) hilarious) boating accident. She’s taken in by her aunt Martha, a delightfully odd character (played by a woman, but who comes across as a drag queen presentation of some kind of dissociative state) who decides that though Angela is a boy at the time of adoption, she has always wanted a little girl and so that is what Angela will be (none of this is revealed until a flashback in the last couple minutes of the movie – until then, the viewer is meant to assume that Angela was the little girl at the beginning of the movie and that it had been her brother that died).
Aunt Martha, lost in, let’s call it “thought.”
By the time we meet Angela presenting as a girl in her teen years (Felissa Rose), when it’s time to go to camp for the first time with her cousin, Ricky, she is a girl – there is no sense of a “boy” passing. But she is not well – quiet, withdrawn, and painfully shy, she is a target for the cruel bullying of the worst elements of childhood. Clearly she has been damaged by the loss of her family in such brutal fashion before her eyes, and more, which I’ll come to in a bit. But that doesn’t stop her from enacting her bloody revenge throughout the film on everyone who harms her or is even a little bit mean to her.
Of course the film doesn’t come out and show her doing it – it tries to maintain suspense until the very end as to who is doing the killing, leaving at least some breadcrumbs leading to her cousin – who has a short temper, and is touchingly protective of his vulnerable younger cousin. And I kinda love him for it. He’s been coming to this camp for years. He has friends and a sense of status in the pecking order of the Lord of the Flies dynamics of kids, supervised by slightly older kids out in the middle of nowhere. He could so easily be as terrible as so many of his cohort, abandoning his delicate cousin/adopted sister to the pack of wild dogs (meaning middle-school aged monsters), or even turn on her to gain points – but time and time again, he is willing to throw down at the drop of a hat with anyone who looks at her funny. For a mean little bastard, I find him really sweet, and good. I believe he really cares about her.
But by the end, Angela’s secrets come to light as some of the older counselors (the two who seem to care the most about their young charges) find her naked on the beach, cradling the severed head of Paul (Ricky’s best friend, who’s been courting Angela all summer and finally got her to meet him on the beach after the social – he generally seemed like a sweet kid, but could also get a bit sexually pushy). After a quick flashback of Aunt Martha informing her mutilated and emotionally scarred young adoptee that they will have to change genders because “another boy in the house simply would not do,” the counselors see Angela’s penis (a local college student stripped down and put on an Angela mask for the scene) and utter the shocked line, “how can it be? My god, she’s a boy!” We zoom in on Angela’s wild, mad, iconic face (which Felissa Rose does to pose with fans at conventions to this day), the music stingers rise, we fade to green and the credits start rolling to the tune of the super groovy “Angela’s Theme (You’re Just What I’ve Been Looking For).” It is an intense, wild, really quite surprising ending to a very weird, and utterly watchable film.
So in the end, it is clear that the movie falls in with the unfortunate trope of the ‘trans killer’ (see Dressed to Kill, Silence of the Lambs, Psycho, etc.), which can be seen as really quite dangerous and harmful in an age of moral panic fueling “bathroom bills,” demonizing particularly trans women as a threat to cis women in ‘women’s only spaces.’ And yes, the movie can fairly be accused of that. But upon first watching it, I really had a different vibe. As a cis-het guy, I can’t claim anything about how a trans person would read this film (but I know it is embraced by some), but I immediately and strongly felt it was (probably accidentally) quite progressive, and offered an argument for trans rights. Yes, Angela has been deeply broken, both by family trauma and by a forced gender swap, but that’s kinda the point, isn’t it? Being made to live as someone who she isn’t has irreparably damaged her. Forcing someone to present as other than themselves is deeply psychologically harmful – and it’s something that as a society, we should not do.
And at the same time, when we meet Angela as a teenager, I feel she is a girl; I don’t feel there is coercion at the moment, and then, as a trans character (and not simply someone forced to transition), she is such a sympathetic figure. Beyond gender issues, it’s hard not to side with her, though by the end, we understand she has killed or at least mutilated a lot of people, some just for the infraction of being irritating little kids. In her weird, socially awkward way, she serves as an identifiable stand in for every young person who feels on the outside, who feels uncomfortable with the other kids, who feels “queer” in any sense of the word (having to do with sexual identity or otherwise). I never went to a sleepaway camp and I can’t imagine having done so (quoting another camp movie, Wet Hot American Summer, I was one of “the indoor kids”) – but I can only think that I would have felt as awkward and uncomfortable as she seems to. In the end, we understand that she is the killer, but she has always been the protagonist, and I feel the film is rather on her side (even if it also feels like every choice was made simply for shock value – and in a weird way, that makes its progressive messaging feel more pure and affectingly effective than something that actually set out to make a ‘positive statement’ and that therefore comes across as lame and pedantic).
