It’s been a long time coming but I finally took the plunge and bought myself one of the really cool lament configurations, not the foil one, but etched brass.
As a horror meme/trope whatever you want to call it its fascinated me since the first time I seen Hellraiser, I remember Barker being interviewed by Jonathan Ross and thought this guy was fascinating,
at the time Barker was a revelation, his fiction seemed completely different, his prose was beautiful and the ideas he espoused, he was so good he was at the vanguard of what is known as Splatterpunk, the one thing about this genre that I didn’t know was that Michael Shea’s story The Autopsy was considered to be a proto splatterpunk story, there you go, you live and learn.
if you haven’t read it, read it along with Fatface and get to know the works of Shea, sadly he died a few years ago, but what he left behind was a great body of work, and more stories of Nifft the lean and inhabitant of the Dying Earth, a first written about by anther giant of the fantasy genre, Jack Vance.
Okay, I slightly digressed there, but going back to Barker, I remember reading the Books of Blood and it was like my eyes had been opened to a whole new world,
Those are just the first three volumes, track them down, they are well worth your time. Seeing those covers again, it takes me back over the years and the days.
For me the books were indicative of the time, we were under a Thatcher government and in the midst of the Tory revolution, I think these books are the essence of the creative backlash of the time, it’s like back in the 50s with the US and the invasion from outer space stories, the communists under the beds and ready to bring down America.
Stories of unknowable brutal forces harassing and haranguing the innocent, only with Hellraiser the innocent were never really that innocent, the box would draw them and from there it was their curiosity that summoned the Cenobites.
Demons to some, Angels to others…
And with that we were introduced to the Hell that was the Cenobites, the famous of that motely murder gang being Pinhead himself.
Backed up by the other Cenobites,
The film tantalised and terrified me in equal measure, damnation was earned through a desire for pleasure, at all points in Frank Cotton’s journey to find the box he could have turned away and would never have known the brutal touch of the Cenobites.
The second Hellraiser, the only good one made the point aptly when the wrong person solved the puzzle box and Pinhead intoned, it is not hands that summon us, it is desire. That was what fascinated me so much, damnation a choice, suffering was earned through pleasure. It seemed a more spiritual time, or at least if someone mentioned hell you wouldn’t scoff so much.
Okay, so you all know the story, but as with all things they pass and fade into obscurity, the Spaltterpunk movement is dead, declining and almost dead by the late 90s. The political scientist in me wonders does that coincide with the election of Tony Blair and the new labour movement sweeping to power, the old guard were overthrown and we had a sense that things were different.
As with the Splatterpunk movement, Labour seems almost a spent force, Tony Blair is reviled a someone who started an illegal war hanging around the periphery of the political scene and pontificating about Brexit like anyone cares what he thinks, like a drunken uncle at a wedding party imparting life advice no one listens to.
Barker himself is a pale shadow of what he once was, from writing the Books of Blood and Everville and the Great and Secret Show,
Two of the best books I have ever read. Compare and contrast that with these two,
I wanted to love them, its Barker, he made me the reader I am, but the first is terrible, it’s like a badly fleshed out short story he couldn’t be bothered with, and the Scarlet Gospels takes an enigmatic and fascinating infernal figure and makes him a cheap bully then casts him aside with a rubbish death.
Maybe it was his act of revenge for this
Put it this way, it’s Hellraiser 9, that’s not Doug Bradley and it’s not a great film.
I sometimes go back and watch Hellraiser, yeah there are some terrible parts in, but the actual meat of the film, the Cenobites, the attic room, the twisted desire and the infernal damnation that comes with the pinnacle of pleasure, it doesn’t age, it’s an allegorical tale and almost seems a bit puritanical, that we decide our fates by the profligacy of our desire and pursuit of pleasure.
I suppose for me it’s the passing of time, but sometimes what comes these days is turgid, badly thought out, committee written rubbish, so I’ll get my own Lemarchand puzzle box, and as much as I want to I won’t play with it…
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