​MY LIFE IN HORROR: HELLRAISER

For those of us that have always been outcast from the prescriptions of tradition and society at large, always denied the ready-made roles and narratives that apply to our straight, cisgender siblings, it's little wonder that the Cenobites -amongst others- exercise a peculiar species of fascination, that transcends any sense of the forbidden born from their monstrosity, and makes them enticing on an existential level. 

For many of us who operate in the haunted depths and heights of horror, Clive Barker's iconic Hellraiser franchise is an ambient phenomena: we were children, even infants in the 1980s, when so many revolutions and ructions occurred within the genre, transforming its accepted face and blowing apart traditional parameters. For my part, I can't recall a time when Hellraiser did not exist; it's as much a part of my internal landscape as The Transformers or The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, as naturally part of the world as storms or Summers. 


Like so many of us, my first exposure came in the form of the UK VHS copy, alongside its sequel, the mythologically ambitious, grotesque carnival that is Hellbound. Though I don't recall the first time I glimpsed and took note of it, the iconic image of “Pinhead” (refered to in the film's credits as “The Lead Cenobite,” later christened “The Hell Priest” in various comics and sequel stories)on the front cover exercised a peculiar and ambiguous fascination over my developing imagination: Here was an image that, whilst disturbing, was also strangely alluring, its symmetry and artistic patterns contrasting wildly with the medium of their recording. Even back then, before I'd read a single word of Clive Barker's prose, before I even knew who the man was or who I was and would become, something about the image attracted and appalled in equal measure. 


For a child already well immersed in the horror cinema of the era -thanks largely to my Mother's extensive VHS library-, the ambiguity of emotion, the complexity of response, was in itself fascinating; abstractly akin to picking a still-bleeding scab, knowing that the skin isn't yet knitted,that there will be pain and blood as a consequence, but unable to leave it alone. Unlike many, many horror films I was already familiar with -The Evil Dead, Alien, A Nightmare of Elm Street, Halloween and myriad others-, Hellraiser boasted a certain patina; a quality of the forbidden that made it, fittingly enough, a profound temptation; an echo of the Lament Configuration puzzle box so essential to its mythology.


My brother and I were never prohibited in our viewing material; our parents took care to vet said subjects and explain their fictional, contrived nature. This sometimes took the form of explaining how certain effects were achieved or pointing out the costume and animation work in particular scenes, or emphasising that the story onscreen was exactly that; no more real or possible than the Saturday morning cartoons we enjoyed. As such, horror became part of our shared childhood; we were as likely to favour a viewing of Predator, The Thing or Aliens as we were The Transformers, Dungeons and Dragons or The Little Mermaid. 


I don't clearly recall the first time I saw Hellraiser; I couldn't tell you how old I was, other than I was likely far too young (a consistent pattern when it comes to formative media in my life), and that it affected me in ways that it did not my brother; evoking emotions that other films it was so often ranked alongside  didn't even come close to. My most abiding, visceral impression is of dirt, not of fear; a sense of spiritual filth that lingers on the film grain and in the images they record. This is not a condemnation in any way; that feeling of being tainted for having watched it, as though the transgression of consuming the material is an occult rite that might well summon unspoken things from across the veil as surely as solving the iconic puzzle box, I recall staying with me for many, many years after that initial viewing. Whilst the images in the film certainly had their power -Frank's rebirth and the variously grotesque stages of his swelling back to something like humanity, the hooks and chains stretching skin to extremity, the Cenobites themselves and their glorious upsetting of reality wherever they occur-, that less defined quality of having being spiritually infected by the film is what fascinated me then and continues to do so. I recall Hellraiser having a power to unsettle me in ways that no amount of Freddy Kreuger's increasingly comic escapades or Michael Meyer's violence ever did. Unlike films such as Alien, which I would return to again and again, consume with near-fetishistic appetite, Hellraiser I returned to gradually and with great trepidation, forgetting certain details in the interim but always recalling that sense of the forbidden, the feeling of transgression that would later recur in my pubescent years with the blossoming of my sexuality and queer identity. ​