Furthermore, in looking at this as a movie for ‘Pride Month,’ I feel there are so many other elements that speak for its inclusion. First of all, there is the much above-referenced ‘camp’ quality of the whole film. It navigates the outrageous and the absurd and the taboo in a way that I most associate with artists who identify as queer, ala the John Waters voiced character on an episode of The Simpsons defining camp as “the tragically ludicrous, the ludicrously tragic” – this movie does that (e.g., Aunt Martha the female drag queen, the extreme, and often fun and funny murders of small children and predatory adults, fake mustache cop, the teen girl on water skis, screaming, for what feels like forever, for the other teens to turn the boat before they run over Angela’s family, the over-the-top, nigh glorious, bitchiness of Meg and Judy, the artsy quality of Angela’s character explaining flashbacks). But past that, it almost seems that there is a kind of ‘gay male gaze’ in terms of the camera. I find it striking that in a movie that goes so far out of its way to be taboo and controversial, there is absolutely no female nudity, but you get a bunch of boys going skinny dipping together (and when they’re not naked, they are all wearing the shortest shorts and crop tops). And finally, there is Angela’s father. We learn over the course of the movie that he was gay and we see him with his lover in one flashback that I suppose is intended to show Angela and her sister being psychologically scarred by seeing their dad in such a sexual situation, but which really comes across as tender and loving and entirely positive. He is no ugly stereotype – in what little we see of him, he seems like a good dad who loves his kids and who is in a healthy, loving relationship. I think maybe this is supposed to shock, but mainly I’m just shocked that it all seems so warm and affirming.
And somehow this whole ridiculous, sordid, disreputable film feels just that way throughout – warm and affirming, while being filled with a superabundance of gory little kid murders, pedophilia, cruelty, and child abuse. It’s great. From the very first scene, seemingly after the events of the film had concluded, showing a broken down, abandoned summer camp where something terrible must have happened, overlaid with the sounds of children playing, I feel that pretty much everything just works – a creepy atmosphere is laid down, and I am ready for it – we are then treated to a cavalcade of laugh out loud moments of violence and pain, and ultimately, it all culminates in an (apparently) inadvertently positive message about allowing children to live as they are (specifically, expressing the gender they themselves feel to be accurate) – it’s better for them (and safer for us).
Mel agrees.
This really has become one of those warm blanket movies for me over the years and it has been a pleasure to spend a little time revisiting it right now. Sometimes life can really get difficult (see the fact that it’s been more than 5 weeks since my last post), and it might be hard to think you can handle it all, but if Angela can persevere and thrive (she goes on to do quite well for herself in the rest of the movies – all of which are more intentionally campy than this, but aren’t nearly as satisfying for me), so can we all.
Happy summer everybody – if you go to summer camp, don’t be mean to anyone (for that matter, if you don’t go to summer camp, don’t be mean to anyone either) – or else…
I was on a roll there – I’d gotten two posts up in two weeks and I knew that a book I wanted to write about would be delivered soon – The Angel of Indian Lake, the third and final entry in Stephen Graham Jones’s “Indian Lake Trilogy,” the first two books of which I’ve already written about here and here. In preparation, I re-read the second book in one week, and then when “Angel” was delivered, I burned through it in about 5 days – I was ready to write and I would get a third post up within three weeks. Awesome.
And then that never happened.
I got hit with some difficult life stuff (which isn’t exactly resolved, but at least is somewhat less volatile at present), a month and a half went by without a post, and now, while I do still have some thoughts and observations about the book, I don’t remember it well enough, in sufficiently specific detail, to feel that I can really write about it in depth.
But I am still gonna write about it – so there, just in a brief, first lasting impressions kind of way. I had thoughts 5 weeks ago when I read it, and I do want to share them. Sure, sometimes life gets difficult, but I don’t want to neglect my blogular duties – it’s good for me, and I hope it can be of interest to you as well, dear stranger reading on the internet (glad to have you).
