Halloween Blogging: Predator (1987)

Back in 1987, the conventional wisdom about John McTiernan’s Predator (1987) was that it started out like Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) and ended up like Alien (1979) or, perhaps, James Cameron’s Aliens (1986).

By framing the film in this simplistic fashion, Predator could be viewed as a simple or derivative swipe at two separate genre inspirations. 

It was part action movie and part sci-fi/horror movie. 

And that, the critics declared, passed for originality in Hollywood.

That’s a left-handed compliment if I ever read one!

The truth about Predator, contrarily, is that it is all of a piece, and thematically consistent throughout. 

Indeed, the intense film forges a debate about warriors or soldiers, and asks, specifically, what the best soldiers are made of. 

Do soldiers succeed because of their technology? 

Or do the best soldiers succeed because of some combination of instinct, experience, and a tactical understanding of their enemy?

McTiernan’s film sets up this debate in the film's visualizations.

Specifically, a squad of American soldiers, led by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Dutch, rain down death and destruction on Third World, Central American soldiers, literally coming down to a village from a point on high to do so. 

This action occurs in the first act, and establishes, per the dialogue that Schwarzenegger’s team is “the best.” We see that adjective vividly demonstrated in a siege set-piece of extreme violence and bloodshed.

The next act of the film, however, deliberately reverses that equation. It positions Schwarzenegger’s team on the ground, and puts an alien hunter at an even higher position -- in the tree-tops -- to rain down death on his “primitive” Earthbound counter-parts. 

The soldiers who were the predators are now the prey.

In both cases, the technologically-superior force wins, and the perceived primitive or lesser opponent is knocked down and defeated. 

In both cases, McTiernan vividly and explicitly associates that sense of superiority with a sense of geographical height; a high physical vantage point, captured by the camera's position.

The winner can, literally, reach heights that the loser can’t, and this is one important reason for his victory.

However, in the third and final act of Predator, Arnold and the alien hunter go head to head -- on equal footing -- and it is only on that terrain, one not involving technology, but rather instincts and know-how, that the best soldier is identified, and a victor is crowned.

So where many 1987 critics choose to see a film that is half Rambo and half Alien, I see a film that develops logically and consistently act to act. You can’t get to that final, almost primordial reckoning in the jungle between the Predator and Dutch unless you frame the debate in precisely the way the screenplay does, and in the way McTiernan does. 

In short, the film depicts the best soldiers in the world demonstrating their ability to defeat all comers, only to be defeated by an enemy better than them; one not of this world.  

The first and second act are two sides of the same coin, the idea -- with apologies to Star Wars Episode I (1999) -- that there is always a bigger fish out there waiting to demonstrate superior technology.

Predator’s third act -- a glorious back-to-basics conflict that looks like it was authentically staged in a prehistoric setting -- makes the point that the greatest hunter or soldier is actually the one who understands his enemy, and trusts his instincts. 

Why make a movie in this fashion? 

Well, in a sense, Predator might be read as a subversive response to the militarization of action films in the mid-1980s, and the kind of shallow, rah-rah patriotism that gave rise to efforts like Heartbreak Ridge (1986), which celebrated an American military victory over…Grenada.

Grenada? 

Was Grenada really a challenge to American domination, given our military budget and might? 

Contrarily, Predator takes a group of tough-talking “ultimate warriors” and puts them in a situation where they aren’t merely shooting fish in a barrel. 

They are the fish in the barrel.

In reckoning with this sudden and total change in fortunes, we begin to glean a true idea of courage and heroism.

All of the Earthly politics in the movie -- illegal border crossings, a false cover story, documentation about a possible invasion, and so forth -- add up to precisely nothing here, and there's a reason why. Those details are immaterial to the real story of soldiers who reckon with an enemy that goes beyond the limits of Earthly knowledge.

Ironically, to be the best soldier in a situation like that, it isn’t the big Gatling gun that matters. It’s the ability to adapt to and understand the kind of menace encountered.

Predator features a lot of macho talk and clichés about war (“I ain’t got time to bleed,”) but it succeeds because it cuts right through this surface, hackneyed vision of military might and suggests a different truth underneath.

