by Kane, Paul
So, indisputably, the first theme we must take into consideration is that of isolation, including enforced isolation. Each one of the characters is killed alone, first Allison who comes across a door with a Keep Out sign on the front of it, which she naturally opens. Inside she finds the Sacrifice Chair, which she sits in, then she bleeds to death as the spinning blades enter her chest. Derrick drops his inhaler on the dance floor and it is kicked down a grate, but he traces it down to the Specimen Room and retrieves it. Lying on a gurney, recovering from his asthma attack, he is then beheaded by Pinhead. Mike, meanwhile, is lured down there by the dark mystery woman whom he has hooked up with at the party—only for her to shut him in the room on his own. He then faces a painful death on the hook, killed by the Banded Cenobite. The tightly knit clump of teens are systematically separated and then murdered, all alone except for their killers. But then, when the ending reveals that they are actually suffering from chemical induced hallucinations, we realize that not even their killer was with them at the end—and in effect they killed themselves, dying in complete isolation buried inside wooden coffins in the grounds of the house (which itself is seemingly cut off completely from civilization).
Chelsea and Jake are split up as well, the former following the ghost of Adam to a room and then getting locked inside, the latter trailing Sister Ursala to her upstairs bedroom. This leads inevitably to them dealing with nightmare scenarios on their own, Chelsea—when she is finally released—encountering first The Host in the back of her car, then Pinhead in the middle of the wooded grounds. Jake has already experienced the most telling scene linked to isolation, when he tries to engage partygoers in conversation only for them all to ignore him: “Hey, how did you get into Hellworld? ... Is this a joke, hey ... Hey!” Soisson’s original idea here was to have Jake turn them around one by one but still be presented with their backs. The chilling effect we get instead sees Jake turn briefly before leaving and witness the entire population of the room hanging dead from hooks and chains.
David Robinson with The Host, Lance Henriksen (courtesy David Robinson).
To do this to the five teens is the greatest act of revenge one could imagine. We do not see that they have any family, indeed they in essence form a family unit themselves, apart from Jake who has made it his mission to distance himself from the rest of the group. “This isn’t a reunion, I never was one of you guys and never will be.” But his words ring false. Like Adam, they are the only family he has. But the one who is the most alone of all is The Host. Not even revealing his name, he makes his dramatic entrance on his own, and throughout the film appears to have no allies, except possibly the Cenobites. Yet we discover that this isn’t so, that he was the father who left Adam behind, regrets it and has come to take revenge on them all—something that leaves a bitter taste in all of their mouths. “You son of a bitch,” shouts Jake, “you were never there for your own son. Your son spent his life waiting for a father who never came home.... That kid took sixteen years of loneliness to his grave and now you wanna come back and get revenge on us?” The last scene with The Host has him sitting in a hotel room, drinking and smoking, totally alone once more and looking at old photos of his son, the placement of a recent picture over the top of Adam as a child signifying that he wishes he could get that time back again. He is just as guilt-ridden as Adam’s friends, except he has just cause to be. In a way, when he then opens the puzzle box and the Cenobites carve him up, they are doing him a favor, putting him out of his misery.
We cannot end this section without talking about the most dramatic example of isolation in the whole movie: that of being buried. A famous fear of Poe’s, the idea of being buried alive and waking up in a coffin is something that chills us all to the marrow. But for the protagonists of Hellworld this fear becomes fact, when they are placed in the earth at the back of the house by The Host, with pipes for air so they won’t die too quickly. Even Adam, burned and dead, makes an attempt to climb out of his coffin in the church at the start (albeit in Chelsea’s dream). Or is it possibly a way of communicating with her? This brings us to our second major theme in the film.
Can you hear me?
