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Vaniria Setser
First off, dear reader, I'd like to let you know that Thoughts Mostly About Film will be on hiatus for somewhere in the vicinity of two weeks while I ramble around off the grid. When I return, however, I'm hoping to add a new feature to the site: a series of interviews with folks working in the indy film industry, doing piecemeal jobs on big money productions while pursuing their own projects by hook, crook, blood, sweat, janky c-stands, and tears. Every one of these people I know has amazing, funny, and often scandalous tales to tell, as well as fascinating insights into the world of making movies. So stay tuned if you want a peek into the way the machinery works on the ground floor of the industry. And now, on with the show!
It's come to my attention that a remake of the campy and unsettling 1987 horror film Hellraiser is soon to be released. As I'm a fan of the original, I'll certainly watch the new version and will put some thoughts down about it in one of my upcoming "What to Watch This Week" pieces. I'm neither one of those people who thinks that everything old is better than everything new, nor one of those people who thinks that everything new is better than everything old, so I have no idea how the two films will compare. Nor do I have much interest in making prognostications about the quality of the new film before I've seen it.
But I do have one prediction: the new Hellraiser will, I suspect, probably be different from the original in a very specific way. My guess is that, insofar as the remake will have a thematic element to it, that element will operate in a contemporary mode, one which I like to think of as issue-driven. In other words, I suspect that the viewer will be able to identify quite directly what in-the-contemporary-mind issue the film is tackling, and what political angle it takes. (Here's a hint that nobody probably needs: it will almost certainly not take a conservative position on the issue, at least not intentionally.)
This will make it, I suspect, quite different from the original, which is a strange, seething film that trades in quite a different kind of horror altogether. Or maybe I'm wrong, and the new version will be a direct remake, right down to the thematics. Who knows? I guess I will, after I watch it. I'll give you my thoughts once I do.
Anyway, all of this is a rather long preamble to the idea I want stick in your grill today, which is about how evolution can help us understand horror movies (and other kinds of movies) like the original Hellraiser.
The easiest way to understand this is to remember that back in the day, before the primates that eventually became us were conscious in the way we are, they had already developed many of the same physical impulses and responses that we still have. They were afraid, they felt pleasure, they were driven to have sex and find food, they struggled through all sorts of social interactions. And then, after a long slow process, they developed consciousness, or perhaps developed "full" consciousness, in the way we know it. (This timeline is reflected, of course, in the physical structure of our brains: the "older" parts, back toward the brain stem, are where we process the more, as the saying goes, "reptilian" emotions, and the "newer" parts are where the thinky stuff happens.)
Now, in this story, it's vital to remember that evolution does not anticipate. It's not as though it (evolution) is some kind of engineer, who's thinking, "You know what? In five hundred thousand or a million years, consciousness is going to develop, so I'm going to make this body in such a way to prepare for that." No. We are animals, with animal bodies, and our brains evolved into consciousness long after those bodies were already pretty close to being were what they are now; in other words, our sense of fear is a lot more similar the sense of fear of something like a rodent than are our mental capacities, as are our sex drives and our penchant for aggression and all those sorts of things.
Which means, very simply, that as consciousness evolved, it was presented with (to vastly simplify) two sorts of problems. The first problem involved what was out there. Can we make this stick sharp and poke that animal if it attacks us? Is there a cleverer way to store water? What happens if we keep this hot orange thing going and then pile some more wood on it? Oh, yeah, and what the hell (although it should be pointed out that there was no concept of hell yet) are the stars, anyway?
The second problem involved what was inside us. Where do these urges in me come from? Why do I feel an uncontrollable need to run away? What is that sensation I feel after I've done something bad? Why the hell do I find myself so attracted to that other person?
Thus, it wasn't just the mystery of the universe that confronted us as we developed our more rational abilities; it was the mystery of why we acted the way we did, of the nature of our intensely strong feelings, of why we and other people were driven sometimes to do things we didn't understand in the slightest.
Jump forward a few hundred thousand years, and you have the horror movie, which often pivots on one or both of those same fears: the world outside of us, populated as it sometimes seems to be by terrifying things outside of our control, and the world inside of us, which just as often seems to be populated by things just as far outside of our control.
Hellraiser was written and directed by Clive Barker, one of Britain's foremost horror novelists. It has its flaws, some of which are simply a matter of bad technology and bad technical choices, and others of which arise from something closer to a failure of nerve or perhaps an inevitable capitulation to market forces. But in the main, it's one of the most original horror films of the 1980s, and a pulpy triumph.
The story it tells has its roots in very odd places (in another piece, for example, I might want to draw out the fruitful comparison to noir movies, and something like The Postman Always Rings Twice in particular.) It opens with a man named Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) who wants to find the most intense experiences imaginable. These are coded as sexual in the film, but as I'll note, I think this is not quite the right way to fully understand them.
The story then shifts to Frank's brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and his wife Julia (Clare Higgins), who are moving into the house where Frank was recently dispatched. It's revealed that Julia once had an all-consuming affair with Frank; on the heels of this, Larry cuts his hand, and some blood drips onto the floorboards of the attic. This revives Frank's horrifyingly desiccated and skinless corpse, which confronts Julia and convinces her that if she brings men to the attic and kills them, creepy red skeleton Frank can feed on them and restore life to his body. Lured by the strange sexual hold that Frank had over her, Julia agrees.
Also on the scene is Larry's daughter Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), who's also going through her own kind of sexual awakening. When she discovers what's going on up there in the attic, Julia and Frank try to kill her, but she steals the puzzle box and escapes. Unfortunately for Kirsty, she falls prey to the box's allure and opens it, summoning the Cenobites. She makes a bargain with them, though: if they let her live for a little while instead of doing the old shred-to-pieces routine on her, she'll lead them to Frank, who has escaped their clutches through his escapades with Julia.
Clearly, a part of the scariness of the film comes from what we might think of as external sources, in terms of the story about evolution I told above. The four Cenobites, and particularly their fearless leader Pinhead, who has, yes, a head covered with pins, are pretty terrifying. They're also aided in their hijinks by a monster who looks kind of like a giant larva with a mouthful of teeth and a stinger on his butt, although because of production design decisions and budget (the film was made, amazingly, considering its effectiveness, for less than a million bucks) this larval fellow doesn't really pack the fearsome punch of his leather-wearing buddies.
And the notion of fiddling around with a gold Rubik's cube and then discovering that your reward for solving it is that chains with hooks at their ends come flashing out of the darkness to sink into your flesh, is, yes, macabre and fear-inducing. As is the idea of being lured to an attic by a woman and then eaten by a skinless maniac.
Now, the movie clearly (and explicitly, in Barker's telling) invokes a kind of S&M iconography in regard to this (as it does with the Cenobites), invoking the idea of an experience that mingles intense sexual pleasure with intense pain.
But to let things lie there is to let the film off the hook, as it were, because the issue at hand runs deeper than that. The fear, the thing that scares us here, does not stop at sexuality, but touches on something broader and more akin to a shared human fear of the deeper drives inside us all. If you doubt this, think about why the film is able to be scary for audiences who are not into S&M.
And they scare us (or can be used to scare us) because our front (consciousness-oriented) brain wrestles with them, but cannot fully control them. They are the animals in us coming to the fore and threatening us, in much the same way that externally-oriented horror movies present us with real animals like sharks or wolves (or scary humans) that threaten us.
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