There’s always a bigger fish.

“You got us here to do your dirty work!”

An elite squad of American soldiers, led by Dutch Schaefer (Schwarzenegger), is dropped into a Central American jungle to rescue a cabinet minister being held by enemy rebels. 

Going along with Dutch’s team is the mission commander, the not-entirely trustworthy Dillon (Carl Weathers).

Once in the jungle, Dutch and his men launch an attack on a rebel village, and find that Dillon has manipulated his team so as to acquire military intelligence about a possible Russian invasion. The group soon takes a captive, Anna, (Elipidia Carillo).

But before the soldiers can be air-lifted out of the jungle, an extra-terrestrial hunter -- a Predator – sets his sights on the group, killing Dutch’s team one man at a time. 

Anna reports a local legend: about a demon who makes trophies of humans and is often reported in the hottest summers.

And this year, it grows very, very hot…

Losing his men rapidly, Dutch must come to understand his enemy’s weaknesses and strengths, and makes a final stand in the jungle, using every resource available…

“Payback time!”

John McTiernan’s camera in Predator rarely stops moving. It tracks, it pans, and it tilts, but is seldom quiescent. 

The constantly-on-the-move camera conveys a few important qualities about the film. The first idea it transmits is that the soldiers inhabit a changing and changeable world, one that only instinct and experience can help them navigate.  

The always-in-motion camera reveals the soldiers -- sometimes violently -- intruding into new space, new frames, and new aspects of their world.  The camera’s movement -- a kind of visual aggression -- suggests the force that the soldiers carry with them.  

This movement, this force, is then balanced by McTiernan against the still-ness of the Predator’s vision or perspective. A contrast is quickly developed and then sustained.

Throughout the film, we see through the Predator’s eyes, or in Predator-vision. These shots, from high above the landscape (in the tree-tops) tend to be still, un-moving. They thereby capture a sense of the whole world unfolding before the Predator, a complete panorama or landscape.

This is an important conceit. The soldiers are  always moving through a changing, shifting world that they, through their actions, impact.  

But they don’t get the whole picture, so-to-speak.  

By contrast, the Predator vision gives us long-shots, and shows the entire jungle terrain around the soldiers.  This viewpoint suggests omnipotence and power.  

The Predator, quite simply, is able to see more of the world, and see it better. He is able to strike from the tree tops with his shoulder-mounted laser cannon, and target with laser sighting his distant foes.  

His sight is superior, until -- importantly -- Dutch manages to “see” through it; recognizing the flaw in the Predator’s infrared vision.

Again, this is an argument against relying too heavily on technology. Dutch’s soldiers rely on big guns, and get decimated.  

The Predator relies on his mask’s vision system (infrared), and Dutch -- smearing himself in mud -- negates the advantage it provides.  

But again, what’s important is the way that all this material is visualized.

The soldiers, on ground level, cut through and move through the frame, violently interacting with the world on a tactile, aggressive level.  

The Predator, like some great vulture, sits still in the trees (until he strikes), silently hanging back and taking in the lay of the land. He has the luxury to operate from a distance, from up on high, unobserved.

The film sets up a battle between these two perspectives, and one might even argue that the Predator ultimately loses because he abandons his best perspective -- the tree tops -- in order to get down to (and enjoy combat on…) Dutch’s level.

Over and over again, however, McTiernan’s gorgeous, moving compositions suggest that the soldiers don’t have the full picture. Not only is the Predator cloaked, but he has access to the world above the soldiers, the world that they can’t see. A brilliantly-orchestrated shot mid-way through the film sees Dutch hunting for Hawkin’s missing body. He can’t find it. After capturing imagery of Dutch trudging through the brush, McTiernan’s camera suddenly moves upwards, and keeps doing so.

It goes up and up, past a bloody fern frond, and then continues its ascent, until we see Hawkins’ naked, bloodied corpse dangling from the tree top.  The Predator is operating in, metaphorically a more fully three dimensional environment, this shot reveals. 

Dwight and the other soldiers can’t compete on that level. They literally can't even see to that level. 

