by eabaker » Fri Oct 27, 2017 2:50 pm
Hellraiser is definitely a movie that has grown on me with time, and as I've moved farther from the expectations I went into it with the first time.
Despite growing up a horror junkie, I didn't really pay much attention to the Hellraiser movies as a kid/teen. I saw the boxes on video store shelves, I read a couple of articles about them in Fangoria, but I never really sought them out. The first time I saw any of them was when I was 17, and my mother and I had flown back east to check out a college. I flipped on the TV in the motel room and caught maybe 15 minutes of Hellraiser, then had to turn it off when we went to get dinner. I came back, turned the TV back on, and watched what I assumed was the last twenty minutes of Hellraiser. Then, over a year later, I went out and rented Hellraiser, and was surprised to find the role of the Cenobites so limited; it turned out that I'd actually seen part of Hellraiser, but then come back from dinner to see the ending of Hellbound: Hellraiser II! I was, frankly, really disappointed not to see all of the Cenobite action I'd been expecting.
(Side note: I had a friend in college who had pretty much the same experience with Evil Dead and Evil Dead 2.)
I rented Hellbound shortly afterward, and liked it a lot more than the first movie, primarily I think because it conformed to my expectations better.
Several years later, I watched both movies again, this time with a clearer idea of what to expect, and found that I liked them more or less equally, but in different ways.
Then, I read The Hellbound Heart.
By the third time I watch Hellraiser - with several years having again elapsed - I found myself way more into it this time. Maybe by now I had a clearer sense of what Barker was going for, or maybe my tastes had just changed as I grew older. Upon re-watching Hellbound, I still enjoyed it, but found it less engrossing and more contrived by comparison. Yes, the Cenobites are cool, but they're more unsettling when their roles are smaller and there is less explanation for them.
These days, I'd probably call Hellraiser one of the best and most deeply unsettling horror movies of its era, while I wouldn't say the same about Hellbound.
Tokyo, a smoldering memorial to the unknown, an unknown which at this very moment still prevails and could at any time lash out with its terrible destruction anywhere else in the world.