Hellraiser (2022)

Score: 2.5 / 5

Certain circles of horror fans go, indeed, fanatic for Clive Barker's original novella (and subsequent works) as well as Barker's own film adaptation in 1987. The Hellbound Heart, changed to Hellraiser, combines body horror with Lovecraftian horror in surprising and erotic ways. Combined with the knowledge that Barker's queerness made this intellectual property one of the first major studio projects that embraced kinky and queer ideas in such a blatant and mainstream way, it should absolutely have been my thing. It's just not my thing. I tried reading it once and couldn't connect with his prose; I tried watching his film and found it indeed provocative and haunting, but its unbearable pace and complete lack of focus or thematic satisfaction left me nauseated and annoyed. So when I heard the franchise was getting a reboot -- and that Disney was sending this directly to streaming service (Hulu, which is where they seem to be illogically and unceremoniously dumping horror fare they don't know will do well, like the awesome Prey that deserved weeks in cinemas) instead of to cinemas -- I had very little interest in seeing it.

Directed by David Bruckner -- a rising star who has also directed The Ritual and The Night House, which is why I chose to watch this movie -- this Hellraiser is a spooky and violent reminder of why I don't like the source material. Which is to say, I didn't hate the experience of watching it because unlike the original film (and its admittedly kind of wonderful kink iconography), this one doesn't jive with my aesthetic preferences. Very few films from the '80s in general would be ones I'm willing to watch, much less enjoy, but especially in the horror genre. There's something aggressively cheap in appearance and desperate in performance or execution that marries (im-)perfectly in movies like the original Hellraiser. Thankfully, Bruckner modernizes his latest film, and his sleek updates are quite nice for this viewer.

Riley (Odessa A'zion), a former addict living with her brother Matt (Brandon Flynn) and his boyfriend Colin (Adam Faison), has a pretty sketchy boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey). We don't know much at first, other than Matt doesn't trust him and is willing to challenge Riley's choice, but it becomes apparent that Trevor is indeed a bit of a delinquent when they break into a supposedly abandoned warehouse and discover a puzzle box. Riley tries it out and learns it contains blades that can poke out and seriously injure the holder if she's not careful. She suddenly meets the Cenobites, a group of supernatural, extra-dimensional religious acolytes in thrall to a mysterious pagan god or demonic lord called Leviathan, apparently living in some kind of Hell in which they experiment with body mutilations and torture to experience hedonistic blending of pain and pleasure.

It's suddenly a whole lot really fast, right? Right. The concept is kind of cool, and in the original film, Barker had the Cenobites dressed, effectively, in BDSM-like leather garb with extraneous and suggestive hooks and straps and buckles. His melding of sex with danger felt incredibly appropriate and meaningful at the time, considering the AIDS crisis and shattering of specifically gay male culture in urban locations like LA and NYC. Consider this revelation in relation to William Friedkin's Cruising, which concerns an undercover cop investigating a serial killer who haunts the West Village and Meatpacking District, released in 1980. It's a taste of the erotic and affirming culture that once was, stirred together with paranoia and fears that our sexuality, so close to liberation, could be so intimately connected with horrific and violent death. The new film is nowhere near as historically or thematically relevant, but its updates are fascinating in other ways. Instead of black leather and fetish gear, the Cenobites here have undergone superhuman body mortifications to craft their appearance and, apparently, clothing. Certain muscles and skin flaps are cut and pulled and strung up around their bodies to create shoulder pads and miters and the illusion of partial coverings, and it just looks painful. Perhaps, like Crimes of the Future, this update asks us to question what we're doing to ourselves culturally in terms of violence upon our bodies, but Hellraiser does not reach for such existential epiphanies.

Riley herself isn't very interesting, but then none of the characters in the new film are. She's preoccupied with a certainty that she's in the thralls of powers beyond her control or understanding (very Lovecraftian, but she's not dealing with potential insanity). Her relationships are fractured and do not develop much with anyone, despite a two-hour runtime, no doubt due to her former addiction, the problematic implication of the screenplay being to use addiction as a shorthand for all that can fail in relationships as well as why those relationships fail. Eventually she traces the box to a wealthy hedonistic bohemian named Mr. Voight (Goran Visnjic, hilariously), hoping to solve the box and rescue her brother and redeem herself before realizing the older man is the reason for their suffering in the first place. The other characters aren't much more developed, which is to say hardly at all, and despite competent performances, precious little about the plot or characters is worth remembering.

What is worth remembering is Bruckner's direction, the cinematography and editing, and the effects. He handles looming horror very well, and here allows the violent shocks to really violate and shock to their full potential. It helps, too, that the appearance of the Cenobites is so unnerving and painful to behold. By the climax, as Leviathan (or whatever that giant, floating, inverted pyramid was) approaches Mr. Voight and the young people fighting for their lives and souls, I admired the visual dynamism of the film, evoking Lovecraft even as it worked to be its own thing. I even admired the screenplay in the ways it compared the pain/pleasure confusion of sexuality and body horror to the pain/pleasure of drug and alcohol addiction and what they do to the body. But the problems with the material -- apart from my own distaste for the central conceit -- are still present: lack of focus on plot and character, over-emphasis on shock value and the appearance of the Cenobites, and tons of unanswered questions about the mythology and apparent plot holes that get bigger upon reflection. I'd rather not sit through the pain of watching this again, though it served its purpose as a mildly entertaining diversion for an evening.