Communication, and more specifically the inability to communicate effectively, is another fundamental theme on which Hellworld is based. Adam is a prime example of this in his ghost-like form, when he appears to Chelsea throughout the course of the movie. The first time, we have just discussed, but then he leads her to a room which locks on its own—possibly to keep her safe from what is happening in the rest of the house—and reaches through the floorboards in the attic to grab hold of her later on. It could be argued that the reason these attempts at communication from beyond the grave fail or are perceived as malicious stem from the fact that they have manifested themselves in Chelsea’s own imagination. She is, after all, buried inside a coffin and not really experiencing any of this in the real world. As The Host says: “Your own guilt-ridden subconscious even threw Adam in there.” However, he does communicate towards the end in order to save Jake and Chelsea’s lives, calling the police from her own cell phone back in the house. Like the old-fashioned radio and the television in Hell on Earth, more modern means are now employed so that the dead can make contact with the living, and the crane shot of Chelsea looking up at the window to see Adam there confirms that it has worked this time.
Jake, too, believes that he has been in contact with Adam through electronic means. When he enters The Host’s study, the computer is switched on and he sees a picture on the screen of the two of them together. A line of writing then appears on that screen telling him, “It’s just a game,” reiterating what they have all been saying about Hellworld. This mode of communication, though, is not to be trusted, as it was the way in which they were all lured here in the first place. Mike, Allison and Derrick are all shown solving an online Lament Configuration which asks “Dare you enter Hell?” for the fifth Annual Hellworld Party at the Leviathan House. Jake’s bait is much more subtle; he meets what he thinks is a girl in a Hellworld chat room and agrees to meet her at the party. Unwittingly, he has told The Host everything he needs to know about the mythos in order to set up the whole charade. “I take my hat off to you. I couldn’t have done it without you, Jake,” he says smirking.
Returning to mobile phones for a moment, apart from when Adam uses it at the end, these are no more reliable as a method of communication. Each guest is given one with a specific number on it, as well as a mask (another way of isolating one’s true self). “If you wish to engage in the pleasures that only flesh can bring,” The Host tells them, “you pick a tasty morsel and dial that number.” But right away Derrick has trouble getting through to Mike when testing it: “Can you hear me now?” he asks twice. Allison uses hers as a joke to distract Derrick when he is chatting up two girls, but it is no joke when it is used later to relay her screams to Chelsea after she has been murdered. If anything, a sort of ESP tells Chelsea something is wrong and she goes up to the room where Allison is—there is no way she could have heard her screams over the music of the party—but she finds it locked. Mike’s use of the mobile gets him into trouble as well, when he contacts Mystery Girl 9364 and says, “I’d love to see your puzzle box.... Wanna dance?” She shakes her head and he reads her thoughts in a way only horny teenagers can. “Wanna party?” he asks, which garners the correct response. But this path will lead to his demise in the Specimen Room.
Chelsea, too, finds her phone useless when she attempts to contact the police. She gets through but the operator can hardly hear her. When the police do arrive, she bangs on the window to try and attract their attention, failing miserably. Once more she rings them, but even talking with the officer in charge doesn’t get her anywhere; he cannot see her in spite of the fact he’s looking up and right at her. “Definitely on drugs,” he concludes, and he is right, but Chelsea did not take these herself. “I’m rerouting you to dispatch,” he tells her and effectively ends the call. Chelsea had similar luck with Mike, just prior to
this. In the middle of receiving oral sex from Lady 9364, he isn’t interested in her plight. “Oh, so now you want me...?” Handing the phone to the mystery woman, she switches it off. The mobiles are then used to keep the only survivors off balance. The Host calls Chelsea and pretends to be Jake in trouble to get her back to the house. Jake sees a reflection of Chatterer and stabs the figure, only to discover it is Chelsea instead, although a call to his mobile from the real Chelsea reveals that his mind is being played with.
In reality, one mobile has been left in each of the coffins—and is a way by which the group can be manipulated with subliminal messages from The Host, as well as to contact each other when they think they are in danger. Finally, a cell is used one last time by The Host after he has been killed in the hotel room. Just when Jake and Chelsea think they have come through the nightmare, and they are driving back home, with Jake keeping his promise that they would live to see another sunrise, her phone goes off. She answers it and The Host appears briefly in the back seat. Perhaps it is an after-effect of the drugs they have been on, or maybe it is The Host himself using the device from “the other side.”