A preface to this review – it is spoiler free, but it is also written more for someone who has read the book – I don’t go deep on describing the events of the story. So, without further ado, let’s go…
The Angel of Indian Lake (2024)
In this third installment, we pick up with Jade Daniels once more, now four years older, having done a second stint in prison following the events of the first book, coming out of it at least theoretically more mature, more of an ‘adult,’ but essentially the same slasher obsessed outsider she ever was. And what’s more, still with the same crushing degree of self-doubt, hard wired to overlook her own strengths, no matter how many times she has risen against insurmountable foes and been the only one to walk away. She is always looking for someone else to step into the shoes of her beloved ‘final girl,’ never considering herself for the part, though she’s been thrust into it time and time again.
Whereas the first two books jumped between viewpoint characters in third person limited, this is entirely Jade’s book, told in first person (except some interstitial chapters, as in the first books). Jade is an easy protagonist to love and identify with, especially as a horror fan – a socially awkward weirdo who just can’t stop expounding on her favorite movies, surrounded by people who aren’t always that into them (who hasn’t been there?), terrified and scarred (psychologically, but also literally) by the horrors she faces, but always ultimately choosing to stand against them and do the hard things that need doing, losing friends, mentors, and toes along the way. It is a real hero’s journey – and one that never really ends – no matter how many times she learns her own power, it doesn’t matter. She will have to learn it again. She believes in her slashers and that belief fuels her, but she still has trouble believing in herself. You’d think she’d have learned by now, but perhaps that’s not how people work. You get a big moment of catharsis and everything feels clear – you’ve progressed, you’re better – and tomorrow, you’re back to your old ways. Actually changing is really hard. And Jade does, but it is hard fought, and there are many setbacks along the way.
Reading this volume, I found myself often thinking of belief and faith. Slashers/final girls constitute Jade’s religion. She has so voraciously consumed these stories to the point that they make up the lens through which she views her life, especially when the bodies start falling – which they do in great numbers in this case (the dead rise, bears attack, human killers stalk the woods, and more). Her faith in her holy texts motivates her, gives her comfort, and helps her to understand this so often blood-stained world. But a key element I really appreciated is the extent to which it is not magic. Jade is constantly wrong – through all three books. She reads the events happening around her through the paradigm of her favorite kind of horror movie, and while it offers interpretive, emotional, and psychological value, as a tool for predictions, it has a pretty weak track record. She leaps to conclusions, chases after red herrings, and is forever trying to puzzle out what is actually going on and why. She’ll make a big emotional decision and try doing something because it feels like it should work, and it doesn’t, and she has to try something else. Slashers may have easily trackable rules (thanks Randy), but life doesn’t. And as with previous cases, the underlying story – the reasons for what is happening – is pretty complicated, messy even. But I think that lends a valuable, if surprising, realism to this story of resurrected spirits, unresolved traumas, and mass killers, supernatural and otherwise – life isn’t a story; it is confusing and confused, and no lens can predict it. All we can do is attempt to interpret – to use the worldview we’ve built ourselves to lend meaning to the chaos, to see the beauty of the story playing out in the horrors we must undergo – we need meaning and beauty and understanding, even when it’s wrong.
When it comes to the killer(s) in the story this time, without going into any spoilers (if you’ve read the first two books and not yet this one, you really have to pick this up and I don’t want to give anything away – I’ll just say that there are as many or more twists, turns, and reversals as you’ve come to expect), it all had a kind of magical realism to it (notable given how the slasher subgenre is so often based in a fully human murderer). To a larger extent than the first two books (though the element was certainly present), this volume premises all local folklore as seemingly true, and anything can happen if the emotions are strong enough – if it is at least poetically justified. At first glance, this seems at odds with much of the slasher canon, but in a way, the slasher pairs well with folklore. It may be the tropeiest subgenre of horror, and its iterative qualities read like modern folk stories – sitting around the campfire, trying to scare each other with a fresh telling of the tale of the call coming from inside the house, or the little girl the lake rejected, or the hook ripped off, dangling from the car door… And the folklore here lands with deep resonance – tales of the American west: settlers, religious fanatics, people displaced from their land, human lives crushed by forces bigger than themselves, those left behind when the world moves on.
