Hellraiser: Barker's Pleasure-and-Pain Theology

Sat, 13 Apr 2024 08:00:00 +0000

The Cenobites do not chase anyone. That is the first thing to understand about Hellraiser, and the thing that separates Clive Barker’s 1987 debut from every other horror film of its decade. The slashers of the era ran; Barker’s monsters process into a room like clergy, in leather vestments and ceremonial scars, and speak in the measured tones of theologians who have thought very hard about suffering and concluded it is holy. Adapted by Barker from his own novella The Hellbound Heart, and made in London for roughly a million dollars, the film proposed a genuinely new idea in a genre that mostly recycled: hell is not a punishment inflicted on the damned. It is a sensation the damned went looking for.

Cenobites - vo.rs

Hellraiser: Barker's Pleasure-and-Pain Theology