If elevated horror films are so desperate to give us "deep" metaphor about drug use, why do all their drugs suck? Sometimes Hellraiser 2022 gets the allure of its Cenobites, but I feel like it's constantly trying to scare me straight.
The opening of Hellraiser 2022 is dark. Visually, I mean. It's even drab. It's pretty well trodden ground at this point to criticize the poor lighting of contemporary cinematogry. Even within its class, though, Hellraiser dedicates itself to keeping information out of the frame, and excitement out of the plot. The mansion orgy that starts the film's action barely makes it onto the screen, for example. We follow a youth through this sequence--will he be seduced by this predatory-seeming cougar? No, she diverts him down the hall like any secretary. Finally, this random victim's encounter with orgy impresario Roland Voight--and the monster-summoning puzzle box that Hellraiser centers on--is as chaste as can be. Maybe the film just wants to set our expectations properly for its first kill... ah, no, it bafflingly happens out of focus in the background, while Voight recites spooky ritual nonsense. It's... pretty deflating!
Much of this could be run of the mill mediocrity and a contemporary set of stylistic choices that I just find kind of bland and unsatisfying. Rewatching the film a year later felt like a dull slog, the tendency to underlight scenes making for a toxic combo with its editors' refusal to cut the fat (the movie is an indefensible two hours long). I think there's more than technical problems dampening the enthusiasm in the film, though. It struggles on a deeper level with its choice to replace the central metaphor in Hellraiser--the allure of transgressive, kinky, queer sex--with a new one: drug addiction.
It's not alone in that fixation, or its muddy results. Contemporary "elevated horror" increasingly feels to me like a tune played with one sad grey note. The sex the protagonist of Hellraiser 2022 has is sad. She can't have a meal with friends, because her asshole brother is there to make it sad. Drinking or doing "pills"? Sad. Sad and nondescript. All she does is "pills", and what are their effects? "Sad" and "drug". What happens in an orgy? Sex, in another room from the one the characters are in. Eroticized bondage murder? A backdrop to a liturgy.
Well, until a trans woman shows up covered in spikes and then for a brief moment I am transported to untold realms of experience. That's no thanks to the film makers, though. That is just how I respond to trans women. Especially scary ones.
I like having all my neurons lit up by seeing Jamie Clayton decked out as this film's cenobite leader Pinhead, and hearing Clayton's gorgeous voice saying spooky shit, because broadly that's something I come to horror for: fear and revulsion and sadness, yes, but also the pleasure of fear mixed with attraction. I sort of thought that was the whole, like, point of Hellraiser, actually. In Clive Barker's original film, the Cenobites are "demons to some, angels to others, explorers in the far realms of experience." The horror, paired with fascination, comes from entities that have transcended the boundaries of pain and pleasure colliding with more conventional human beings. Humans creep and scheme, but Cenobites are a force.
I may as well lay my cards on the table here: I find this very hot, conceptually.
Now, I had to reflect on this a little bit, as I worked on this article. The original Hellraiser is a movie about Frank, a guy who, bored with conventional perversion, seeks out a cursed puzzle box and gets ripped to actual shreds for his trouble. He then comes back as a melty skeleton to seduce his ex (his brother's wife) and menace his niece. She in turn solves the puzzle box, summons the Cenobites, and in desperation offers them the escaped Frank in exchange for her own life.
Eroticism, sexual menace, and masochism all play a part in this film, but I'm not sure that the protagonist Kirsty experiences, on screen, the commingled desire and terror the Cenobites represent. The Cenobites are not even necessarily directly erotic monsters (though apparently the film was developed under the title Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave, which rules). Some of the eroticism was apparently in part taken out due to MPAA censorship. Go figure. And yet, what remains is a kind of eroticism of texture. It's looking at these practical effects, these monster designs, and being repulsed but also wishing to see more of them. What makes it read that way for me is not necessarily in the story itself, but in the sensory imaginary of Chatterer putting its fingers in Kirsty's mouth and going [clickclickclickclick] next to her ear. The first time I saw that I recoiled from the screen!
...But I kept looking, and have returned again and again.
Maybe it's this dynamic that inspires the drug (or more broadly "mental health" or "cycles of trauma") metaphor increasingly popular in contemporary Elevated Horror. The possibility of relapse certainly hangs over everything in Hellraiser 2022. Protagonist Riley is treated with constant suspicion from everyone from her brother to his friends to paramedics over the possibility she's relapsing, something I could get if the film seemed to understand "substances" as offering something appealing to the user. Something seems to have gotten lost in stylistic translation, though. The metaphor is suggested by the stylistic allure of the genre, then the metaphor becomes sort of heightened by the modern vogue for horror films to not just mean something but Mean Something (Elevated), and in the gloomy ponderousness of the style the original aesthetic that carried the meaning gets lost.
Every cursed relic is a drug. Every drug is fentanyl.
Here's a question though: if the puzzle box the Lament Configuration represents drug addiction, why would anyone ever fucking start? The whole thing seems viscerally unappealing. You move a couple parts around (this is actually pretty cool and appealing in an autistic kinda way) then a blade snaps out and jabs you. The original puzzle box was content to summon a bunch of demonic angels to pierce your flesh with meathooks, but this has an added Drug Metaphor Effect. Which... mostly constitutes making you kinda droopy, before sending you screaming to hell.