Furthermore, it is a very emotional read, eliciting tears from me on more than one occasion (though to be honest, I am an easy mark, but that said, it absolutely earned those tears). And I think this may be the strength of the series, and possibly of Graham Jones’s writing writ large. There is excitement and gore and thrills aplenty, but it is all run through with such deep feeling and characters you can love and root for and sometimes mourn. I think they are quite different writers, but in this way, Graham Jones rather reminds me of Stephen King. I feel like they both come to know characters first, and then they have to follow those characters where they will, often resulting in big, circuitous, even meandering plots which are not at all about plot – they’re about people, about their hopes and fears and compulsions and failings. The book makes a breathless dash for the finish line, but it feels like it is desperately running towards a point which is not yet known, which has to be found, which has to make that emotional, poetic, mythic sense, and which will, along with its protagonist, make false starts along the way. All of this could be taken as criticism, but I feel it is a strength of the text rather than a weakness.
So there we are – I rather liked it (though maybe wouldn’t go as strong as “love” – I’d reserve that for the second book, Don’t Fear the Reaper). I haven’t even tried to describe the story – but part three of a trilogy is nowhere to start, so if you’ve come this far and haven’t read the first two books, maybe go pick up My Heart is a Chainsaw – if you read this blog, I expect you’ll likely be into it. The story here could be stated as simply as “people start dying again and Jade has to deal with it” – but there is clearly so much more to it than that. For my part, it was nice to return to Proofrock, Idaho one last time and see Jade off. This was totally engaging and intriguing and fun, and if you have enjoyed the first two volumes, you really do need to check it out.
I don’t know why I haven’t watched any of the films of Brandon Cronenberg yet. When I was first really getting into horror as a genre, his dad, David Cronenberg, was my absolute favorite director, making work so rich in concept, with gripping ideas that challenge and stretch the idea of the body, the mind, the self, and not in arsty, self-important packages, but in wild, fleshy, sexual, bloody weird rides (I also don’t know why I haven’t written about any of David Cronenberg’s films yet – one of these days). And when the younger Cronenberg hit the scene with his 2012 premiere, Antiviral, the buzz was that he was similarly invested in big concepts, but that he was also absolutely his own artist, with his own clear voice. By all counts, I should have leapt at the chance to check him out. But somehow, I never did.
Then in 2020, after some hiatus, he returned with Possessor, and I heard from voices I trusted that it was not only an interesting and accomplished work, but that it was also really exciting and intense. But, still, I didn’t watch it for some reason. Finally, most recently, about a year ago, his Infinity Pool made a splash (whoops – sorry, ugh), dividing audience opinions, but sounding absolutely intriguing, and did I rush out to the cinema to see it? No, of course not. Why? Who knows? I am a mystery even unto myself.
Anyway, this week, I just want to jump in with both feet and give my first impressions on his catalogue as it currently stands. I haven’t watched any of these movies yet, so I don’t know what I’ll think, but I sure hope I’ll like them. Either way, I’m going to try to keep this short. I usually run on longer than intended, and it means I don’t publish nearly as often as I’d like, so these will be off the cuff and to the point. If there’s something there, I reserve the right to return to it sometime in the future in depth.
And of course, there will probably be some spoilers…
Antiviral (2012)
What an interesting idea: It’s the near future and society’s obsession with celebrities has ballooned to wild new proportions. Butchers sell hunks of protein grown from the harvested cells of famous people, fans can indulge their darker impulses in computer generated interactions with their celebrity crushes wherein they can dominate, humiliate and/or torture them, and most significant for our story, there is a thriving market in viruses collected from the famous that people pay big bucks to have themselves infected with, attaining a biological intimacy with the objects of their fascination. The companies that buy and distribute these illnesses put them through a copy protection process to make them non-contagious so no one can contract some starlet’s herpes or stomach flu for free. But of course, with such a limited good, there is a thriving black market in hacked viruses.
Syd March (Caleb Landry Jones) works for a virus selling clinic and regularly infects himself with their wares to smuggle them out of the premises so that at home he can use a stolen machine to crack their copy protections and sell them to an illicit distributer. He is an intriguing figure, a cipher at the heart of the story. He is always terribly ill, and there is a kind of mystery that runs through it all of what exactly he gets from this. Does he need the money that badly? Is he some kind of celebrity obsessive as well? By the end of the film, it is revealed, but not understanding where he’s coming from is really surprisingly compelling. And Landry Jones is so very good in the role, exuding a weird, sickly charisma throughout. He is pale and clammy and disgusting, but also captivatingly intense in a quiet, broken way. It’s a great performance and it left me wondering what he’s been up to in recent years. I feel like he was exploding in the 2010’s, but I haven’t seen him in a while. I hope he’s ok and not infected with a terrible celebrity illness (I just checked – he’s alive and working – good).