We cannot ignore two other means of communication. The first has been used in every single Hellraiser film to date, and will no doubt be used in any to come. It is the puzzle box itself. A communication conduit to Hell, it reaches out to the Cenobites and tells them when another victim is ready. The second is the very process of playing the film, by which all these ideas are communicated to audiences around the world, to fans of the Hellraiser series.
Get Your Mythology Right, Buddy
More so than even Hellseeker, Hellworld refers to other films in the series and even utilizes the mythology in a completely different way. Its deliberately self-referential tone is one of the things that marks this film apart from any other Hellraiser that has gone before it. Right from the start we are immersed in Hellraiser lore. When Mike shows up at Chelsea’s apartment we’re led to believe that The Chatterer is making an early appearance, perhaps in a hallucinatory sequence à la Inferno or Hellseeker. But he is only wearing a mask that he has picked up for $100 from the Internet (and like many that are actually freely available in the real world). Chelsea then reminds us that in their cinematic world, like ours, “Cenobites don’t exist, and even if they did, I never opened the Lament Configuration.” During the movie, Chelsea is our constant commentator on the mythos, and our constant reminder that none of this is real: “The props are cool,” she tells The Host, “but this is just an old house, Lemarchand is a character from some scary story, the puzzle box a myth and Hellworld? Just a game.”
It is Chelsea who misdirects us into thinking that the rules will be the same for this sequel as they were in previous ones. When The Host takes a victim, Pinhead is never far behind, leading both us as an audience and Chelsea to reach the same conclusion. “You’re going to rip off your face and morph into some franchise icon, right? Gimme a break.” This is our first signal that things might well be different this time, and actually The Host is not Pinhead. He is someone who also doesn’t believe in Hellraiser, and is simply using it to get his revenge. Far from being Pinhead, he is one of the souls our Lead Cenobite collects at the finale. Just as Chelsea has started to believe the whole mythos might be real, The Host—in complete reversal—goes from being the biggest Hellraiser aficionado alive, to not believing a word of it. He even opens the box, thinking it to be nothing more than a replica like the one he gave to Jake to drug him (the Invitation Box, which pierces Jake’s thumb). This proves his ultimate undoing.
To quote Gary Tunnicliffe again, this is “A fan film for fans of the films.”1 References abound, from the attic set which could so easily have housed Frank, to the statues of Jesus that Julia and Kirsty came across all those years ago in Lodovico Street. The Internet site the group access could be any of a dozen Hellraiser fan sites on the net that really do exist, and Pinhead’s famous lines waft through the air as they manipulate the digital Lament Configuration. Many young Hellraiser fans will recognize themselves in the characters of Chelsea, Mike, Derrick (sporting his fetching Pinhead T-shirt) and Allison. But there is one difference between fans of this franchise and Space Voyage, as Chelsea calls it (a thinly veiled reference surely to another popular franchise), fearing that the party might be like some sort of convention where people dress up as aliens. As Allison puts it so succinctly: “Hellraisers know how to party!” And if the Hellraiser house—the ultimate fan party location, at 86 Hellbound Drive—is anything to go by, how can anybody disagree? “I’ve died and gone to Hell,” says Derrick when he sees the huge spinning box and the throngs of people dancing to the music, before reminding us again that we are in actual fact watching a horror film: “Gratuitous tit shot,” he states when he sees a bare-breasted woman coming down the stairs. The audience knows it, and the makers know that they do, too, therefore they can play with the conventions to entertain. Although The Host treads a fine line, providing critics with a line to savage the film with if they so desired. “It’s like a bad horror movie, isn’t it?” he says to Chelsea.