I may not act like it but I've smoked a drug or two in my day and idk man I'm sorry but if this is what they did, no one would fucking do them.
The weirdness of all this is compounded a couple of ways. For one thing, the film seems almost disinterested in the Cenobites themselves. Maybe this is the lighting again: it's a genuine chore at times to make anything out, almost like they're unconfident in the new strung up flesh designs of the gaggle of Cenobites. I don't get this at all because the designs are fine* and I'd love to see more of them. At least we get some good closeups of the cool music box winding mechanism that constantly drags the rich guy's nerves around.
*Well mostly fine. Sometimes (the asphyxiating cenobite stands out here) the decision to eschew leather and latex for manipulated flesh results in things that look less like kinksters and more like silent Hill monsters. Goths fuck with knives; meat bags just sorta writhe at you.
What the film is more interested in, though, is lore. There's an entire lengthy lore dump in the middle about how the puzzle box has a series of different "configuration" each with their own word and ironic rewards. God this film loves ironic rewards. That's sort of fine too, and not to get too "ending explained" here but I think the point of the final scene is that the rich stealth-antagonist of the film has gotten power but at the cost of being strapped into the wish granting entity Leviathan, maybe for eternity. The irony thing is a little weird, though, considering the original film summons demons to have kinky sex with you and the main "irony" if you could call it that is they are much kinkier than you, and consider solving the puzzle to be, itself, carte blanche consent. That's less irony than some confusion in cultural exchange.
This film, though, hammers home that people fuck with the box because they want to treat it like a wish granting engine, and it needs a set number of sacrifices to make the genie Leviathan show up. It doesn't even take opportunities it could to dig into this wish-granting aspect deeper, really, wasting the potential of characters like cougar Serena Menaker. She's the former right hand woman for Voight and when the cast encounters her she's dying of lung cancer, but rather than have her choose her own end by stealing and employing the box, she just... gets got by accident, again. No wishing, no agency, not even really much done with the two different breath play cenobites with her, just, whoops you're dead. Riley gets her own wish, of course, as the protagonist, and what does she wish for? For the movie to be over and the monsters to fuck off--effectively, no wish at all. Pinhead characterizes this as "the lament configuration": having to live with the consequences of her actions. What those actions and consequences are is murky. She tries to get valuables from a seemingly abandoned warehouse because her asshole brother is mad that her job doesn't pay the rent, but I don't think that warrants being dragged to hell. Her brother boxes himself, and I guess she could be considered responsible for that, if the brother is as untrustworthy around sharp objects as a toddler. She... doesn't realize her boyfriend has been running a long con to sacrifice her to Voight? For shame! No, she's barely even as culpable as Kirsty in the original, who solves the full puzzle. Riley fiddles with it for exactly one step!
So the message is, what, people do drugs because they're tricked into it by the fucking devil and then their whole life gets destroyed? And also, if you do get tricked by the devil and have your life destroyed, you should... feel culpable? And feel conflicted about declining to bring your shithead abusive brother--who FRANKLY got what was coming to him--back as a fucked up freaky zombie? And not even get a shot looking triumphant when you feed your shitty boyfriend to the Cenobites, you have to feel sad about that TOO? This all feels like a bit of a Very Special Episode.
It's frustrating because there ARE more interesting ways to handle the metaphor. Take, for example, Rings, a short film released between the first and second American Ring adaptations. I know, I know, but listen. The short takes Samara's cursed video tape in a clever and logical direction: in the hands of teens who know the "copy and share this in seven days" command, it becomes a kind slow hallucinogen and real life creepypasta. The short does a great job of showing the appeal. There's a whole community of people sharing footage of things like ladders only they, and their early digital camcorders, can see, and daring each other to go further and further into the one week they have to live.
What makes the cursed-artifact-as-drug work for me so well in Rings is precisely that the cursed tape is... actually also not all that dangerous. Samara wants her work to go viral, and once the strategy for survival gets out a certain symbiosis emerges. A disease can't propagate if it kills all its hosts. The danger in Rings comes from the decision of other teens to hang the protagonist out to dry. They want to see what will happen on Day 7, and so contrive to isolate him. It's weird that a short sequel tie-in can feel like a clever intervention against films that came out in the last couple of years, but, it does. The focus is, refreshingly, on the social conditions surrounding the cursed artifact. If there's a "message" at all, it's less about personal failure to Just Say No, and about knowing who you can trust not to screw you over for internet clout. Now that's a message that feels ahead of its time!
So does fixing the disjunct between these films' temptation narrative and the refusal to make the temptations actually tempting fix the problems? Well, it might if they could stop moralizing for a second. Take 2022's Talk To Me, for example, a film about teens getting possessed by a fucked up plaster hand at parties. It genuinely does some good work to present the drug that is the Bye Bye Hand as something you'd actually want to do! It's terrifying but seemingly exhilarating, and while we don't really get to see much of this directly the characters describe it as euphorically connected to the surrounding world. It also, critically, doesn't seem to be all *that dangerous* as long as you're lucky, which most people seem to be.