Anyway, Syd is sent to harvest a pathogen from one particular star, and in the process, before the virus has been copy-protected, he steals some, directly injecting a bit of her blood into his veins. You might say this was a mistake as, after he wakes up from what might have been a mini-coma, he sees a news report that she’s died of a mysterious disease, and all of a sudden, he’s thrust into the twists and turns of a conspiracy/corporate espionage thriller as various figures hound and kidnap him, all seeking the valuable commodity flowing through his vascular system. Also, he’s probably going to die.
Sadly, whereas the first act had totally enraptured me and I was so taken with the initial ideas, particularly the interrogation of what celebrity even is and how it connects with other motivating works of the imaginary, more than one character likening it to a kind of faith, in the second act, I just got a bit lost in the circuities of the plot. There is rather a lot of plot. Maybe too much plot. I faded a bit… But in the end, I’d say the final act clicked into place, with Syd regaining control of his story, the concept of celebrity as a kind of cannibalistic fetishism taken to its logical conclusion and, in a private moment, Syd’s compulsive motivations are revealed. It was a satisfying ending, though it was a shame that I had drifted somewhat along the way.
But I’ve gotta say, as a first feature, wow – I’m impressed. It has a bold, confident visual style; it is full of ideas (and Brandon Cronenberg wrote it in addition to directing, so he deserves full credit for exploring those ideas); and while it is impossible not to compare it to the work of his father (there is obvious common ground between this film and other works that play in the borderlands of biology, identity, and technology such as Videodrome, Rabid, or Existenz), I also think a clear authorial voice can be heard. It’s also interesting that the first film of an artist who knows he’s working under his father’s long shadow is entirely focused on the idea of famousness. I’m super curious to watch the next couple of movies and see how he’s developed since his debut.
Possessor (2020)
I think it’s easy to read artistic growth from Antiviral to this. Though the first film impressed me, this one (also both written and directed by Cronenberg) really got under my skin. Again, we have a high concept sci-fi, near future horror-thriller premise, but whereas I felt the big ideas in the first film ended up getting somewhat sidelined by the corporate espionage plot in the second act, in this case, the central conceptual issue just metastasizes throughout the film, with a haunting and horrific payoff by the end. It was all a fascinating, intense ride that was both intellectually challenging and emotionally weighted, with moments of thrilling excitement and horrific acts of violence or violation of self. I was captivated start to finish and it left me in an odd state for a while afterwards.
This time, our protagonist, Tasya Vos (played by Andrea Riseborough, among others) is a fancy assassin whose consciousness is technologically implanted into the brains of unwitting patsies that she rides to get access to high level targets, eliminating them and then getting pulled back to her own body as she makes her host commit suicide, thus fully severing the connection. You get the impression that she is very good at her job, but that it has taken a toll on her psychologically and emotionally. Her relationships are strained at best – it’s as if when she’s in her own body with her husband and son, she is merely playing the role of “Tasya,” and it is a role for which she must prepare, practicing her lines in advance, getting her vocal inflections right for this character, this job: herself. And the job comes with her in other ways. In moments of intimacy, whether sexual or filial, she flashes on violent memories of time she’d recently spent in a host.
Similarly, when we see her do her job and enter a new person (which is not only physical – she must study that person’s life, relationships, and mannerisms to be able to slip into them for days without raising flags), there is a difficult process of adjustment, finding her new legs both metaphorically and literally. This process is not easy or obvious. No matter how much a host has been studied in advance, upon taking over, it is impossible to fully recreate their persona, and when, for example, a host’s girlfriend questions why he’s acting so strangely, it is a high stakes, deeply emotional improv game to maintain the illusion with one who knows that host so well. Similarly, there are basic corporeal elements at play, such as simply living within a new physical form, sometimes with different parts – a sex scene which she has in a male body is more than a bit of a trip – for her and for us.
And it must be said that while Riseborough is excellent when we see her, most of the film consists of Tasya in another body, that of Colin Tate, and that therefore, she is largely portrayed by Christopher Abbott, who does such a nuanced job of playing her playing him. This is a concept that lends itself to rich, subtle performances (Jennifer Jason Lee also stands out as Tasya’s handler) – a big sci-fi idea that depends not on special effects, but on special actors.
