The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy

by Kane, Paul

  Regardless of all the horror and heartache, Yagher managed to deliver the movie on time and within budget. Running at about 110 minutes, it was screened for executives at Miramax in early 1995. Their reaction was less than favorable. Their main concern was that the most important character in any Hellraiser movie, Pinhead, didn’t appear until well over half an hour into the film. “I’d written six versions of this script: six drafts,” Pete Atkins told an interviewer in late 1995, “and [Miramax] always knew that the eighteenth century came first and Pinhead didn’t appear until the twentieth century story. So it’s not that anyone could blame Kevin for delaying Pinhead’s entrance.... But, I think that when they saw the movie they suddenly felt, ‘Hey, wait a minute, where’s our monster? We made a terrible mistake!’”34

  Consequently, they requested changes to the film, the first of which would be rearrangement of the story sequence. The space section would have to be brought in sooner, to give audiences at least a glimpse of Pinhead and let them know he would be featured later on: the historical parts would now be introduced by Paul Merchant as if he was telling his family’s tale. There were other alterations that would be necessitated, too, such as the expulsion of the gambling scene in favor of Angelique’s “birth.” She became a young street urchin that the Duc and Jacques murder so that she can play host to the demon they summon. A happy ending would be required as well, whereby Paul gets away with Rimmer in a shuttle. All of this would require more footage.

  After spending so much time and effort on such a traumatic shoot, Yagher was naturally hesitant to commit himself. “I could understand the changes that they wanted me to make but, for someone who has slept with it, which they didn’t do, it’s tough to give up what you’ve kind of created. I had given everything to the one script. So, the bottom line was that I had to decide either basically to dedicate another year to the film or go on with my life and continue other projects. In the end, it wasn’t so much the direction that they wanted to take, as it was that I just didn’t have the time and energy.”35 To watch it change day by day would have been like, in his words, “pulling butt hairs out.”36 Instead, he threw himself into work on Universal’s Sleepy Hollow project, to be directed by Tim Burton.

  Enter director Joe Chappelle. He had previously directed a movie called Thieves Quartet in 1994, a surprisingly good low-budget film in the Reservoir Dogs mold. His other credential was Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth film in the series. This movie had also gone through many difficulties, beginning with eleven drafts of the script. Chappelle reportedly wanted to excise many of Donald Pleasance’s scenes as Dr. Loomis; then a combination of the actor’s death, creative differences between Chappelle and the producer, and an allegedly bad test screening forced re-shoots and post production re-editing. The result: most of the cast and crew vowed they would never make another Halloween movie again. If nothing else, this experience should have prepared him for work on the troubled Hellraiser IV.

  Atkins penned three of the new scenes but wasn’t available for further rewrites, so at the suggestion of Barker the extra rewrites were handled by Rand Ravich, co-author of Candyman: Farewell to the Flesh. His was the rewrite that enabled them to slot material into a framework the studio would be satisfied with, and Chappelle directed the new footage in April and May 1995. Said Bradley of these: “I mean, I did two weeks of re-shoots, which weren’t really re-shoots at all, they were [shooting] whole new material, and there were at least two other sessions which didn’t involve me.”37

  When the new version of the movie was shown to Yagher, he felt it didn’t represent his artistic vision. The film had changed so much he decided to remove his name from the project. Yagher exercised his right to anonymity by using the Alan Smithee pseudonym. Alan (or sometimes Allen) Smithee is the name designated by the Director’s Guild of America as screen credit for a filmmaker who wishes to remove his or her own name from a movie.38 It was hardly surprising. The film suffers greatly from its lack of overall supervision and views like a movie made by several directors, not just two—reflecting the number of different people who worked on it at different times, including three editors: Randy Bricker, Rod Dean and Jim Prior.