This just winds up making the moral judgment feel all that more like a PSA. Kids, this may seem fun at first... but watch out! The longer I sit with the film the more uncomfortable I feel about the fact that it takes its black female protagonist through hell, all the while having white characters around her blaming her for everything that happens, fair or not, and finally giving her an incredibly grim and bleak ending. Every "mistake" she makes seems to narratively confirm everything other characters say about her being fundamentally dangerous to be around. Is that... really what these films are trying to say? It feels fair to at least ask what the moral attitude of these films is, because they seem to want so desperately to be about something. I've bitched about this before: even a film that seems to have been made for no clear reason like What Keeps You Alive feels fixated on weighty Themeshness, the need to be taken seriously as having something to say. I'm happy to meet a dumb series like Friday the 13th where it's at; I'm not sure some Elevated Horror films are prepared for the kind of advanced thematic scrutiny they're pleading for.
These films reify a basic misery of existence. It just starts to feel an awful lot like the message about drug addiction or mental illness simply is that we SHOULD treat these lunatics and junkies like a vector for horror and death, like a social contagion. Everyone treats the protagonists of Talk To Me and New Hellraiser as contemptible or disappointing at best and actively a corrupting force at worst. The narrative of the films seem to demonstrate that they're... absolutely correct to do so. A film like Smile, which Jack Saint did a whole thing about, suggests that cycles of trauma are escapable only if you can manage to completely isolate yourself from everyone else before killing yourself, but odds are you'll probably just traumatize some other poor bastard anyway.
These films wish to utilize the supernatural horror elements as a metaphor but don't seem to have thought through what that metaphor means. There's a deep cynicism and even nihilism to films like Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre but they feel to me like an attempt to slice and rip through a sense of complacency with society. Elevated Horror often seems to take as its starting point the presumption that things are awful, and there's no escape, and from there proceed to lay out how the most victimized members of society should embrace nihilism and if anything self annihilation in response. This can even be spun, via a sprinkling of identity politics or pop psychology about "trauma", into something that almost seems progressive, in that it acknowledges the dire state of the world... as long as you ignore the deeper pessimism that anyone could ever rise above their station, conditions, and damage.
I don't think it's wrong to want something else from Hellraiser, as strange as that might seem. The proof is in Hellraiser 2022 itself.
In probably the best scene in the movie, random side character uhhhh [switches tabs] uhhh "Nora" is dragged by the Cenobites out of the back of a moving van, which, marvelously, distends into an entire dungeon hallway, maybe the coolest geometry trick the movie pulls off. She's then strung up into suspension bondage in the most gorgeous set in the movie, suspended in the air by the tension between a series of chains pulling her body in different directions. This image is... almost kind of lit ok! (It's still pretty murky, sadly.) The tunnel and its strange geometry allows Cenobites to flank Nora at front and back, creating a kind of erotic horror tableau, perfect for Pinhead as high priestess to deliver a monologue.
And what a monologue it is! In response to Nora's prayer to God, Pinhead, Socratic method style, introduces the philosophy of the Cenobites: why would you want salvation, one sing "joyful note, without change, without end", when you could taste the whole spectrum and extremity of experience? Implicit in the discussion of "notes" is the implication that the Cenobites can pull a wide variety of other sounds from their victim/clients. Pinhead feels seductively alien in that monologue, genuinely seeming to not comprehend why someone would want salvation when there's just so much else out there to experience. She's offering something special here. When Chatterer kneels in front of Nora in the scene, there's an almost tender reverence that presages Chatterer's own explosive death later in the film, which it accepts with the same reverence.
And, during the course of the monologue, Pinhead pulls out a titular pin from her titular head (it's like, 6 inches long) and carefully uses it to penetrate the human woman's throat. From the side. The camera lingers on not one but two interior shots of the throat squirming and spasming as the pin slides around in there and her vocal chords struggle to make a sound while pinned. This is, bluntly, horny stuff. It's also visceral and uncomfortable stuff, which is part of the point. I think at moments like this the film attempts to put the viewer in something of the mindset of the Cenobites, tries to reach for some transcendental moment where sex and suffering are deeply entangled and even interchangeable.
And then Nora gets her back blown out.
Literally. 🙂
And then...
...there's another entire hour left in the movie of running around a mansion, opening doors, closing doors, getting monologued-at by rich guy Roland Voight, getting some more lore dumps, squinting and trying to make out what the Mother and Masque Cenobite designs look like... you get it. And an ending on that same sad gray note, the Lament Configuration, nothing was learned but that things kinda suck.
It's not just heaven that can be a single sustained note, but hell as well, in the hands of a player unimaginative enough.
I'm looking for horror with more music in it.
This originally ran on my Patreon in October 2023, and has been lightly updated and edited to make the words more good. It's part of a much larger project of ongoing horror movie reviews which originally ran on my blog and which has a little html archive version. I'll keep posting more short horror reviews to my Tumblr so follow me there for more. If this piece helped you appreciate art more deeply, consider following me on patreon, adding me to your rss reader, and tipping me.
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