The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy Read Free Page B

killing his sister. Or else they targeted weak families, as Freddy Krueger does in Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984). For a British equivalent, one could go back to Michael Powell’s Peeping Tom (1960), in which a father’s experiments on his son turn him into a voyeuristic murderer.
    Because of the commercial sense of casting American and British actors, and thanks to Barker’s broad international outlook, Hellraiser could claim a lineage to both U.K. and U.S. “family horror” films. But, at its very core, it is a British film with a British writer/director. If anything, the film’s bland domestic setting, the suburban environment against which such an extraordinary story plays out, has its origins in the black and white Kitchen Sink or British New Wave dramas of the late 1950s and 1960s, typified by films like Look Back in Anger (Tony Richardson, 1958) and A Taste of Honey (Tony Richardson, 1961)—a realism which helps immensely when it comes to suspension of disbelief. At the very least, the saga of the Cottons, on one level, is pure British soap opera in the Eastenders mold.
    But there is a massive difference. Hellraiser scratched beneath the veneer, in much the same way David Lynch did with small town America in Blue Velvet (1986). Barker’s film is a metaphor for what really goes on behind the net curtains in certain British households, and not just because of its S&M overtones. This concentration on verisimilitude, on human and family situations, could also be the reason Hellraiser has been dubbed “Ibsen with monsters.” 7
    The relationships between family members are key to the understanding of Hellraiser and how it subverts conventional roles. The four primary characters are all introduced to us by way of their position in this family. Julia and Larry are man and wife; Kirsty is Larry’s daughter and Julia’s stepdaughter (we discover the real matriarch has passed away when the removal men comment that Kirsty has her mother’s looks. “Her mother’s dead,” snaps Larry), while Frank is the black sheep brother and Kirsty’s uncle. As a primary player in this story, Frank states his affiliation every time he encounters a new character. “I’m Frank,” he tells Julia when he turns up just before the wedding, “ Brother Frank.” Later, when Kirsty comes across him in the attic, he says: “Kirsty, it’s Frank. It’s Uncle Frank.”
    Barker then deliberately contorts the roles so that they often result in uncomfortable and disturbing viewing. Julia is Larry’s wife, yet there are times when she acts more like his mother. When he cuts his hand he seeks Julia out. “You know me and blood,” he says, looking like he’s about to faint. Julia immediately adopts the position of caring parent, holding his arm up, preparing to rush him to the hospital and comforting him by saying, “It’s all right.” Here is another reason their marriage is on a collision course for disaster. In true Greek tragedy form, Larry is fulfilling some subconscious Oedipal desire to sleep with his mother (or a figure who represents his mother). But this situation is fundamentally wrong and Julia knows it. As stated earlier, she uses her sexuality to divert Larry when he is about to investigate the attic room, but cannot go through with the act itself: for one thing her real lover is watching close by.
    Conversely, there are moments when Julia becomes the child and Larry the parent, the most obvious example being when he thinks she is ill, after she has committed the first murder, though this could just as easily translate as subservience. His throwaway joke of, “Wanna cookie, little girl?” is disquieting, especially when one scrutinizes his relationship with Kirsty in more detail.
    Kirsty is introduced via a telephone conversation with her father, and the contrast between his body language with Julia and now is incredibly revealing. Larry’s face lights up; there is pure delight in his voice. Kirsty, not