Hellraiser and Gothic Transgression

"We have such sights to show you!"

As I prepared to watch the new Hellraiser film released on Hulu this spooky season, I went back and watched the first three movies in the series. Seeing these movies for the first time in forever really cemented some ideas in me.

Spoilers for Hellraiser (2022) ahead:

The first is that Barker’s Hellraiser (1987) is an amazing film worth more than the monster movie praise it usually garners. Though Pinhead is iconic, the film would be a revelation without the Cenobites.

Don’t get me wrong, I love The Order of the Gash. It’s just that Frank is such a freaking evil antagonist and the Cenobites are actually more of the consequence than the cause of the transgression that he sets in motion. The lore of the Lamentation Configuration is that people who seek it out are seeking new realms of pleasure and pain. Frank is a character that has experienced as much as he believes he can in the world and wants more. We see this through his backstory, the seduction of Julia, the pictures of his sexual exploits, etc. Jerome Reuter has a great article discussing these ideas called, “Exploring DeSade and Gothic Horror in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.” One of the many things I agreed with from that article was the focus that he (and many other critics) give to the Gothic roots and horror of the Hellraiser franchise. These ideas made me think of the role of the Gothic villain and hero, along with the shifts of the new movie. Which, contrary to many reviews I have read, I really loved.

Marquette University’s Glossary of the Gothic defines Transgression as “central to the Gothic because it serves as a means for writers to interrogate existing categories, limits and anxieties within society. By transgressing social limits, the Gothic “reinforces the values and necessity of restoring or defining limits” through the presentment of the horrific outcomes of transgression.

Frank is a Gothic villain through this breaking of social limits. He is scarier than most movie villains because he is not in search of power or wealth specifically. Those are categories that society can control and handle. Frank’s search for pleasure, though encompassing ideas of power, is fully for his own sadistic ends. We see this really smack us in the face once he takes over the body of his brother Larry. He can’t hide his needs. His sexualization and movement toward domination of Kirsty argue that he would never stop, even when he knows the consequences of his actions are to be dragged back to Hell. Matthew Sautman argues this better and takes this further than I am in “Domestic Bodies In Hell: The Significance of Gendered Embodiment in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.” Sautman states, “Frank possesses a privileged body, he also possesses a seemingly amoral character that values the pleasure he receives from other people’s bodies more than hegemonic social mores.” It is this transgression of social mores that make Frank stand apart from other horror villains.

In these ways, Frank is very different than Dr. Channard from Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) and Roland Voight from Hellraiser (2022). Actually, one of my favorite scenes in the new Hellraiser illuminates this difference perfectly. It is the moment when Pinhead understands Voight’s motivation. The Hell Priest says, “Perhaps we were wrong about you. You never sought sensation. Your whole life, every conquest, all your pleasures…lie in power.”

This misunderstanding between the Cenobites and Voight was a wonderful turn in the film. The idea that they were looking for something more from the man than the mundane quest for power that we see at the heart of most rich male antagonists was a breaking of trust that paralleled the breaking of trust between the protagonist and her love interest in really interesting ways. The Cenobites are not the bad guys in these three movies (Well, one could argue that the Cenobite Dr. Channard was. But I would argue the movie falls apart once he and his claymation-style tentacles come on the scene). They are tools of order and chaos with their own rules that govern the behavior within their society.

The protagonist of Hellraiser (2022) also stands out as more of a gothic hero than Kristy in the earlier films. Victor Sage, in his discussion of the classic gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, describes gothic tropes as “the conflation of hero and villain” and a “focus on the victimized but often defiant, position of women” as well as “the use of confined spaces-castles, dungeons, monasteries and prisons, to symbolize extreme emotional states by labyrinthine incarceration” (82). As a recovering addict, Riley is already in a liminal state between hero and villain within the society she lives in. Then she is thrown into the “labyrinthine incarceration” of the puzzle box and the house.

Her refusal to make a deal with the Cenobites at the end of the movie is an act of defiance that some might see as her escaping out the other side of her torment. She was a stronger and more in-control person who did not have to rely on her brother or boyfriend for support. Yet, as Pinhead says, her refusal will be “A life of regret. Knowing everything you’ve done, everyone you’ve hurt, and lost… You choose to live. To carry that weight. Bitter and brief. You have chosen, The Lament Configuration.”

Riley and Colin drive away at the end of the film, yet they are not free. Their transgression into this world will haunt them. I hope to see a sequel starting with Colin cutting himself in the bathroom where the Cenobites took his love from him. Matt’s resurrection would be the perfect start to a new horror.

The creation of the Voight Cenobite is an afterthought that would have been better as an after-the-credit scene or start of the sequel. The real ending is in that car. The question of whether they made the right choice and that doomed breath that shows Riley just doesn’t know.

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Works not Linked:

Sage, Victor. "Gothic Novel." The Handbook to Gothic Literature. Ed. by Maria Mulvey-Roberts, NYU Press, 1998.