Hellraiser
Short description
A man named Frank Cotton acquires an antique puzzle box and solves it, opening a passage to a realm of otherworldly beings for whom pleasure and pain are inseparable. What comes through destroys his body, and he returns as a mutilated figure who needs blood to rebuild himself. His brother Larry moves into the family house with his wife, Julia, and Larry's daughter Kirsty eventually comes into possession of the box, which she opens. The film was directed by Clive Barker, who wrote the screenplay, and was produced by Christopher Figg. It is the first film Barker directed, followed by Nightbreed in 1990 and Lord of Illusions in 1995.
The cast includes Andrew Robinson as Larry, Clare Higgins as Julia, Ashley Laurence as Kirsty, Sean Chapman as Frank, Oliver Smith as Frank in his monstrous form, and Robert Hines as Steve. The production was made for about a million dollars and took roughly fifteen times that amount at the worldwide box office.
On IMDb the film holds a rating of 6.9 out of 10 from around 153,000 votes, and on TMDB it also stands at 6.9 from a much smaller base of about three thousand votes. A critics' rating of 6.8 out of 10 from 56 reviews places it close to both audience scores.
What's left behind the scenes
- The original title of the painting was “Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave.”
- Doug Bradley, who played the Cenobite, spent six hours in makeup before appearing on set, with hundreds of pins affixed to his head.
- Before filming, Doug Bradley was offered a choice of two minor roles – a furniture mover or the “pinhead” Cenobite. The budding actor thought it was, of course, more important for a young actor to have his face on screen, but he still chose the role of the Cenobite. And he didn't regret it.
- The role of Larry Cotton was initially offered to Lance Henriksen, but he declined.
- This was Clive Barker’s directorial debut. His book “The Hellbound Heart,” on which the film is based, consists of only 60 pages.
- Frank Cotton in his human form and Frank as the "resurrected" are played by different actors.
- Doug Bradley is a friend and classmate of Clive Barker.
- Several comics were released based on the film, and plastic models of the Cenobites were produced.
- It should be noted that there was no Pinhead in the original literary source; his functions were performed by a creature called "The Engineer" – a strange being with a human body and a cluster of light instead of a head. However, at the very beginning of the novella, there is a description of several Cenobites, and one of them – a woman – looks like this: "Every inch of the head was tattooed with a complex pattern, at each intersection of horizontal and vertical lines a pin with a precious stone gleamed, piercing the bone through and through."
- Initially, the film's soundtrack was recorded by the well-known English industrial band Coil, but despite protests from Clive Barker, a long-time acquaintance of the band, the producers at New Line Cinema did not accept their compositions for their own reasons.
- There are two versions of the film — a full and an abridged one. Especially bloody scenes were cut and shortened in it.
- Hell in the film is represented as a network of corridors and labyrinths.
- Barker revised the original screenplay under the influence of Tony Randel and Peter Atkins, who were filming the sequel. This concerns the scene in which Kirsty takes the Puzzle Box from Julia, killed by the Cenobites' hooks. It was necessary to introduce an element connecting the series – a mattress with Julia's blood.
- Cenobite is a church term, denoting a resident of a monastic community. The word is of Greek origin. Barker describes the Cenobites as 'theologians of the Order of the Flesh or the Cutters.' Cenobites can only penetrate our reality through a special spatio-temporal rift – a 'schism' – which can be opened and closed using special devices. The Puzzle Box is such a device for creating a 'rift,' first made by a toy maker named Philip Lemarchand in 1784 at the behest and design of the Duke de Lille (an aristocrat practicing dark magic).
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