Of course, the job goes south (otherwise there wouldn’t be a movie), and the lines between Tasya and Colin begin to blur. Beyond that, the very idea that Tasya (or anyone for that matter) is a whole person, with full agency and will, is called into question. As the film goes on, we see her more and more untethered – something that may be occurring due to circumstances of the plot, but also may be the state she has been living in for some time, but is only now coming into unsettling focus.
All of this sets up the sci-fi thriller premise, but it must be said that the horror is strong here – both in an exploration of a horrific experience of losing or at least questioning one’s self, but also in shocking moments of tragic violence, as well as a disturbing presentation of the degree to which the individual is not at all inviolable, but is only ever an impermanent approximation, existing temporarily in a web of physical and social contexts. This is largely played out in performance, but it also gets pretty trippy at times, and I must commend Cronenberg’s fascinating visual elements, mostly filmed in camera with practical effects, which is always refreshing, but here feels particularly significant. In a film this concerned with corporeality, I think an over reliance on CGI would be detrimental.
As I wrote earlier, this exploration of what it is to be a mind in a body plays out over the course of the story, but it must be said, that while the film is big in ideas, and does maintain a kind of hypnotic vibe, that doesn’t make it some kind of art film, prioritizing philosophy over narrative – interesting, but heady and sleep inducing. This is a suspenseful, emotional, and intense movie, and its conclusion, lands with a bleakly chilling gut punch.
A fascinating viewing experience, it really planted itself in my head, leaving me in an uncanny mood, feeling a bit odd in my own body for some time after the credits had rolled. I guess a film must be good if it inspires a minor fugue state, right?
Finally, I keep finding myself coming back to the question of how I might characterize Brandon Cronenberg and how his work should be distinguished from his father’s. There are a great deal of similarities so far. It’s like he’s carrying on the family business of “body horror that philosophically interrogates psychology,” and what a family business – some people just go into shoemaking or accounting or something. But still, I hesitate. It feels facile to simply note how they are thematically similar. There is clearly a mind at work here and it seems unfairly reductive to mention his dad so much when these films have been so strong. Perhaps after watching his third flick, I’ll be better prepared to put my finger on his oeuvre.
Infinity Pool (2023)
As mentioned earlier, when this came out last year, it divided audiences, so I came to it prepared for something, I don’t know, divisive. What I found was a hell of a movie. I wonder if it so split opinion because it was simply Cronenberg’s most widely released and marketed film to date (Antiviral being a first feature, Possessor being a pandemic release, and Infinity Pool starring Alexander Skarsgård, a pretty well-known actor and Mia Goth, who has been knocking it out of the park lately), thus bringing in a wider audience, not all of whom might have been up for what they got. In any case, I loved it. But before getting into it, I must say that for the first two films I was generally able to dance around the plot without really spoiling much – I feel that with this one, I’m going to have to reveal certain details, so if you think you might be interested in seeing it, go do it now. It’s available in many places, though I don’t know which version you’ll get (as with Possessor, there is an R-rated cut and an original cut with more explicit sexual and violent imagery) – I rented the uncut version from the production company’s website – and if you get geo-blocked, as I did, living in Poland, my VPN worked for it just fine.
Skarsgård plays James Foster, a novelist who published his first book seven years ago and is struggling to produce a second one. Seeking inspiration, he and his wife, Em, the daughter of his publisher, have gone on vacation to a gated resort in the fictional country of Li Tolqa (shot mostly in and around the Croatian town of Šibenik – which I visited in 2022, about a year after filming). This invented country seems to have fascinating cultural practices, but all that Foster, or for that matter, we, can see are those that are cultivated for tourists, either as gift shop masks, or as economic exchange, the locals literally selling their lives for the entertainment of rich foreigners. At the start of the film, Foster is clearly lost and depressed – going to a tourist resort that offers the most superficial presentation of culture while drinking champagne with the breakfast buffet and lounging by the pool can be pleasant, but unsurprisingly stirs no creative juices – and he doubts if there is even anything within to be stirred. Having married into money, perhaps he is simply now a member of the idle rich, producing nothing of value, empty inside, living a squalid, meaningless life of luxury.
