Poor monsters from horror movies of legend are now apathetic. They have become soft and toothless, and can be petted, with their evil energy sapped through fan adoration. There is some entertainment value to Freddy Krueger’s cartoonish adventures as a wisecracking joke machine or the viral videos of proud parents who have their six-year-olds terrorizing playgrounds wearing Michael Myers costumes. There’s Count Chocula.
But, it is inevitable that something will be lost. That has been the fate also of the “Hellraiser”Three films were released theatrically and seven others for the home market. As more and more sequels played fast and loose with creator Clive Barker’s thematic vision for his Cenobites — extra-dimensional entities that sought carnal experience, preying on conflicted human desires and obsessions — the quality suffered and those giddy, early thrills faded from memory. The films’ leading Cenobite, The Hell Priest aka “Pinhead,”Once a great phantom, he became a cuddly toys.
The new reimagined “Hellraiser,”Then, the filmmaker David Bruckner (“The Night House”This is a welcome return of original intent. Together with screenwriters Ben Collins (who collaborated on “The Night House”), Bruckner has adapted Barker’s original 1986 novella, “The Hellbound Heart,”He interpreted it with great success to tell the story of addiction’s intangible effects.
Riley (Odessa A’zion, “Grand Army”) is a young addict struggling to stay sober. Matt Flynn is her brother. “13 Reasons Why”Colin, his boyfriend (Adam Faison), “Everything’s Gonna Be Okay”) and roommate Nora (Aoife Hinds, “Derry Girls”She is able to rely on them for a lot of her support. But Riley’s new boyfriend, Trevor (Drew Starkey, “Outer Banks”This is a destabilizing force. Riley is recruited to rob the bank. They are given a puzzle box which, when turned and twisted, releases a blade that cuts the user as well as opens a portal into the dimension of Cenobites.
Riley is summoned by the creatures, who demand sacrifices. This damage now has a devastating effect on Riley’s family and friends in a supernatural dimension. This mix includes a wealthy collector of occult items, and a terrifyingly powerful man named Voight (a haunted Goran Visjnic), who’s role in all the madness becomes more apparent as the sacrifices pile up.
This year’s “Barbarian” is turning horror fans’ heads because it seems to have come out of nowhere, its mythology not yet turned into merch. It is based on the common fear of dark basements and has a shockingly new effect. “Hellraiser,”In its most successful iterations, the game has never relied on a scary setting or the idea that a simple slasher. Its universe is anything but straightforward.
Rather, Barker’s interest in the intangible qualities of human desire allowed for his world to be populated with analogs of psychological extremes and of the human need to chase sensation. Steeped in BDSM culture’s practical settings, it was body-horror that had no choice but to evoke late-1980s anxiety surrounding AIDS, thrumming with an energy and insider perspective queer horror fans felt deeply.
Now it’s 35 years later, and Bruckner, Collins and Piotrowski understand that the jolt of the new is a lost cause for an established narrative. Instead, they expand and refine details, grounding the human characters in the kind empathy-driven despair which might lead to a character considering escaping to another world of sensory exploration, accompanied by a bunch of stunningly beautiful new friends.
The film is a balancing act that rides the fine line between sparking an audience’s imagination with the unknown and satisfying literal-minded questions like, “How does that puzzle box do all that stuff, and where do the Cenobites come from?” In Bruckner’s directorial hands and David Marks’ editing, more information is delivered than ever before, but no plot point is over-explained. The mystery is allowed to be ambiguous.
As Riley, A’zion delivers a breakthrough performance that could have, in a less thoughtful production, been reduced to screaming and crying. A young addict, desperate and real, is a mess of an individual with a voice that breaks every time she attempts to explain her confused and urgent need for reconciliation in both her everyday life and the supernatural one that has interrupted her existence.
Jamie Clayton, The Priest, is currently in the interim.“The L Word: Generation Q,” “Sense8”Doug Bradley became a legend as he gracefully takes the torch from Veronica (). “Pinhead” through the first eight films and has become inextricably linked to the films’ lore. Rather than try to duplicate Bradley’s manner, presence or speech, Clayton’s Priest resurrects the character’s strangeness, commanding the frame with eerie stillness, beckoning hapless humans to indulge sensation no matter the cost. “Accept the pain you have wrought,”Riley is told by the Priest that he wants to do more of the same. When A’zion responds, “I don’t want this!”Clayton meets it in a seductive whispered way “Yes, you do.”
But what about the box with all those beloved monsters? They’re different here, extravagantly reinterpreted with practical effects and, in the case of the Cenobites, stunning creature design and costume execution from Keith Thompson, Josh Russell and Sierra Russell. Embodying Clive Barker’s original intention of “repulsive glamour,” these Cenobites silently glide on hell’s runway. The assignment was “red flesh and raw meat, but make it fashion,”Their work is a graceful slam-dunk.
“Hellraiser”Hulu debuts October 7,