It is with an infinite sadness that I must report that our 31 days of horror movies list is almost at an end (only 5 more left, and this next pick), but I promise that we are going to finish strong! This next entry is still one of the most disturbing films on this list and it created a genre icon that is still going strong to this very day. Without any further ado, I will simply let this quote give you a hint as to what our entry will be...
"We have such sights to show you..."
Day 26 - Clive Barker's Hellraiser
"I have seen the future of horror and his name is Clive Barker" so said Stephen King in a poster for the underground cult classic film, Hellraiser. That's a hell of an endorsement if you're going to get one and to paraphrase King, he really wasn't lying. Barker's Hellraiser, an adaptation of his novella "The Hellbound Heart," is unlike anything that had come before in the genre and to this day there's nothing like it. The story of Frank, a man who thrives on pleasure, and his pursuit of a mystical puzzle box that opens the doors to new dimensions of sadomasochism remains as shocking, intense, and gloriously demented as when it premiered in 1987. Sure, the gruesome body horror of Hellraiser might get all the attention (after all, this is a film that has everything from a skinless corpse telling people that he's in Hell to said corpse impersonating the father of our heroine, Kirsty, via the father's own skin) but Barker's ideas are so much scarier than what is visually presented onscreen. Hellraiser also explores ideas of pleasure/pain and the two being mutually connected, death, sexuality, family trauma, and of course greed and power into a combination of splatter slasher with a dark fantasy twist. The idea of Hellraiser inhabiting the same realm as a dark fantasy story is apt, to the point that Julia (a ferocious Clare Higgins) becomes the wicked stepmother to Kirsty and will stop at nothing to destroy her and uncover the secrets of the puzzle box. Horrifying yet featuring truly limitless imagination, Hellraiser is a rare cult classic that doesn't disappoint - it goes as hard as you'd imagine it does and presents its vision with a darkly literate sensibility that is undeniable. We also have to talk about the fact that Doug Bradley's Pinhead is amazing and Ashley Laurence's Kirsty is one of the best final girls ever (who else would get the idea to bargain with the Cenobites for their life?!) while the Christopher Young score is a wildly operatic score that matches the intensity of the film perfectly. There are a lot of disappointing sequels for the Hellraiser franchise, but Hellbound: Hellraiser II is a gloriously ambitious sequel that expands the mythology of the first film and presents a fantastic conflict between Julia and Kirsty that the other films never quite reach. There is so much to discuss with the first Hellraiser but if something like A Nightmare on Elm Street is the next step after being exposed to slashers, then Hellraiser is the ultimate endpoint - a transgressive nightmare featuring one of the genre's most enigmatic villains and a truly twisted narrative that plays with convention in borderline self-aware manner.
*All of the recommendations that we make can be found at the El Paso Public Library Catalog!
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