And so, he is given a jolt when they meet another couple at the resort, Alban and Gabi (Mia Goth), who says she’s a huge fan of his novel and is desperately waiting for him to publish again. He is drawn to the seductively frank Gabi, her unfiltered interest in him stroking James’s ego (while she literally strokes other things – at least in the uncut version) and inciting a dangerous risk-taking in him as he drags his wife out of the guarded resort compound for a day trip with the other two into the wilder environs of the country they’ve come to visit – which just means grilling and getting drunk on a beach down the road from their hotel. But then, driving back at night, he hits and kills a local farmer, and that is what really begins our story.
Li Tolqa is a country with a very traditional sense of justice and the local law is that in the case of such a killing, the eldest son of the victim has the right to kill the assailant. However, the country also has an interesting history of folk traditions, mixed with surprisingly modern cloning technology. Earlier in the film, we saw a taste of a local ritual with grotesque masks that revolves around a kind of doubling of character. That has developed into a modern practice of high capitalism wherein they offer Foster the option to have himself cloned, the clone implanted with all of his memories and guilt for the crime, and having that clone killed in his place.
I wonder what the practice was before cloning was perfected – was someone masked in the place of the killer and thus executed? Would that masked person volunteer and their family be compensated or were they discarded serfs without any rights? We’ll never know though as, tourists ourselves, we only know of the extraordinarily expensive service offered to Foster, one that he is willing to avail himself of.
One gets the sense that this cloned execution procedure is a key part of the local economy. We are told that Li Tolqa is a very poor country and that it is dangerous beyond the barbed wire fences of the hotel compound. We understand that tourism is vital to local GDP, and I think this is just another kind of tourism – this is the sort of place where rich westerners can come to behave extraordinarily badly and just pay a financial fee to be excused, exploiting a local population that offers themselves up for that exploitation, for abuse or even death, so profitable is the practice.
Foster is not as horrified at the sight of having himself killed as one might expect. In fact, while his wife is traumatized, he seems happy – finally free, and not just from punishment, but of himself – that schmuck who couldn’t write is dead. Good riddance. Soon he finds himself falling in with a group of terrible, wealthy tourists, pulled their by Gabi, who all embark on acts of debauchery and brutality, safe in the knowledge that they can always pay to have another clone produced and dispatched. They are just having the best time, causing all sorts of trouble for the local people, and James follows Gabi deeper and deeper into their midst, her mask being lowered so slowly that it is hard to pinpoint the truth of her from one moment to the next – it’s a really nicely navigated performance.
For one who has been so disappointed in himself, who already felt creatively and emotionally barren, there is a tempting freedom in this act of self-destruction, killing the failure he once was, now free to hedonistically indulge with no shame, with no concept of ambition or ethics or value. Once haunted by imposter syndrome, he finds that weight lifted from him by means of a literal imposter – who is also, actually, himself – but of course, it does not go well for the imposter.
Whereas in Possessor, one body was being fought over by two personas, each of whom lost something of themselves in the process, here, James instead splits himself, again and again. It is freeing, but perhaps something is erased as well. The film regularly plays with doubts as to who is “real” and who is a copy – characters directly discuss the possibility that they are actually being killed and that the clones are left in their place. That may be, but is never established one way or another, and I don’t think it’s important. I think everything is real and everything is a sham.
By the end, James seems to have been left a husk, hollowed out by this self-destructive experience, but wasn’t he already at the beginning – has this changed him for the worst, or simply revealed to him the degree to which he had already (maybe even always?) been absent? All of the other tourists seem to be having so much fun, and while he goes on this journey with them, and behaves just as badly, he is haunted and miserable. Why the difference? Are they simply gleeful monsters or does his failure to enjoy himself make him somehow worse than them? They all do terrible things, but at least they are enjoying themselves – he is just miserably trying to disappear. And aren’t we, the viewers, implicated in their entertainment: emotional tourists of horrors inflicted on others, and when all is said and done, we just go back to our normal lives, having a laugh, untouched?
I will say that the very ending didn’t blow me away as much as most of the run time had done, but that as a whole, this was quite the ride. The ideas, which still circle around many similar themes from the first two works (bodies, identity, sense and loss of self – all run through with fleshy violence and explicit sexual imagery) are thought provoking and I was emotionally involved in James’s story. Skarsgård and Goth are both great, and the visual style of the film is striking, with crisp, intriguing cinematography and experimental, hallucinatory sequences that get quite creative, and again, Cronenberg leans into practical make-up effects and in-camera visual techniques, and it is a pleasure to see something that feels so solid, even when it’s disorienting and ethereal. This seems at odds, but I think it’s true.