Hellraiser, whatever else might be said about the film, exercises power by cultivating a certain poetry between its themes and subject matter: the reactions it elicits in its audience echo those of characters in the film to the same atrocities and situations in which they occur. In the film's opening sequence, Frank Cotton, in his role as a strangely post-modern Faust, blithely solves the Lament Configuration, lacking the scope of imagination to understand what it will summon, and what his blunted, myopic lusts will give birth to. What he summons, what he unleashes and ultimately becomes, are profoundly tainted miracles; supernatural, otherworldly, utterly at odds with much of the concertedly-realist horror of the era. Frank represents an utterly polluted species of metaphysics; eternal life, resurrection, life beyond death, but shot through with a vein of cynical wit: This isn't glory, though the swelling, orchestral soundtrack during his hideously organic rebirth enjoins us to regard it as such; this is a curious mingling of miracle and atrocity, where any distinction between the two dies. This quality is, of course, rendered explicit by The Hell-Priest himself, who declares his cabal as: “...demons to some, angels to others.” To focus on the overt, visual gore, images of physical pain and bodily mutilation is to somewhat miss the point; as interesting, as repulsive, as powerful as they are, they are also part and parcel of a deeper metaphysics and commentary thereon. Throughout the film, familiar Christianic parables and works of fiction are echoed, down to certain symbols and metaphors derived from Biblical myth itself. However, Barker inverts and subtly lampoons those miracles by making them part of an entirely other metaphysics; one that, whilst it sometimes uses the language of Christianity in a wry and sardonic fashion, cleaves to no parameter or assumption of those traditions. In that, Barker creates a status quo in which miracles can be simultaneously welcome and unwelcome; attractive and repellant, sexual and repulsive. That ambiguity of response is something Barker has worked to elicit since his earliest writings. His fascination is not with the purity of horror, repulsion or the other emotions horror fiction is generally assumed to arouse, but with demonstrating to the audience that they enjoy subject matter and imagery that simultaneously repels and disturbs them; that there is worth in that response. It is a conspiratorial act of transgression on behalf of both creator and audience, that is explicitly designed to swell context and undermine assumption, to allow horror to be more than markets, studios and systems of distribution prescribe. 


Even as a child, though I lacked the language or internal circuitry of mind to articulate it to myself, I sensed this on a subconscious, visceral level. That ethos of disturbia; of being tainted by this work, yet reluctantly returning to it again and again, I found undeniably fascinating. As a child given to flights of profound fantasy, dense and protracted internal monologues, explorations of self and my own responses to the outer world, I couldn't help but ache to solve the puzzle of that emotional reaction in the same manner that protagonist Kirsty ultimately solves the Lament Configuration. It felt like there was revelation waiting on the other side, as though if I could only find the language to articulate what was happening, why the film aroused such response, I might blossom into some new state of self-understanding, a surreal Nirvana that isn't entirely from the condition the Cenobites occupy and promise their devotees. 


Whilst I maintained a fascination with various horror-film ghosts, demons, monsters and their ilk throughout my childhood, none of them -save, perhaps, Giger's eponymous Alien- ever exercised the same degree or complexity of obsession as The Cenobites. Aesthetically alone, they were and remain far removed from anything else in the bestiaries of popular horror at the time, and incorporated influences whose seeming incongruity -from the papal to the BDSM- Barker married into a troublingly cohesive whole. Most horror film monsters of the era, whilst beautifully designed, were often aesthetic exercises only; intended to intrigue and horrify via their inevitable revelation. The Cenobites are somewhat different, both in design and presentation. First off, the film makes no bones about revealing them for what they are; albeit shadowed, they occur in the film's opening scene, presented amidst a kaleidoscope of violent, strange and graphic imagery, which leaves the audience powerfully unsettled and questioning what manner of profane circus they've been invited to participate in. Later, when Kirsty Cotton succeeds in unwittingly summoning them, they occur wreathed in clinical, otherworldly luminescence, bleakly radiant in their grotesque majesty. The film plays little games with its monsters du jour, actively inviting the audience to regard them and be fascinated, aroused, disturbed, attracted and repulsed all in the same instant. As a boy barely aware of his own nascent queerness, this experience was formative: to not only encounter creatures whose aesthetics appealed in their own inchoate and ineffabe fashion, but that echoed the queerness I wouldn't actively recognise for many years yet...that was a powerful and unexpected element of my abiding attraction to these films and continued identification with Barker's work as a whole. 


Most mainstream, cinematic works of horror of the era -barring one or two notable exceptions- were assiduously heternormative both in theme and subject; they operated in worlds where cisgender, heterosexual identities were assumed and any deviation was treated either as joke or deviance. Gay characters, if they occurred at all, were either jokes, victims or monsters; there was no in between. And trans-panic killers had been part and parcel of horror cinema arguably since Hitchcock's Psycho in the 1960s. An ugly and pervasive reactionary element of much mainstream horror lay in emphasising and exaggerating the threat posed by “the other;” acting as post-modern reimaginings of traditional folk and fairy tales, they served to reinforce rigid and prescribed forms of morality derived from extremely conservative ideologies. 


