Originally Posted by Oriphiel

I decided to do something different for a change, and look at a movie rather than an album. Of course, being a fan of weird music, it's no surprise that i'm also a fan of weird flicks! Specifically, I've always had an affinity for the genres of horror, science fiction, and comedy, with some of my favorite movies having a mix of all three. I'll start off with a movie that truly is the perfect incarnation of the phrase "Love it or hate it"...





From the introduction to the very last scene, Hellraiser is an incredibly odd and at times non-traditional horror movie. Rather than focus on the standard battle between "good" and "evil", where young twenty-somethings with a deus ex machina defeat some ancient and wicked force, Hellraiser is at it's heart a story about the role of pleasure and pain in the human psyche. Of course, while one of the characters is eventually pegged as the "hero" whom the audience is supposed to root for, the movie actually spends most of it's run time examining the relationship between the two characters who become "the villains". In fact, you get the feeling that Clive Barker (the director, and author of the novel from which the movie was based) was constantly pressured by the studio and producers to make the film more simple and clear-cut then he wanted it to be. Everything from the scenes (which were edited to appease the MPAA) to the title of the movie became issues. Originally named "The Hellbound Heart" (after the novel), the studio asked for a change, citing that it was too "romantic" sounding. They asked for new ideas; Clive jokingly came up with the overly-literal "Sadomasochists From Beyond the Grave", and an elderly woman in the film crew apparently offered the joke suggestion "What a Woman Will Do For a Good ****". Needless to say, the studio rejected the titles, and eventually everyone settled on "Hellraiser".


Hellraiser is mostly the story of these two characters: a middle-aged woman who no longer loves her husband, and the living corpse of her husband's brother (who, in life, had an affair with her)

The difficulties of the movie didn't end with the road-bumps during it's creation. After it was released, viewers and critics alike had no idea what to make of what they had just seen. It isn't hard to see why people were confused and in disdain; the movie constantly tries to accomplish too many things in it's run-time, and this creates odd inconsistencies. For example, the first half of the movie relies mostly on suspense (and the dialogue between the characters) to affect the audience, however the second half features many cheap jump scares and the "cat and mouse" cliche that audiences were fairly tired of. The movie was at times a very tasteful and suspenseful work of horror, which many people thought didn't mesh well with the heavy scenes of (what they claimed was "tasteless") gore. Also, most of the movie centers around the idea that humans are always driven to do what brings them pleasure, forming morality after the fact to try and justify their inclinations, while also examining our odd fascination with danger and pain, trying to find the blurry (or maybe non-existent) line where the sensation of pleasure becomes pain. The first two thirds of the movie shy away from the labels of "good" and "evil", portraying the humans and demons without clearly defining any heroes or villains (making it hard to truly hate any character, since they're all mostly given motives for their actions). However, the final part of the movie throws the moral neutrality out the window, and becomes a generic battle between a human and demons. These odd dualities left a bad impression on audiences, causing half of the audience to absolutely hate the movie, and the other half to love it to the point of making it a cult classic. The critics were just as divided: while some praised the movie for it's merits, others were not at all impressed. As Roger Ebert himself put it: "This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination."


The Cenobites, demons who care only for exploring the limits of pleasure and pain.