Daddy worked his whole life for nothing but the pain
Now he walks these empty rooms looking for something to blame
But you inherit the sins, you inherit the flames
--Bruce Springsteen, Adam Raised a Cain
I don't know if Clive Barker was ever a Catholic, but if he wasn't, he sure expresses some of the baggage of Catholicism. The idea that the slightest slip from the path of righteousness, even if you don't know you've slipped or don't know the rules, will land you in eternal damnation is a thread that runs through Barker's The Hellbound Heart even without the trappings of the church. Barker transmits this theme to the Hellraiser movies more or less intact, though films subsequent to the first two Hellraisers are less rigorous in their exploration of this idea, if they're aware of it at all. There's a queer layer to this, given Barker's sexuality and, um, colorful history working at gay leather clubs in the 1970s. His Goth-bondage demons seem tailored to a queer man's self-loathing, where his demons flog not only himself for his deviance, but everyone around him. Sin, it seems, has collateral damage.
The new version of Hellraiser (2022, directed by David Bruckner) has a different set of sins and a different source of self-loathing for its protagonist, but the idea is largely the same. In the Hellraiser universe's framing, basic needs when taken to extremes will land you in hell, whether it's a need for kinky gay sex or for pharmaceutical kicks. All human needs are addictions of a sort. The sins committed by Hellraiser's explorers of the frontiers of experience are a stand-in for any "sin" you like, however small and trivial. The fallout for the people around an addict is usually more dire than for the people around a self-loathing gay leather boy. So, sure. Why not. But there's a downside to this idea. It takes a property that, for all its flaws, originated as outsider art and frames it as mainstream product. Addiction narratives are mainstream films--everyone in Hollywood makes addiction movies eventually. All queer films, even today, are outsider art. You see the dichotomy, right? And this transcends the relative production values and even the competence of the filmmaking. This film has the most technically competent director who ever came near the series not excluding Barker himself, and production resources that dwarf any previous edition, and yet this fails to pull itself away from its progenitors.
The story follows Riley, a recovering addict, who is being pulled back into bad behavior by her new boyfriend. The new boyfriend, Trevor, is casually dismissive of Riley's recovery and doesn't do the minimal things to help her. He also has a big score in a warehouse owned by a missing billionaire, into which he ropes Riley. When they penetrate the container allegedly containing the loot, they find instead a safe containing a single item. A puzzle box. They go to Trevor's apartment and have sex and Riley takes some pills before heading to her own digs, where she lives with her brother Matt and his partner, Colin. Matt, for his part, has had enough of her. When he realizes that she has relapsed, he kicks her out. She spends the night outside, playing with the puzzle box, which has a tendency to bite when one of its configurations is solved. After it impales Riley's hand, she begins to hallucinate the arrival of demons, who she begs to take another soul instead of hers. They oblige. The next day, she learns that her brother is missing. She enlists Trevor in an attempt to find him. The trail leads to the mysterious missing billionaire they've robbed, whose disappearance is accompanied by rumors of his depravity. He has a house where Riley thinks there might be answers. She's trailed to the house by Trevor and by Colin and her friend, Nora, who all perhaps hope to stage an intervention. The house, on the other hand, has other ideas. It has been built as a trap for the unwary, and the demons from the box are eager to play...