  Of the major changes, the dynamics between the main characters are most conspicuous. Angelique and Phillip are not given sufficient time to develop their relationship in eighteenth century France, so when they meet again in New York the rekindling of it feels rushed. “We were good together, John,” she says to him, and yet they only encountered each other briefly, when Angelique killed him at Jacques’ behest. Their encounter on the space station, which would have been a final tying up of their business, is totally absent.

  Similarly, Angelique and Pinhead’s attitudes towards each other are now ill-defined. The way the film has been spliced together, it plays as if Pinhead actually misses the chaos that the Princess once brought to the underworld. “Hell is much more ordered since your time,” he tells her, “and much less amusing.” In the original script this was a chastisement—a sly remark about her use of the clowns as tools of death—but here it is more like a lament. To add to the perplexity, he says, “You’ve been away too long, Princess.” Not an admonition, but a confession that he has missed her, which is strange in itself as Pinhead didn’t exist before the twentieth century. The one-upmanship has no grounding at all, and it appears that Pinhead may be jealous of her relationship with John.

  An extremely sexual scene replaces the argument they have about which methods work best to secure souls. “Your human admirer may not sense it, but I can smell the exquisite stench of what you really are!” he says, then rakes a finger hook between her breasts, much to Angelique’s delight. This, in turn, throws the conflict at the end of the New York scene into confusion. It is not made clear why Angelique wishes John to open the Elysium Configuration, nor why Pinhead suddenly punishes her and they all disappear into the puzzle box.

  When Angelique appears at Pinhead’s side again, it seems to the audience that she has simply reverted to a more Hellish demeanor. Gone is the undercurrent about her being a slave to Pinhead and Hell, about her own desires being quashed in favor of the order he spoke of. She is Pinhead’s companion now, taking the place of the female Cenobite from the first two movies. How much of this has to do with Barker’s intention to finally see Pinhead paired up one can only speculate. “We’re actually taking the mythology places it hasn’t gone,” he told Imagi-Movies back before the film was even made. “We’re going to see Pinhead in some situations we haven’t even remotely seen him in. We’ve got female Cenobites, and we’re determined that somewhere down the line the Black Pope of Hell himself is going to get laid!”39 The attraction between Lemarchand/Merchant is definitely muted, possibly so that Pinhead might get that bride from the unfilmed ending of Hellraiser III, after all.

  What does impress is the soundtrack by Daniel Licht. The composer began his career with music for Tony Randel’s Children of the Night in 1991, then went on to work almost exclusively in the horror genre. While Licht does touch on Christopher Young’s themes for Hellraiser and Hellbound, most apparent when Pinhead makes his first real entrance—he doesn’t leech from them constantly. The new, haunting theme he came up with to accompany the credits is a tremendous Gothic tune and a worthy successor to Young’s, as is the chase sequence music that accompanies Bobbi, and later Rimmer’s, flight from the Chatter Beast (recalling Kirsty’s encounter with the Engineer). The whole score is powerful, blending unconventional instrumentation occasionally augmented by a chorus.

  The film—in a lean eighty-five minute version—was finally released in American cinemas during March 1996, well over a year after Miramax’s projected date. And while it didn’t do a roaring trade, it did manage to take $9,321,492 at the box office domestically.40 It would eventually surface as a straight-to-video offering in the UK a couple of years later. While it was not what anyone—Yagher and Atkins especially—would have hoped for, as Bradley so succinctly summed up: “It was somet
hing of a minor miracle that we had a movie at all.”41 He even went so far as to state, “The results are uneven, but the first 20 minutes—the bit I’m not in—are as strong as anything in any of the previous movies. I’m happy with it, overall.”42

  Yagher’s defense just after its opening was: “My whole idea was that I didn’t want to do a Hellraiser IV where Pinhead slaughters a bunch of people. It’s been done before, and III was a good example of that, turning people into C.D. Heads and Cameraheads. I wanted to do something a little different.”43

  For better or worse, it can truly be said that he got his wish.

