The one where a guy is torn apart by chains from Hell!!!
AKA: Hellraiser.
This an oldie but a goodie. Do the kids watch Hellraiser any more?
I’ve always watched a lot of horror movies with my father, even when I was a young kid. He was probably one of those guys you see at a scary movie with an 8 year-old and think, “Jeez, how is that kid going to grow up?”
Well, for the most part it was just fine. My Dad was always very careful about explaining that these movies weren’t real. They were people using makeup and lighting and acting to tell a story that made us interested in watching.
If I was some kid who freaked out at the sight of a movie monster, I’m sure he would’ve pulled back. But I was fine! And I loved scary movies - still do!
Until one day my father took me to Hellraiser. This was back in the days before Internet. You couldn’t do online research, maybe didn’t see the trailers, and so were probably just going by the movie poster. Dad probably saw this and thought it would be a scary little monster movie, like Wolfman or The Mummy.
Well, he was wrong, and he realized right away that he’d made a poor decision. He still brings it up from time to time, when we’re discussing scary movies. What my father doesn’t understand is that it is the religion he brought me up in, which he thought so worthwhile and beneficial, that was far more damaging than a horror movie could ever be.
It wasn’t exactly the violence or the sexual imagery that did so much damage, it was the religious overtones of the film. I was raised in a strongly Catholic family, and an overwhelming fear of Hell is the bread and butter of the theology. Even when the threat of Hell wasn’t explicit, it was always implicit. Hellraiser was so traumatizing because it portrayed a world where it was taken for granted that the mythology of Christianity was real; it made the themes and mythology explicit. And they were horrifying, just as they are in their religious context.
I’m not a Clive Barker reader. I’ve never read one of his books. But I do know a little about him. A lot of work is an allegory for and explanation of his interest in bondage, the dynamic of pleasure and pain. Clive Barker plays with these tropes, using religious imagery as the spiritual expression of what are actually quite idiosyncratic psychological experiences. The experience of pain in sexual pleasure is by no means a universal!
I started losing faith very young. When I was struggling with the intellectual arguments against religious belief, the fear of Hell was always the bugaboo in the background. Yes, there were all these intellectual reasons to not believe in religion: but then again, if you lose faith you burn in Hell!
It wasn’t until I read James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man that I began to gain a clearer understanding of how the threat of Hell is used to gain power over young, impressionable minds, and how overcoming this fear is profoundly liberating. In Portrait, young Daedalus realizes he has to risk even the fires of Hell if he is to fulfill his destiny in becoming a great chronicler of the human experience. But to demonstrate just what was at stake, Joyce had to make the horrors of Hell so vivid that we would truly understand what was at stake in him denying the faith he was brought up in.
So in Hellraiser, a young Catholic is presented with the true horror that is such a huge component of Christian theology, and how it warps the emotional and psychological health of otherwise happy and healthy human beings. But it takes a more mature, sophisticated mind to see how Barker is playing off the metaphysics of religion and its psychological implications in the real world.