Yet in among all these references to previous films, Hellworld also attempts to weave in some mythology of its own, adding to the already multilayered Hellraiser history. As The Host takes them down into the basement, he clues them in as a resident expert on the Leviathan House. He claims it was Phillip Lemarchand’s second greatest architectural achievement after the Lament Configuration, originally a convent commissioned by the church.2 “And for decades it stood as such. Then came the convent’s final Mother Superior, Sister Ursala, a nun whose vows were shattered by an obsession for a shiny puzzle box and the unholy pleasures seated inside of it. Sometime during the blizzard of 1808 some hundred and eighty women vanished from this house without a trace. Ursala was the only one they found, only she wasn’t all there. You might say she went to pieces.... Years later the house was renovated and became a lock up for the criminally insane.” Or, as Derrick sniggers: “From nuns to nuts.” Apparently drawing quite heavily on the Nightmare on Elm Street mythology, where a nun was trapped in a mental asylum and raped by a hundred maniacs, this nonetheless remains in keeping with Hellraiser’s and Pinhead’s ongoing discord with the church and with religion, further compounded by all the imagery at the start.
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WORLD IN ACTION
Hellraiser: Hellworld was released on DVD 6 September 2005, just three months after Deader. Generally speaking, the critics took this movie for what it was—completely different to what had gone before in the series, but using familiar horror tropes to cater to fans of the genre as a whole. Arrow in the Head’s online review said: “I entered Hellraiser: Hellworld ready to have an ‘okay’ time and to my big surprise ... I had a freaking blast!” The review continued: “Overall, this flick was a F*cking-A good time! It knew what it was and wasn’t ashamed of it!”
John J. Puccio of DVD Town drew attention to the franchise aspects of the movie: “You’ve seen the movies. You’ve read the books. You’ve even collected the action figures. Now, play the game!” He went on to talk about the more explicit nature of the material: “The sex and nudity are purely gratuitous and have nothing to do with the plot. The violence is mainly what we came for, but the filmmakers know that viewers expect sex and nudity and violence to go together, and, as I’ve said, the filmmakers are intent on providing viewers with everything they expect.”
The Cenobites are part of the mythology that Hellworld openly references (courtesy Gary J. Tunnicliffe).
One of the most detailed reviews came from a familiar name to any horror fan, that of writer Staci Layne Wilson, who wrote about the film for horror.com and got what the movie was really all about: “The setting, characters, and killings are all standard horror stuff on the surface, but director Rick Bota (channeling a meth-addled William Castle) and screenwriter Carl V. Dupré (doing his best Mario Bay of Blood Bava) brought their A game with inventive little twists and shocks all throughout the gory proceedings.” Sh
e was also pleased to see Henriksen in the film, saying, “The screen is owned by Henriksen as The Host (and his character is leaps and bounds better than another host he played in a 2003 disappointment called The Invitation) Best Host line: ‘If you need anything ... scream.’” And she was impressed by the rest of the cast, especially the feisty heroine, who follows in the best tradition of Kirsty and Joey: “Chelsea (Katheryn Winnick) is also a lot of fun to watch as she’s put through the wringer, making many narrow escapes.”
But Deader and Hellworld were not the only Hellraiser films to be made in recent years. There was one more, a short movie that examines what the last days of the Cenobites might be like and features Pinhead as you’ve never seen him before.
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NO MORE SOULS
Filmed in the space of a weekend, on a small set at his Two Hours in the Dark, Inc., effects workshops in Canoga Park, California, Gary J. Tunnicliffe’s short Hellraiser film is certainly quite impressive. Shot for a budget of $2,400, twelve hundred of which was spent hiring a high definition camera from World Wide Broadcast Services, Inc., No More Souls: One Last Slice of Sensation imagines an alternate future for Pinhead to the one shown in Bloodline. Here humanity has destroyed itself in a nuclear war and in one fell swoop both Heaven and Hell are filled to the brim with four billion human souls. During the first millennium the souls were processed in Hell, but of course once they had run out there were no more souls to harvest. Tunnicliffe studied the instruction manual on the camera and visited a cinematography chat room to ask questions before the shoot.