Those who don’t appreciate Predator tend to watch the film, listen to the macho tough talk, and consider the film a kind of stupid, macho action/horror movie. 

Yet in its own way, Predator glides right past such clichéd dialogue and situations. In doing so, it comments on them.  These cliches are not points of strength, the movie informs us, but points of weakness.  When the Predator uses his duck call device, for example, he apes the men at their most verbally simplistic.  “Any time…”  Or “Over here.”  

Then he is able to trick them using their own words. Their mode of expression becomes a tool to use against them.

As a whole, Predator sort of tricks the audience with its appearance too -- as a macho war movie -- and then treads deeper to examine our conceits about the military, and military might. 

When Arnold finally defeats the Predator, he does so not as a twentieth century soldier with high-tech weapons, but as a mud-camouflaged cave-man, relying on his instinct, his knowledge of the land, and hard-gleaned information about his enemy.

Even then, Arnold barely wins.  

The Predator sacrifices his superior technology, comes to the ground, and takes off his mask because he wants to fight like Arnie; he wants to experience battle like a human would. That desire proves to be the alien's undoing, a sense of vanity about himself, and an unearned sense of superiority to his nemesis.  

And again, this quality reflects dynamically on the first act of the film. Everyone keeps calling Dutch's team "the best,: and the team itself wipes out the Central American rebels while hardly breaking a sweat.

The bigger they are, the harder they fall, right?

Dutch, by contrast, demonstrates qualities that our culture doesn’t always value, especially in terms of our military men. He shows compassion and decency with Anna, a prisoner.  He trusts her when the situation changes instead of continuing to treat her like a foe.  

He also rejects Dillon’s approach to war (that the ends justify the means), and does his best to get his men out of a situation in which they are not really fighting for their country, but acting as pawns in someone’s illegal agenda.  

Finally, Dutch is curious -- intensely curious -- and flexible enough to understand that he is being hunted by something inhuman. He doesn’t reject the possibility that this could be true, and instead contends with the facts. 

 “If it bleeds, we can kill it” Dutch concludes, and that is a perfectly logical and sensible argument in the face of what seems an irrational conflict: a battle with an invisible alien.

Dutch is lucky, of course, too. He discovers the secret of defeating Predator-vision by accident, by ending up in the mud. But he also makes the most of his opportunities by demonstrating flexibility rather than rigidity. He changes his very identity to win.  He goes from 20th century high-tech soldier to primitive cave man, to carry the day.

Predator still dazzles, in part because of McTiernan’s often-moving camera and approach to visuals, but also because of that incredible final sequence in the jungle.  

Arnold and the colossal, frightening alien duke it out on a little parcel of land, surrounded by water.  The setting is picturesque, but more than that, it seems to evoke some kind of genetic memory, a feeling for the day when humans didn’t understand the world and were prey to saber tooth tigers or bears, or anything else that might find us when we ventured out of our caves. 

The film’s final battle -- shorn of high-tech military hardware -- gets down to the bloody basics and is incredibly satisfying on a human level.

Today, we have military drones, smart-bombs, and other incredible technology to help us win when we wage war, but Predator is a remarkable reminder from another movie age that the biggest, best guns don’t necessarily make great soldiers.   

If they did, the Predator would have won his battle with Arnie, right?

Halloween Blogging: Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988)

Upon viewing Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) again recently, I was struck with an illuminating thought. 

There are two kinds of horror movies in 1970s and 1980s franchises.

The first kind of movie is an artistic masterpiece, one that thrives on visual imagery, on symbolism, and on subtext. In this category, I land movies such as Halloween (1978), Phantasm (1979), A Nightmare on Elm Street and Clive Barker’s original masterpiece, Hellraiser (1987).  These films operate on both a literal level and a metaphorical one.

And then there’s the second kind of horror movie in these franchises, which viewers will often detect in the first sequel.

This second brand of franchise horror film eschews the overt, careful artistry of the first film and doubles down instead on internal mythology.  In other words, the details of the world are hammered out, and character motivations are more deeply explained. A sketch is colored in, essentially, but in terms of symbolism some things get lost, forgotten, or over-written.