  16

  OPEN THE GATES, LAY LOW THE RAMPARTS

  Time to Play

  It should be self evident from an examination of both the script and the resultant film that the predominant theme of Bloodline is time. The three sections of the linear story are all set in distinct time zones, which further prevents the movie from retaining a single identity. These were to be roughly two hundred years apart, until the final setting was changed to 2127, possibly to keep it more in line with what near future technology might be like. But as the restructured non-linear movie plays it casts Paul Merchant not only in the role of narrator but also that of a time traveler.

  He takes both Rimmer and the audience through time via a series of flashbacks, first to an unspecified date “centuries ago,” which we know to be 1784 from the script, then to the modern day New York of 1996. Like the main character in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), Paul is also determined to alter the course of that history, or at the very least alter the course of the present. In Wells’ book, The Time Traveler returns from a future where the Morlocks have bred the weaker Eloi for food, while in the recent 2002 film adaptation, directed by Wells’ great-grandson Simon, inventor Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) is motivated to travel back and save the love of his life when she is murdered. Both Phillip and John have been killed because of their dealings with the forces of Hell and it is Paul who will take his revenge using the Elysium Configuration, sent forwards through time by his ancestors. This is also another perfect example of the Rule of Three. Where the first two incarnations failed in their task, Paul will succeed because he is aware of the pitfalls.

  Time haunts the characters in all three periods. During the opening introduction, Paul Merchant impresses upon Rimmer that “Time is of the essence,” and tells her, “I don’t have time to help you understand.” But because it is the only way, he has to relate his story. When we move into the France section, we see that Phillip’s workshop is littered with clocks, the sound of ticking all around; indeed, this is part of his profession. In his eagerness to deliver the finished box, he walks past a huge clock face lying on the floor—shown in a low-level point of view shot—as wife Genevieve asks: “It’s midnight, where are you going?” On his way out, she again reminds him, “It’s late,” and the chiming of a bell is heard from far away ringing out the hour. When Phillip arrives at the Chateau du Reve, the Duc de L’Isle congratulates him on his timing: “As precise as your pieces, as timely as your toys....” Then as Genevieve sets out to track down her husband after he visits the Chateau for a second time, the clocks in his workshop all chime mockingly, as if to emphasize that his time has run out.

  In the New York section, Bobbi is woken early by Angelique’s phone call and enquires, “What time is it?” John’s reply covers up the indiscretion: “Japanese client, has no sense of time.” Pinhead himself grows impatient with Angelique’s progress, so much so that he takes matters into his own hands and kidnaps John’s son. “The time for trickery is past,” he informs her. When Bobbi finds that Jack is in the clutches of Pinhead, she puts her hand to her mouth and her watch is very clearly in the shot, linking her terror directly to time. And John and Pinhead’s eventual meeting compels the demon to impart: “No longer will we have to seep into your world like pests through cracks in the baseboards; once and for all we will open the gates, lay low the ramparts.... It is time to open the pathway, forever.”

  Returning to the future section, after Pinhead and his cohorts are summoned, one of his first lines to Paul is: “We’d almost given up waiting for you to play.” Paul counters: “Long wait, demon, for such a short game.” But, as always, Pinhead is ready with a rejoinder of his own: “Tell the truth, Merchant, you’re pleased to see me. Your impatience has matched my own.” The waiting is once again linked to agony, as well as curiosity.

  During the climactic finale, a red digital clock counts off the time to a solar alignment that will allow completion of the Elysium Configuration, accompanied out loud by a computerized female voice. “Twenty-three minutes to complete mission,” she tells Merchant as he is trying to convince Rimmer about the Cenobites. Edwards, too, sets a time limit, ordering his officer to “Escort the prisoner to his cell and be prepared to leave at 0430 hours.” Sadly, he will not make his own deadline. Later we see a close-up of the clock as the computer states: “Twelve minutes to complete mission,” and we’re granted a tight close-up of the seconds speeding away. When Pinhead catches up with Merchant in the control room, the doctor’s eyes flash up to the clock once more, which shows him there are only six minutes left. Immediately afterwards he tells Rimmer she’s got five minutes to get to the shuttle. Lastly, Pinhead’s final speech shows he is still preoccupied with time. Upon hearing the computer counting down, he offers these words of wisdom: “Two minutes; two centuries, it all ticks by so quickly.” Yet when told he is about to die, he claims, “I am forever!”

