ABSTRACT
When I think of the first time I saw The Exorcist (dir. William Friedkin, Warner Bros. 1973), it is the smell that I recall most clearly: musty, close, with a cloying sweetness that hangs on the edge like mist. Even now, decades later, whenever I screen this classic film for a course, my sense-memory kicks in and I am back in the E.W. Bickle Theatre in the small town on Vancouver Island where I grew up. Despite the escalating mayhem on the screen, the various horrific images from the film-Regan vomiting pea soup, her head slowly spinning around, the violent levitation of the bed as the exorcists battle the demon Pazuzu-it is the smell of the old theater, the odor of stale popcorn and over-sweetened orange drink in the fountain cooler that returns to haunt me. Indeed, every time I see those images and remember those smells a part of me is fifteen again-and terrified. Back then I know I’d have left the theater if it hadn’t meant walking home-in the dark, vulnerable, alone. As it was, weeks passed before I could sleep untroubled by nightmares. It is safe to say that I was not much of a cinema horror fan after that. Cue the Scooby-Doo special effects and fast-forward thirty years. A sudden
bout of the flu keeps me on the couch. I am no longer the frightened fifteen yearold, but a sociologist of religion, specializing among other things in the intricate relationship between religion and popular culture. It is Halloween weekend and a local television station is running a Hellraiser marathon. I had, of course, seen the covers in the video store and recognized Doug Bradley’s iconic character, Pinhead, from the movie art. While Pinhead’s cassock-like leather outfit, the constant references to souls in torment, and an explicit, ongoing concern with the battle between good and evil occasionally caught my attention, I had not seen any of the films. So, when Channel Seven announced the Hellraiser marathon that weekend I thought, what do I have to lose? I can always change the channel. As I watched, though, I grew increasingly fascinated with the religious mythol-
ogy that underpinned and evolved over the course of the franchise. In the first installment, Hellraiser (dir. Clive Barker, New World Pictures 1987), which is
based on Clive Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart (1986), an intricate puzzle box opens a portal between our world and a dimension inhabited by creatures known as Cenobites-humans horribly mutated, trapped in eternity by their own desires, and living in an ersatz community defined only by their shared suffering. Indeed, though many Hellraiser fans may not be aware of it, “cenobite” is an explicitly religious term and means a professed religious person-a monk or a nun-who lives as part of a community, rather than as a hermit. Traditional religious icons, though, in this case holy cards, crosses, and statues of the Virgin Mary and Michelangelo’s Pietà, lie discarded outside the grim, foreboding house in which the central action takes place. There is religion here, there is the reality of an unseen order that impinges on our own, just not the kind with which we are perhaps familiar. The marathon continued and the Hellraiser mythology expanded. In the
second installment, Hellbound: Hellraiser II (dir. Tony Randel, New World Pictures 1988), we catch a glimpse of what Hell might actually look like. Rather than hellfire, brimstone, and hordes of cackling demons, Hell is a bleak, gray labyrinth through which we wander alone, chased forever by the memories, fears, and desires that brought us there in the first place. In Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (dir. Anthony Hickox, Miramax Films 1992), Pinhead explicitly challenges one of the dominant religions in North America, performing a blasphemous mockery of the Eucharist from behind the altar of a Catholic church. When an outraged priest attacks him for his sacrilege, shouting, “You’ll burn in hell for this!” the Cenobite responds gravely, “Burn? Oh, such a limited imagination.” Indeed, theologically implicit lines such as these are hallmarks of the first several entries into the franchise. In Hellraiser, for instance, when the terrified Kirsty wants to know what the Cenobites are, Pinhead tells her, “We are explorers in the further regions of experience. Angels to some, demons to others.” To another character in Hellraiser III, he explains, “There is no good, Monroe, there is no evil. There is only flesh.” And to Joey, the female lead in that film, he pledges, “Down the dark decades of your pain, this will seem like a memory of heaven.” Heaven and hell, angels and demons, souls cast in the balance between good and evil, the hope of eternal salvation and the prospect of eternal suffering-these are all explicitly religious concepts that, although they have become a generalized part of our cultural lexicon, make no real sense apart from the theological traditions in which they are embedded. For me, though, the principal moment of clarity in the development of
the Hellraiser mythology comes in Hellraiser: Bloodline (dir. Kevin Yagher and Joe Chappelle, Miramax Films 1996), the fourth entry in the series and by far the most ambitious. Although this installment is also the most heavily criticized by the legions of Hellraiser fans, I admit that it remains my favorite, not so much for what it does, but for what it implies. Filling in the backstory on the origins of the puzzle box, the liminal Cenobite realm, and the future of the doorway between the worlds, the narrative moves uneasily between eighteenth-century France, the late modern period, and some indeterminate time in a science fiction future. In our day, Pinhead tries to coerce a New York architect into building a permanent
portal between the dimensions, one through which the Cenobite legions could pass in force and at will. When the architect meets his “employer” for the first time, however, the young man can only exclaim, weakly, “Oh, my God.” To which, in his imitable, sepulchral voice, Pinhead responds: “Do I look like someone who cares what God thinks?” After seven hours of watching the Hellraiser mythology unfold, I thought, No,
you don’t (care what God thinks). Not really. And, in many ways this line both defines the Hellraiser series and explains/highlights one of the reasons religion and horror are often tied so closely together. Why don’t you care what God thinks? What has happened to the God in which so many hundreds of millions have placed their trust? Has he been banished by science, as an earlier sequence in the Hellraiser: Bloodline suggests? Does the presence of the Cenobites-angels to some, demons to others-render him irrelevant? Or, while many still profess belief, does Pinhead in some way reflect a paradox of the late modern world: we may still believe in God, but we don’t seem to care what he thinks.