Why do horror franchises from this era operate in this fashion?

Well, perhaps because symbolic imagery and sub-text may be limited to a specific, singular narrative or set of characters. That imagery may be beautiful, canny and informative, yet when time comes for a sequel with a new story, new characters, and even a new setting, it is hard to sustain it. The zeitgeist has changed, for one thing, and so symbols change. 

Therefore, intrepid filmmakers turn to the internal consistencies of the world where they work. Like the idea that Michael Myers must have a concrete motivation for his murders, and is thus the sibling of Laurie Strode.

Perhaps this is why sequels so rarely live up to the originals. They don’t pinpoint an adequate new sub-text or deep imagery to sustain the series. So instead, additional concrete details are provided.

Yet, inescapably, familiarity is the enemy of horror. The more we know, the less scared we become. We are scared not when we know more, but when we no less.  The more vague the details, the better chance that we will be unsettled by the film.

Hellbound is the second kind of movie in terms of this paradigm.

Specifically, Hellbound: Hellraiser II is a mythology-based, world-building sequel to Clive Barker’s brilliant horror film, Hellraiser (1987). It’s a good mythology-based horror film on it own terms, but I miss the sheer artistic inspiration of Clive Barker’s inaugural film in the franchise.

Hellbound opens with a recap of Hellraiser’s scary ending, and then shows us the origins of Pinhead (Doug Bradley) himself. It also finishes off any personal business left lingering between Julia (Clare Higgins) and Frank (Sean Chapman), before settling down in Hell itself.  The details of Hell, and even an evil Deity (Leviathan, Lord of the Labyrinth) are all explored.

The focus, as that description suggests, is on deepening and broadening the Hellraiser universe. The focus is on providing more details, and revealing a consistent “universe.”

I can’t complain too much, however since the solid 1988 sequel shows audiences how Cenobites are manufactured, takes us to Hell for a grand tour, features the great Ashley Laurence in a starring role, and reveals to us precisely the kind of torment in Hell that Frank deserves.  There’s an overall reflection of literary mythology too -- an Orphean descent into the Underworld to retrieve a loved one -- but even that is broadly applied.

So by my estimation, Hellbound is a good horror film, of the second type.

It’s just that traveling from Hellraiser to Hellbound is roughly akin to going from Phantasm (1979) to Phantasm II (1988).

The first film in each series is richly symbolic and reveals something about the human condition, whether the fear of mortality, or mankind’s sexual obsessions. 

Then the ambitious sequel comes along, and it’s big and world-building and totally impressive as a straight-up horror flick, but it exists almost purely on a literal level, not a symbolic one. 

Therefore, in comparison to the original, I can’t help but register the sequel as a bit of a disappointment, or at least a come down. I admire so much the rarefied, symbolic level of Hellraiser and Phantasm. 

This is about me, as much as the film, a reader might conclude. I want my horror movies to do more than just scare me a little, like I’m on a roller coaster ride. I want the movie to concern or reflect something important; something that makes me think about the world, myself, and my relationships.

So I miss Clive Barker’s facility for visual symbolism in Tony Randel’s Hellbound, but I still like the sequel for what it is (a rip-roaring, gory horror movie), even if, at times, the movie looks to be held together by little more than spit and polish.

“The mind is a labyrinth…a puzzle.”

Following the ghoulish events with Julia and Frank, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is remanded to the Channard Institute, an insane asylum.

There, she talks about the box, and doorways to Hell being opened and closed.

Listening intently to her strange tale is Dr. Channard (Kenneth Cranham), a man who has devoted his life to the study of the Lament Configuration. 

Another patient in his custody, young Tiffany (Imogen Boorman) is mute, but is an expert at solving puzzles. Presumably, he has in mind for this ward to solve one particular puzzle box.

Even as Dr. Channard takes gruesome steps to revive Julia (Clare Higgins), Kirsty receives a message that she believes is from her dead father.  “I am in Hell. Help me,” it reads, written in blood.

Kirsty determines to go with Tiffany, into Hell, and rescue her father.