Barker, having occupied the depths where the monsters dwell most of his life -having been consigned to those very realms by both his status as a gay man and his underclass position-, came along with Hellraiser and decided to rip those structures and assumptions apart (in a manner reminiscent of how Frank is variously torn to shreds in the film itself). Here, we have a horror story whose queerness is overt, despite the lack of distinct LGBTQ characters or relationship dynamics. Here are iconic horror-film monsters that derive aesthetic inspiration from, amongst other sources, the gay BDSM clubs Barker was familiar with and the underground periodicals he was known to illustrate for (some of which were seized and destroyed as a result of the UK's bout of Puritan panic during the 1980s). The Cenobites are intended to exercise a certain allure over the audience, not merely a fascination with the extent and elaboration of their mutilations (though that is undoubtedly part of their appeal), but in terms of what they thematically represent: Bound up in their variously rent, lacerated, pierced and infibulated forms is an artistic obsession with transgression and transformation; sensuality and experience are the cores of their credo, and their anatomies are merely the mediums by which that is expressed. They are walking works of self-authored art and religious icons; creatures that have reached a pique of sensual excess, thereby achieving a twisted Nirvana, an absolutism and poetry that is enviable, especially to those of us born into the abyss of corrupt and decaying ideology that characterises the last couple of centuries. 


Far from merely being “monsters,” the Cenobites, like so many of Clive Barker's creations, reflect the awful allure of that condition; mythic abstractions of the human beings they once were, rendered absolute by the extreme nature of their remaking and the fundamental inspirations the dark god Leviathan has teased out of their subconsciousness, expressing through their reworked anatomies. 


For those of us that have always been outcast from the prescriptions of tradition and society at large, always denied the ready-made roles and narratives that apply to our straight, cisgender siblings, it's little wonder that the Cenobites -amongst others- exercise a peculiar species of fascination, that transcends any sense of the forbidden born from their monstrosity, and makes them enticing on an existential level. 


In that, the mythology of Hellraiser is echoed in the relationship it draws with its audience; seekers and sybarites within the universe of the fiction come to the Lament Configuration for various reasons: out of curiosity, desire; a need to know or understand. They are then remade by the Cenobites according to those factors, becoming avatars and angels of peculiarly human principles. By the same token, the target audience of Hellraiser finds fascination and -albeit ineffable, reluctant- attraction with its monstrous subjects because they reflect not only their own conditions -being so often cast in the roles of monsters and deviants by the conservative forces that shape and underpin traditional society-, but also the potential within those conditions. There is beauty in abomination and poetry in monstrosity, according to the Cenobites; a message that can't help but chime with those of us variously condemned as both for our inalienable natures. 


Contextually, Hellraiser occurred within a particularly puritan era of the UK (one that, in many ways, echoes the scapegoating circumstances in which we currently find ourselves, especially with regards to our trans siblings). The legacy of Mary Whitehouse and her crusade to impose myopically and fundamentally Christian standards of taste and ethics upon British media was in full swing, the British tabloid press wallowed in painting LGBTQ culture as a disease-ridden pit of license in the wake of the HIV/AIDs crisis, and everywhere, small but incredibly persuasive, influentual pockets of conservatism rose up in response to what they perceived as “declining moral standards” in the sociey they assumed to be automatically and exclusively their's. 


Hellraiser, and Barker's entire body of work, is a response to and refutation of those very forces: here, Barker dares to present entities and a metaphysics purer than any fundamentalist's presumptions of their own traditions, but that operates with regards to inverse, markedly queer assumptions of purity itself: 

 The purity of the Cenobites derives not from denial or innocence, but their exact opposites: sensation, sensuality and experience so extreme, so all-consuming, they physically and spiritually transform their subjects, rendering them as far more than human. That the puritan nature of the Cenobites also incorporates imagery derived from queer circles is Barker's lampoon of the prescriptive myopia of the puritanism and purported “ethics” of those seeking to impose their standards on all of British media and culture: Your purity is not our purity, Barker dares to proclaim, in every gasp and moan, every splash of blood or semen, every laceration and stretched-taut scrap of flesh. In fact, your purity is tawdry and hollow compared to ours. Our angels are more angelic, our demons more demonic, our pleasures and pains more intense and transcendent. 


It is a challenge and a manifesto, rendered in latex and fake gore, in mutilations that themselves are often almost biblical in terms of their symbolism, but lampooned with the species of bleak wit that suffuses Barker's work. 


Child though I might have been, I maintain that a part of me perceived and understood this complexity on a subconscious level, in a way that I lacked the language and conscious mental architecture to express even to myself. Bound up in that fascination was my nascent queerness; the unspoken understanding that here was something made for me, that spoke to me within traditions and a visual language that I understood as a horror fan, but also as a gay-child-waiting-to-be-a-gay-man. That understanding, that frisson, only expanded and complexified with greater exposure over the years. Whilst also a source of profound disturbance, making the first two Hellraiser films items of forbidden allure in my Mother's VHS library, that connection with the material became increasingly undeniable as I grew and blossomed into the early years of my sexual identity. With that came a more visceral understanding of the sensual desires that inform Leviathan's creed, and that form a central part of Hellraiser's poetry: Desire is the key, a source of both damnation and salvation (which, Barker asserts, in certain realms of extremity, dissolve in terms of their distinction). It became clear to me that here was horror made by and for queer men, that speaks to us on a level denied to our straight counterparts, despite the central narrative revolving around a doggedly herteronormative family structure and series of relationships (in many respects, the original film is also Barker's less-than-celebratory satire of prescribed family structures and traditional relationship dynamics, particularly with regards to how they utterly fail to accommodate or acknowledge the needs of women, particulary in the carnal sense). 


