150 Word Reviews: 'Hellraiser' (1987)

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Photo: Film Futures

Horror writer Clive Barker’s directorial debut is a low-budget masterpiece and, in my opinion, one of the most original splatter flicks of the ’80s. Hellraiser is a raunchy, blood-drenched, coked-up HP Lovecraft story about a kinky mortal who wants to explore sex in other dimensions. He gets what he wants, good and hard.

And from there, it gets weird: a living corpse, a horny wicked stepmother, a gore-soaked mattress that's also a portal to hell.

The movie's design — from the mysterious puzzle box that summons leather-clad fuck monsters from hell to the monsters themselves — is on another level. Pinhead, the leader of the Cenobites, looks like a fabulous goth butcher who gives himself a daily nailgun facial. He’s a brilliant and terrifying creation, a demon who enjoys his work: ripping apart humans with hooks for eternity.

The climactic death features the best final two words from a baddie.

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I HAVE FEELINGS: I grew up reading horror short stories and novels. I guess I have my mother to thank: she encouraged me to read Edgar Allan Poe, and while his prose was oftentimes ornate and impenetrable to a 20th-century pre-teen, I was still able to thrill to tales of humans being sliced in half by giant swinging blades or buried alive behind a brick wall. Eventually, a smart Junior High English teacher snuck me a book titled Thinner by Stephen King, written under the pseudonym Richard Bachman. It’s the story of a crooked, heavyset lawyer cursed to lose weight — to become thinner — until he wastes away. The book was my introduction to the world of body horror. And then, one day, at the library of all places, I found a book called The Damnation Game, a book about a bodyguard hired to protect a man who made a deal with the devil. It’s full of carnage and romance, zombies, and a cannibal child-killer called the “Razor-Eater.” It was a shocking book that I did not think my mother or my teacher would approve of. It was my book, and the author’s name was Clive Barker. I immediately devoured his short story collection The Books of Blood. King wrote about haunted cars, but Barker wrote about a telepathic woman who gives men lethal orgasms. He was darker and weirder than any other horror writer. He wrote erotic horror fantasies, and I wish he were more popular than he is today. In a way, Clive Barker is like Neil Gaiman’s cooler older brother who got laid constantly.