After Tiffany opens the box, Channard meets his fate as a Cenobite, and engineers a coup of the Labyrinth.  Kirsty helps Pinhead (Doug Bradley) finds his humanity for one battle against this new cenobite, but it does not go well.

After an encounter with Frank, Kirsty must summon all her resourcefulness to escape Hell, and more than that, stop Channard.

“What tales will she tell us from the other side?”

In a significant fashion, Hellbound really is about tales from the “other side.”

The other world that we saw only briefly in Hellraiser, Hell itself, is depicted for long stretches of the film. Some of the visuals are generally amazing, while others prove a letdown.

The matte painting, for instance, of the labyrinth, looks astonishingly good. There are several shots which reveal Kirsty and Tiffany walking a long, narrow pathway across that Escher-like maze. The maze extends to the horizon, but also stretches downwards, across multiple levels. 

Also successfully depicted is Frank Cotton’s personal hell.  He lives in a room where ghostly women “promise” sex but never “deliver.”To Frank, this is a punishment on the scale of Tantalus, and quite appropriate. He lives, essentially, in a trap that will drive him mad for all eternity.  And that’s the reason he summoned Kirsty. He believes she’s a girl who keeps her “promises,” and wants to test that theory.

Unfortunately, when we don’t see the big matte shots, or visit Frank in his personal Hell, the underworld is depicted in less than inspiring fashion.

In fact it appears to consist of one hallway that branches off, and is filmed again and again. At one point, we get a P.O.V. shot with the camera hurtling through the corridor, and before the editor can cut away, it looks like there are some boards or lumber balanced against one wall.

This section of Hell: under construction.

When one couples shots like this one with the fact that Chatterer’s make-up design completely changes at one point, with no explanation, one gets the feeling that the film was made in a tearing hurry, and suffered from a lot of tinkering with.

Tiffany’s weird hall-of-mirrors/carnival scene is similarly crude in visualization, and doesn’t really add anything to the proceedings. Did she lose her Mom at a carnival? The sequence never makes us understand why this circus-like place is Tiffany’s personal Hell, or why she is permitted to escape it.

On the plus side, the Cenobite-making chamber is radically evil and neat, though it proves a stumbling block in future entries since it isn’t, apparently, required to make Cenobites after all. 

And though I wonder about the rationale of making Leviathan a huge puzzle box, I nonetheless love the deeply creepy black light it periodically shines across the realm. Instead of a lighthouse, Leviathan is a dark-house, shining darkness throughout every corner of Hell.

To get back to my treatise on mythology, Hellbound feels duty-bound to give us a lot of information.  It provides background on Pinhead, revealing his pre-Cenobite life. We learn he was a British soldier in World War I, and Hell on Earth, the next installment, even tells us his name.

We also get to reconnect in the film, powerfully, with Clare Higgins’ Julia. Once more, she gives voice to the film’s intermittent motif about literary mythology (seen in the Orpheus-like story and in the damnations of Hell being like the torments of Tantalus or Sisyphus). Here, Julia relevantly notes her role in the myth; that she is both the “wicked stepmother” and “evil queen” in Kirstie’s fairy tale. I love that Julia, formerly repressed and frigid, internalizes this role and emerges from Hell as a siren, a seductress.

Again, however, one has to wonder about the discontinuities between the two films, vis-à-vis revival via human blood. Frank had new skin after three strangers and Larry were killed in the first film. Julia in Hellbound kills a room full of prostitutes, and still doesn’t have all her new skin yet.

Another scene in the film is also incongruous. It shows a hospital ward of insane patients being tortured by many copies of the Lament Configuration, even after Pinhead has verbally confirmed that desire, not hands, call him. The scene doesn’t make any sense, in light of that remark.

Yet Hellbound’s heights of imagination generally tend to overcome such deficits. A movie would really have to go some distance to prove itself bloodier and gorier than Hellraiser was.  Hellbound manages that feat with ease. The scene involving a straight razor, a bloody mattress, and a very sick man, is one for the record books.