It's fascinating that the Cenobites, being so emblematic of queerness, operate in a state of being far and beyond the mundane, to the point that they are otherworldly, their presence alone enough to upset static reality, making walls bleed and lights blaze, doors open into labyrinthine nowheres and shadows give birth to abominations (Kirsty Cotton's encounter with The Engineer in the original film is a startlingly surreal sequence). It's certainly no accident that, at the film's climax, with the unravelling of the Cotton family both figuratively and literally (the name alone an elaborate pun), the new family home collapses around them in a manner redolent of more conservative, gothic traditions (echoes of Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher are conscious and considerable). 


Again, whilst I lacked the means of consciously articulating it to myself at the time, like many queer kids, I so often found myself an alien at the dinner table, something cast outside the fish bowl looking in. To this day, whilst my own family are decent and loving people, my tolerance for family atmospheres is extremely finite, and my desire to be parts of them almost non-existent. Like many LGBTQ individuals, I've gradually accrued and constructed my own extended family in the same manner that we are often obliged to accrue and construct our own identities (in lieu of the meta-narratives of Fathers and Mothers, even husbands and wives that have always applied to our straight siblings). In metaphorical terms, The Cenobites are this near-universal factor of queerness in the 20th/21st centuries made manifest, exaggerated to ultimate extremes and rendered in the guise of horror-film monsters: By their very natures, they are apart from the mundane world yet reliant on it, excluded from traditional structures yet fascinated by them. Their proclivities for reshaping and surgically sculpting every element of their beings -from skin to soul- is metaphorically resonant with the experience of growing up queer throughout the latter decades of the 20th century: Like them, many of us were obliged to shape not only our places in the world, but also our own identities. Existential uncertainty and despair are hardly uncommon amongst our tribes, and that is largely derived from the sincere lack of societal space afforded to us. 


What Barker dares to state through the Cenobites -and his body of work to follow- is that the situation doesn't necessarily have to be one exclusively of despair; there is an artistry, a metaphysics inherent, that in itself is worthy of celebration. We are, Barker asserts, deviant works of self-authored art, and worthy of love, celebration, pleasure and beauty. That we might confuse or even horrify and repel the grey sterility of the traditionally prescribed world of our births in their pursuit is not a basis for condemnation, as they would most certainly have it, but celebration in and of itself. That world, according to Barker, isn't worth trying to protect or preserve. It is a rotting carcass, as hollow as incestuous Uncle Frank and passionless Daddy Larry, both of whom are presented as contemptuous in their own peculiar ways. 


One of the most shocking and subversive subtexts of Hellraiser is that it refuses to deify family as something sacred or worthy of protection. If anything, “family” becomes the source and subject of damnation here; the play of family life Larry Cotton seeks to impose on both his step-wife, Julia, and daughter, Kirsty, is treated as disposable at best; flimsy and without substance, irrevocably tainted at worse, and, unlike in many of its contemporaries, no defence whatsoever against the outside forces that corrode it. 


Once again, Barker engages his queer audience on an unspoken but intimately engaged level; being traditionally denied the comforts of “family,” the roles and narratives that ideations of “family” traditionally provide, queer audiences understand the film's often contemptuous tone towards the phenomena, and celebrate its rare exposure as a source of horror in and of itself. 


Looking back, many, many years later, with so much more experience of Hellraiser, the works of Clive Barker and the experiences and subjects they explore, what is the film to me now? Certainly an artefact of some sentiment; a perversely comforting creation that I return to again and again, finding solace in its extreme imagery, its familiar and unsettling sequences. But also perhaps the first piece of media that dared speak to me sincerely as a queer entity; that addressed the part of me society and culture would denounce as perversity or aberration and have me deny. In that, it is a “Saul on the road to Damascus” moment of profundity, one of those media experiences that alters the topgraphy of our minds and imaginations, that explodes wide the parameters of assumption and reveals new arenas of operation. There is transcendence to be found here amongst the bleakness, grue and nihilism; significances that, perhaps, are peculiar to queer audiences, for whom the work is less another entry in the annals of classic 1980s horror, and more a gospel in the mythologies of our gradual acknowledgement in the gardens where we have never been trespassers, no matter how ardently we are denied.

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