Overview
“The doors to the pleasure of Heaven or Hell. I didn’t care which… I thought I’d gone to the limits. I hadn’t. The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond limits… pain and pleasure, indivisible.”
The original Hellraiser movie is comfortably a contender for one of my favorite movies of all time. The sequels have been not as good, to say the least, including at least one movie clearly made just to extend the IP rights. In the 2022 sequel, the protagonist is overtly struggling with addiction as part of the plot, but I still feel the original was far better at tapping into the raw themes underlying addiction.
One of the most confusing aspects of addiction to people who have never abused substances or struggled with compulsions is how someone can keep using despite the pain outweighing the pleasure. It’s actually confusing for most addicts who attempt recovery too, which often leads to the conclusion that one must simply be incapable of valuing anything over the addictive stimulus. The quotes above from Frank Cotton, the real antagonist driving the events of the film, reveal some of this thinking when taken to the extreme in a visual narrative that’s helpful to dissect.
The neurobiological explanation of addictive compulsions first requires dispelling the common myth that dopamine is a pleasure molecule. In reality, it’s a reward chemical that builds the associations between cues and the potential for desirable outcomes. You can absolutely hate the experience of something but want it anyways because your brain has coded it as rewarding before you even experience it. The lines of pain and pleasure blur as the lines between wanting and liking diverge.
Clive Barker
“I think one of the things that fantastic writing does is that it joins up the places of power. It actually says to the reader: ‘This thing that you remember from your childhood, this moment of epiphany you know from your childhood, is actually connected up with this piece of physics, and this piece of physics is actually connected with the theory of magic, and the theory of magic is actually connected to your ideas about sex and your ideas about sex are actually connected to your ideas about love, which, in turn, are connected to your ideas about death which are, in turn, connected with higher physics’… We live in such strictly decompartmentalised times, when it’s all about specialisation.”
I just really like this quote from Barker. I’d argue that the specialized, decompartmentalized times he speaks about is one of the reasons traditional institutional authorities are less compelling to us and face existential challenges to their credibility. A diversified global economy necessarily relies on increasingly specialized sets of skills who operate through standards that eliminate the need to understand the nuances of the network one interacts within. This works to optimize processes along the metrics that those standards can reflect, but it also sidelines the holistic individual human as a body and a being. Consider education. We can create a set of standards and use grades as a metric to evaluate the process of education, and we can create specialized pathways for students to pursue so they can work cutting-edge problems, but this also stratifies the life experiences each student has, with each topical specialty becoming its own social niche as well. Drawing connections across niches requires one to occupy a position whose incentives are not driven along any single hierarchical institution, and so writers who take a step back from their niches to look at the bigger picture necessarily gravitate towards living in the social margins between niches. It’s from those margins that one can identify the constellation of interwoven relationships and epiphanies that Barker speaks about.
The Hellbound Heart
The movie is a loose adaptation of The Hellbound Heart which had the great fortune of involving the author in its production. I’m going to avoid referencing too much of the book here, but I find it hard not to analyze the book and movie at the same time, seeing both as the result of the same perspectives on escapism and hedonism.
Frank
Frank is shown to be a hedonistic thrill-seeker who has no regard for norms or rules. He travels the world in search of taboo pleasures beyond what everyday life could provide, obviously including drugs and sex. He has an affair with his brother Larry’s wife, Julia, which introduces the elements of Frank’s debauchery into the family. Kirsty, Larry’s daughter, is our primary protagonist as a typical coming-of-age woman seeking to carve out an independent life for herself.
In the book version, Frank’s hedonism burns through the capacity for normal life, and he becomes jealous of Larry’s ability to be fulfilled in his routine ordinary life with a family. We can conclude then that Frank was born into a mental or neurological state that predisposed him to seeking more risks to fill a low baseline of the ability to experience pleasure, rather than experiencing a traumatic upbringing or inflicting some curse on himself. Pop psychology has always been fascinated by personality constructs like the addictive personality, psychopathy, or Cluster B Personality Traits. I wouldn’t go as far as to be an armchair doctor and label Frank with any of these in particular, but it tracks that Frank’s baseline personality traits emerge from a related disturbance or disorder.
In the movie version, we see Frank put on Larry’s skin after a murder as a disguise, but the context from the book adds another dimension to Frank becoming Larry and having an affair with Larry’s wife. He wants to be his brother, and he horrifically attempts to literally enact the substitution.
I’m going to avoid referencing too much of the book here, but the written description of the experience of using the Configuration within the opening of the novella is very close to a bad trip. Frank’s backstory, which is mostly dropped in the movie, features waves of depression, suicidality, and nihilism that persisted since his adolescence. Larry, or Rory in the book, turns out to be a very vanilla man who finds the routine of ordinary life to be engaging and overreacts to mild disturbances. From this perspective, the addiction analogy seems natural. When Frank says he doesn’t care whether he found heaven or hell, he’s reached the point that many addicts do where nothing on Earth seems to satisfy the desire for instant intense gratification.
By the time he gets to the Configuration: “this new addiction quickly cured him of dope and drink. Perhaps there were other ways to bend the world to suit the shape of his dreams.” So the book is explicit about the box being a reference to addiction. There are some really good passages I’d love to keep referencing, but I’ll save it for the page about the book.
The Lament Configuration that he finds on his travels to Morocco has the same promise of exotic transcendentalism that give substances their allure. Talk To Me plays with a similar concept by treating its cursed hand as something ancient that has traveled all around the world while remaining esoteric. The Lament Configuration is a puzzle box which someone must activate intentionally before knowing what the outcome can be, mimicking the ritual preparation that goes into using substances alongside the risk of something horrible happening after. The way Frank brings the box back to the old home Larry, Julia, and their daughter Kirsty move into isn’t very different than the way drugs can cross borders to end up in the hands of everyday people.
Kirsty is the protagonist of the film, a teenager on the threshold of exploring adulthood. She’s beginning to explore sexuality with her boyfriend at the same time that she encounters Frank and the Lament Configuration, which we can read as experimenting with drugs she stumbled upon. No peer pressure, no crazy partying, just the all-too-common story of kids finding an adult’s stash and applying their basic human curiosity. Even though she was absentmindedly playing with the Configuration, she still activates it to summon the Cenobites. Rather than dragging her away though, she has the presence of mind to cut a deal that would lead the Cenobites to Frank, their escapee.
The Cenobites are a great concept that stands out in an era were villains like Freddy Krueger and Jason Vorhees became breakout icons of the horror genre. Fun fact, Clive Barker was inspired by his visits to underground BDSM clubs for the movie’s costuming choices, so if your instinct upon seeing them was to scream “BDSM DEMONS”, you’re definitely not alone. Well, as the iconic Cenobite Pinhead says: “Demons to some, angels to others.”