  The clock device in this section, as well as drawing our attention to the theme, serves the purpose of increasing viewer tension, utilizing the teachings of that Master of Suspense, Alfred Hitchcock. To quote him: “The element of suspense is giving the audience information. Now, you and I are sitting here. Suddenly a bomb goes off, up we go: blown to smithereens. What does the audience have watching this scene? Five or ten seconds of shock. Now, we do the scene over again, but we tell the audience there’s a bomb underneath this table and it’s going to go off in five minutes.... Then their anxieties will be as long as that clock ticks away.”1

  In Bloodline, the ticking bomb is the countdown for the Elysium Device activation. The audience has been given information about this, they have seen Phillip drawing up his plans, seen John’s attempt—and failure—to successfully operate it in the basement of the building he designed. We know, because Paul is trying to learn from past mistakes, that he will probably succeed this time. At first it is the SWAT team that are oblivious to what is happening, which leads to their deaths at the hands of the Cenobites. Then it is Pinhead himself who is unaware that he is walking into a trap.

  Toys and Games

  Considering that the central human character in the film is a toymaker—the name by which he is referred to in all three time periods—it should come as no great revelation that there are numerous references to both toys and games throughout the film. This theme has actually been a recurrent one throughout the whole series. All the important characters have played games at one point or another. Frank plays with Julia’s emotions, and in turn she plays a dangerous game with her prey in the bars. Frank also plays a game with Kirsty at the end, pretending to be her father, until this is revealed, giving rise to one of the most memorable lines in Hellraiser history: “So much for the cat and mouse shit.”

  Kirsty plays a bargaining game with the Cenobites, as we saw in chapter 2, and the demons themselves enter into games with their human subjects, “Time to play,” being one of Pinhead’s preferred sayings. In Hellbound, Tiffany’s obsession was bound to her playing with puzzles (coincidentally, the wooden box she slots together at the Institute bears more than a passing resemblance to Phillip’s rudimentary Lament Configuration), while in Hell on Earth, Pinhead encourages Joey to let the Pseudo Cenobites play: “Ah, more friends come to play with you.” Even when he slips inside her mind, he is toying with her memories of her dead father. “Couldn’t resist playing games, could you?” snaps Elliott when
he comes face-to-face with his alter ego.

  In Bloodline these correlations are much more blatant. In France, the peasant girl Angelique assumes the Duc is playing a game when Jacques binds her hands to the table; this is further compounded by his producing a handkerchief from behind her ear. In the original script, the gamblers are playing card games at the chateau when Phillip arrives, but the delivery of the box initiates a new, more deadly game. “Will you play, sir?” the demon Angelique asks Corbusier, offering him the Lament Configuration. In the film, though, it is Jacques who plays sexual games with Angelique once she is demonized, and she is condemned to do his bidding. This doesn’t prevent her from wishing that things were different, especially when Phillip arrives. “Toymaker! You have such pliant fingers,” she says seductively. “I want them to play with me.” In the previous version of the story, she does play a mating game with Phillip, but now is ordered to dispatch him quickly, then to join Jacques back in the bedroom.

  In the present day there are even more games to be played. Angelique is at the forefront this time, and the first involves revenge on Jacques. “Close your eyes,” she tells him. “Don’t move.” “Why?” he asks, and in a replay of what was said during her original demise she replies, “So you won’t bruise.” Jacques’ reaction to that: “Is this a new game?” “Oh yes,” she tells him. “It might hurt ... just a little.” And when the game is over, Jacques will be dead.