The Channard Cenobite is hugely creative too, for example. Who in his or her right mind devised an individual who is carried around by a giant worm that has burrowed into that individual’s head? The conception and imagery of the character is remarkable.

If the final battle between Channard and Pinhead’s team had featured a little more punch, a little more suspense, I’d rate the film even higher.  I very much enjoy the scenes of Kirsty and Pinhead teaming up, as it were, but I wish Pinhead put up a better fight before getting his throat slit.

As it stands, Hellbound is a perfectly satisfying mythology-based horror sequel. For those who “have to see, have to know…” -- like Channard -- the movie both promises and delivers.

For those audiences seeking a film functioning at at the same artistic apex as Hellraiser does, however, this first sequel may not exactly qualify as a “pleasure.”

Movie Trailer: Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 (1988)

Halloween Blogging: Hellraiser (1987)

At the risk of embarrassing some readers, I will nonetheless write the following statement regarding Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1987).

It’s all about sex.

If that description is too debauching, just consider for a moment how much of our great literature actually concerns sex.

What started the Trojan War, and led to the events of Homer’s Iliad?

Sexual desire (for Helen).

Or consider, Lysistrata.

Or Othello.

At the center of all those tales is the human sex drive, or perhaps put more aptly, the mysteries of the human sex drive.  How it can be manipulated.  How it can be used.  How it can be sated.

An extremely gory horror film from 1987, Hellraiser is very much in the same camp as the aforementioned works of literature. The film involves, specifically, one “uptight and frigid” woman’s desire to experience, again, the best sex of her life. 

That sex (with Frank Cotton) is so amazing that Julia (Clare Higgins) -- as we see in the film -- would do literally anything to experience it again, even commit murder…repeatedly. Family ties fall by the wayside as Julia single-mindedly pursues a resurrection of not only her lover, but her slumbering passion.

The later Hellraiser films -- as horror sequels often do -- adopt a much more literal, straightforward stance.  Those films are about, simply, people opening the gates to Hell and their adventures with Cenobites such as Pinhead (Doug Bradley).

But Barker’s inaugural film is about sexual frustration in Julia, and sexual awakening, after a fashion, in Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence).

Barker explores these notions about human sexuality -- about the flesh -- through repeated instances of remarkable (and either sensual or horrific) visual symbolism.

I have read, over the decades, negative reviews of Hellraiser that don’t understand why people like so much a movie concerning an “evil box.”

In some cases, those critics have failed to understand the central idea that built the franchise; the idea that Hellraiser isn’t about opening an evil box, but rather  mastering and unlocking the puzzle-box of human sexuality.

The Hellraiser movies go from brilliant to terrible in short order, and I’ll review at least the first four in the next few weeks here on the blog, but the first film remains a masterpiece of the macabre primarily for its deep exploration into these ideas about sex and desire.

“Some things have to be endured, and that’s what makes the pleasures so sweet.”

Julia (Clare Higgins) and Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson) move into the family house formerly occupied by Larry’s loner brother Frank (Sean Chapman). Julia and Frank once had an affair, and she covets the memory of it.

But now, bizarrely, a chance arises for Julia to have a second chance with Frank. He died in the house at the hands of demonic beings called Cenobites. In particular, he opened a puzzle -- the Lament Configuration -- that opened a door between Earth and Hell.

Somehow, Frank escaped the tortures of the Cenobites, and was left for dead.  His consciousness and bones still survive, but for him to be whole once more, he must have Julia bring him the blood of the living to devour.

She does so, bringing back strange men to the house with a promise of sex, and then bludgeoning them to death with a hammer.

Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), Larry's daughter, grows increasingly concerned for her father, and is troubled by bad dreams. One day, she goes to the house and learns what Frank and Julia are up to.  She also gets her hands on the Lament Configuration Puzzle, summoning the Cenobites as Frank once did.

Now Kirsty must make a deal with Pinhead (Doug Bradley), the leader of the Cenobites, to turn over Frank, lest they tear her soul apart. instead...

“Like love…only real.”