I loved it. The continued play with dividing and questioning the idea of the ‘self’ lands emotionally. The exploration of economic, cultural exploitation rings true – I particularly love how little we actually learn of the fictional setting – as tourists, we merely skate on the surface and are intrigued and enticed by the sense of hidden depths, but feel no need to dig deeper and actually invest thought or energy in learning something. Finally, the drama of James’s self-doubt and the lure of a total freedom from responsibility connected for me – I think it’s something many could experience, though few have the capital resources to follow through on as he does (also, the cloning technology isn’t quite there yet).
For me, I experienced a small taste of something like this during the pandemic: I, like many, can struggle with such an ‘imposter syndrome’ – am I ever doing anything truly worthwhile – artistically, in the theatre, writing this blog, in my teaching, in my interactions with others, or am I just idle, greedy, lazy, indulging in things I like for my own self-serving pleasure? I can only assume this is a commonly felt anxiety and that it’s not just me. But when we weren’t supposed to go anywhere or do anything, and the way we were asked to “help” was to essentially stay home and chill out, I felt a real kind of freedom – no need to perform, to achieve, to plan for the future, or even really imagine it – just read books, watch films, listen to music, exercise, bake bread, work online, and hangout with my wife and my cat – it was a kind of low-ambition bliss that I’d never before felt so allowed to enjoy and that was really hard to come back from. I have (I guess), but it wasn’t automatic. It took effort to get more involved in the world beyond my own four walls again (and now I’m back to feeling guiltily inadequate – that I don’t do enough – artistically, politically, intellectually).
But personal tangents aside, this was a great movie. If you haven’t watched it yet, I hope I haven’t spoiled it for you – go give it a try.
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Yeesh – I’d said I wanted this to be a short, “off the cuff” post, and now, 4,000 words later, we’re still here. But I’m glad to have finally dug into this filmmaker I’d long been interested in and somehow had not yet at all explored – a good project for a week. Which brings me, of course, back to that essential question of how I describe his work, and how I think it might be discussed in comparison to that of his father’s. So first of all, having watched these three films, I think Brandon Cronenberg is a really significant new voice in horror, whose name should come up when people discuss the Ari Asters and Robert Eggerses of the world. He is making really interesting and engaging sci-fi/horror, and really capitalizing on the promise of both halves of that sub-genre. For me, the best sci-fi need not include spaceships or robots, but simply involves positing some technologically based possibility that lets us explore an idea – for an individual, for society, etc. Horror invites us to dwell in a dark place, taking some difficult emotion and following it to its natural conclusion, allowing it to develop into something more than natural, something monstrous or mythic. Cronenberg is doing both of these things, and making exciting, intriguing, visually striking stories to boot (writing this post, I find myself overusing and unable to find enough synonyms for ‘interesting,’ ‘intriguing,’ and ‘fascinating’ – that says something about the nature of the work).
Of course, this is quite a similar sandbox to that which his father, David Cronenberg, has long played in, and there are striking overlaps of their recurring themes. In both cases, the physical body is often foregrounded – flesh is important, as is the breaching of its boundaries, which means sex and violence are front and center. And all of this focus on corporeality results in an exploration of the mind and how its sanctity, its permanence, its sense of being discrete and whole might be re-imagined, challenged, or even abandoned. Furthermore, at a higher level of abstraction, commerce often becomes involved – a meeting place of desire and physical reality, with the body and self in play. In both creators’ work there is a tension between a cerebral, philosophical exploration and a visceral emotionality. Yeah – in many ways, their work is not all that dissimilar.
And yet, their films do certainly feel different to me – and clearly have different minds behind them. One aspect of difference may simply be technical – between film stocks and the capabilities of special effects, a body horror/sci-fi piece made in the late 70s/early 80s is bound to look different than one made forty years later. But there is also a difference of mood that is difficult for me to specify. Perhaps one of these days I’ll have to return to the father in the form of some kind of filmic retrospective to see if I can put it in words, but for now, I just feel that though they both circle around similar ideas, if I were to watch a future film by one of them and not be told which had made it, I expect I’d be able to guess, so specific are their respective creative fingerprints. I fear this is a cop out of sorts, but for now, it’s the best I’ve got.
Either way though, I think I can safely say that both have earned the cost of a ticket from me for anything they make going forward.
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).
Cenobite concept art by Barker.
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.