One of my friends suggested that there's a whiff of industry about this version of Hellraiser, that it had somehow been commodified. I think that's probably a fair assessment, though I would suggest that every single one of the Hellraiser films since the third film has been product rather than art. Once you start describing films as a "franchise," that ship has sailed and you might as well send the concept art over to the Funko pop people and the action figure sculptors for mock up and be done with it. It's true that this exists to perpetuate the IP. It's not required to be good or even meh. It's to their credit that the filmmakers have smuggled any sort of transgression into the film, which they have. The radical recasting of the series primary villain is evidence that the filmmakers at least understand the queerness of Hellraiser, even if they've watered the whole thing down. And I'd be lying if I said I watched this film for reasons other than Jamie Clayton's performance as the Hell Priest (or Pinhead, if you prefer). Indeed, her presence is more in line with the description of the character in The Hellbound Heart than Doug Bradley ever was, but in truth, the movies and the source text parted company and diverged their mythologies early on. I haven't felt the urge to watch a Hellraiser film in forever and this one element prompted me to say "I'm looking forward to the new Hellraiser film," which are words that never before passed my lips. And let there be no mistake: Jamie Clayton's Hell Priest is the best thing in this film. The full on refutation of gendered demons here is genuinely radical, and her performance is more than equal to the act of casting her in the first place. As a trans person myself, I have a tribal loyalty to the idea that trans people should be part of this conversation, that they should be offered the chance to play central roles in films that aren't particularly about transness, and if she had been bad, I would tell you that. Instead, she is genuinely disturbing. Her character is repulsive and dangerously beautiful at the same time. If she is to be the face of the franchise going forward, then this series suddenly has a glamour to it that was never part of it before. I wish this was a better showcase for her because she showed up to fucking slay. I wish this film embraced her queerness. But it doesn't, and part of this is on Jamie Clayton, too, through no fault of her own. Even if she's trans, she's a cis-normative beauty. If you don't know who she is, you wouldn't know the nature of the film's transgression. That's the film's playbook all over.
This film's screenplay is a failure of imagination. I know that screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski have worked with David Bruckner before, but I swear the plot of this film plays like their only exposure to horror movies are slasher films. Maybe this trickles down from David S. Goyer. I dunno. Regardless, it's lazy. The middle act reverts to every film you've ever seen about gormless young people trapped in a horror movie space--in this case, Voight's mansion which has been built as a cage to trap the Cenobites. The design of the mansion bears a familial resemblance to the spaces in the William Castle remakes of the early 2000s, particularly 13 Ghosts. It feels second hand. So too does the film's human villain, Voight himself, played by Goran Visnjic, who is evil from the point of conception if you accept the proposition that all billionaires are evil. He seems like a conflation of Frank from the first film and the doctor from the second. I half expected his last line to be "and to think...I hesitated," but they already threw out some key catch phrases to stroke the nostalgia of a long-time audience. I don't mind any of this. It's the price you pay to the genre. I do object to everything this film offers up for its central addiction metaphor. I never once believed that Riley was an addict, which is on Odessa A’zion for a performance that has no authenticity in spite of a screenplay that seems like it was written by people who have never met an addict. Given the way this theme supports the rest of the whole edifice, this is rotten from the bottom up and overwhelms the novel ideas about the rewards offered by the puzzle box and the notion that a monkey's paw is best left unwished.
The film is lit and color corrected right at the border of human vision. Many scenes are too dark and would have been even in a movie theater, while others have the dismal murk of contemporary cinematography. This tends to obscure things a paying audience might want to see. A good look at the Cenobites, perhaps, or the details of the spaces inside the mansion. I love the conception of the Cenobites, in which flesh becomes fashion becomes fetish. That at least is a Barkerian horror concept. When we can actually see the Cenobites, they're legitimately frightening. When The Gasp, one of the film's new Cenobites, whispers to one of their victims to "Save your breath for screaming," that places the film firmly in the universe and idiom of the original films, as does the transformation of Voight at the end, which is a pure reworking of the end of Hellraiser II. These elements feel like Hellraiser. The film goes out of its way to hide them. What's frustrating about this is that Bruckner shows a fundamental understanding of film blocking deep into the film frame, but this too is often sabotaged by his camera crew.
In spite of my various disappointments, Hellraiser 2022 is still maybe the second or third best film bearing the brand. The original item often veered into the risible due to the poverty of its production resources and the inexperience of its director relative to his ideas, so this is a drastic upgrade in terms of mere technical competence. But this film also bows to the tyranny of the well-made movie, which offers no real surprises, no real stakes, and no real human beings for the audience to spend their time with. These are all horror movie characters, without interiority or visible urges and needs. Even Riley's addiction is appended as an identifier and a plot device rather than as something the on-screen character actually feels. I don't know whether I prefer the charming incompetence to the mercenary professionalism or vice versa. And so it goes.
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