I first saw Hellraiser (1987) in movie theaters in 1987. I was seventeen, and had never seen such a bloody film.  And yet, I could detect on repeat viewings (especially after I was in my twenties), how all the blood and violence in the film served a dramatic purpose. The cold, empty Julia would do anything to feel her blood pumping again, to feel the heights of passion, even it meant spilling the blood of someone else, someone she didn't care about.

Julia’s passion for Frank and blood-letting are first connected by Barker in a remarkable (and remarkably disgusting...) bit of cross-cutting early on. 

Julia is in the attic, remembering the first time Frank made love to her (over her wedding gown, actually…). 

Meanwhile, downstairs, Larry is attempting, with several movers, to get a mattress up a narrow staircase. The mattress becomes stuck, and Larry must pull at it. He tugs at it repeatedly, even as we see Frank thrusting atop Julia. 

Unfortunately for Larry, he drags his hand across a rusty nail. Blood fountains from his hand.

The symbolism is unmistakable. As Julia has intercourse with Frank and achieves orgasm (in her flashback), that fevered motion is mirrored by Larry’s hand, dragging the mattress. Both moments end with, presumably, the release of fluids.  

But in this case, Julia’s driving memory of sex with Frank is linked to explicitly to injury, to blood and death. 

Indeed, that’s what her passion will ultimately bring to Larry, his family, and anyone else that gets into her orbit. Her love for Frank is a death sentence to everyone else.

That’s not the only time that visual symbolism comes into play. 

Consider specifically how the puzzle box, the Lament Configuration, is opened. The demons are released after the user runs a finger across a small circle of gold filigree.  

This small circle (by a roaming finger...) across a surface is mirrored by Julia and Frank’s sign of affection for one another. Several times in the film, they run their fingers across each other’s lips in a circle…even when fingers and lips are drenched in spilled blood.  

The little circle that opens the box -- and this sensuous touch of the soft lips -- is also, apparently, a metaphor or stand-in for clitoral stimulation. That stimulation suggests another kind of gateway, one to passion and sexual satisfaction.  Frank is a kind of hyper-sexualized figure, an explorer in the realms of pleasure and pain, and he is adept, apparently, at opening the puzzle -- or unlocking a woman’s desire. Julia is ultimately undone by Frank (at least in this movie), because he uses these skills to get his life back, but doesn’t truly love her. He betrays her, instead.

I have always considered Julia's journey to be the emotional and thematic core of Hellraiser. The family house where virtually all the action occurs even seems to be a metaphor for the character of Julia. It is an empty place that, nonetheless, houses inside a monstrous or terrible desire.  

The house hides Frank, a dormant figure waiting to be re-activated. And Julia holds him inside her sealed-off heart, wishing him back.

Consider, in comparison, Kirsty’s journey. 

A young woman, she is permanently infantilized as "Daddy’s little girl." Kirsty is solicitous of her dad’s attention, and constantly worrying/tending to him. She runs to him whenever she has a problem.

Kirsty is also beautiful, and “ripe” as Frank describes her. She is totally unaware of her own (dawning) sexual power.  Kirsty's beauty arouses the movers in the house, and then Kirsty goes to a kitchen sink, which explodes with water, unexpectedly, in her face.  

Kirsty is surprised by this explosion, because she is unaware of the power she wields.  

To put it another way, Kirsty has not realized the power to unlock the puzzle box of her sexual power. But where Julia’s passion was associated explicitly with spilled blood, Kirsty’s is not. 

Instead, her desire is pure, and visualized by the water. Life hasn't twisted Kirsty yet, hasn't transformed her into something sick and co-dependent.

Later, Kirsty has sex with her boyfriend, Steve, and in general seems to have a much healthier attitude about passion than do either Frank or Julia. 

So when she gets her hands on the Lament Configuration what does Kirsty do? 

First, she teases Frank with the promise of controlling it. She does this not as a flirt, not out of desire, but so as to save her own life. 

Kirsty has realized, suddenly, that she possesses something he very much wants. She can bargain with it, and hold him at bay. Kirsty now has an awareness of the power she yields, and again, that's a metaphor for sexual awakening.

Then, Kirsty uses the box for another purpose.  She sends back the demons; destroying the sickness that Frank and Julia created. She wields the box for an end that saves her life, and saves others.  

Kirsty escapes the out-sized pull her father has on her life (exemplified by Frank’s gross come-on line, “Come to Daddy,”) and demonstrates responsible control over the Lament Configuration. She can use the box to destroy her demons, not summon them, not wallow in them. She governs her passions. She doesn't let them govern her, the way that Julia does.

This fact seems plain in the imagery that connects the two women. For a moment, each woman has a hand on the box. But Julia has destroyed herself playing with it. Kirsty takes it for purposes of escape.

What is presented in Hellraiser then, uniquely, is a story of two very different women. One lives in the memory of the past, and covets a sick relationship that gave her pleasure. The other woman is able to grow up, move beyond her family unit, and demonstrate an ability to conquer the threats that she encounters.

I admire Hellraiser so much not for the goopy special effects, the downright bloody horror, or even the spectacular and immortal Cenobite designs, but because the film focuses so clearly on Julia and Kirsty, and their encounters interacting with the “puzzle” of flesh, skin, and desire. 

The imagery -- whether revealed in cross-cutting, or related to the mastery of the Lament Configuration, enhance the film’s themes beautifully.

For me, no other Hellraiser film so perfectly captures the drive and illogic of human behavior. The sequels move into the realm of mythology.  I like Hellbound very much, but it’s such a different animal. 

In short, Hellraiser is all a about a woman bringing unsuspecting men back to a filthy room and beating them to death with claw hammers…so she can have the best sex of her life again. These particular scenes -- three of them -- are played to perfection by Higgins. Julia is both anxious and excited as she lures her would-be lovers to their doom. On that first encounter, she’s thinking about committing murder. Her mark is thinking about having sex. The line “there’s a first time for everything,” captures the moment perfectly. It is true of both murder and sex.

Once the Hellraiser movies beyond both Julia and Kirsty, they seem a whole lot less intriguing.

Hellraiser also concerns tactile pleasures in a way that explores the Zeitgeist of its time. We experience the world through our flesh, through our skin. We want to do -- at least sometimes -- what feels good, not what it is actually right.  

That equation seems like a perfect metaphor for the excess of the 1980s, and so Hellraiser speaks to its time in a remarkably powerful way.

In a decade of “greed is good,” how far do you take greed?  In this case, greed transmits, pretty much, as sexual avarice. A merchant asks -- in the film’s book-end questions: “what’s your pleasure?” 

That’s the question, isn’t it? How far would somebody go to feel good? As far as Julia goes? Or Frank?

Today we remember Hellraiser as our introduction to Pinhead, Chatterer, Butterball, and the Female. But these Cenobites -- if I recall correctly from Paul Kane’s brilliant book about the series, The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy -- only appear on screen for seven minutes.  These “explorers in the further realm of experience” carry such incredible impact, even today, because they are well-performed, and carefully-designed. But also because we don't see them too often, or get to know them too well.

Pinhead radiates a kind of noble or regal brand of evil. He’s a monster, and yet, in some way, he can be approached with reason and logic. At least if you have something to bargain with.  

The others are frightfully monstrous, and they make you wonder how they can be seen as “angels to some” instead of as “demons.”

This first Hellraiser film also features some blind alleys that were never adequately explored in the sequels. After this film, for instance, we never again saw The Engineer, or the bone demon that takes the box from the fire during the denouement. Those seem fascinating elements of the mythology that ought to be developed at some point.

But more troubling, I feel, is the fact that post-Hellbound films don’t’ really deal convincingly or well with human foibles.  

Pinhead and his buddies should function as ruthless exploiters of human vice, and each film in the franchise, conceivably, could concern the downward spiral of someone like Frank, or Julia. And in Hellbound, Pinhead notes that “hands don’t” summon him, only “desire” does. That edict is dropped like a hot potato by the third film, and Pinhead, Angelique and other Cenobites torture anyone who haphazardly opens the box and toys with it. 

That paradigm takes away much of the power of the franchise and robs Hellraiser of its galvanizing factor; the opening up of the complex puzzle of human desire.