James Rose
It is the pivotal scene in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser (1981): moving into their new house, husband Larry (Andrew Robinson) helps the removal men carry the marital mattress up the stairwell while his wife, Julia (Clare Higgins), waits pensively in the bedroom. Barker elegantly cuts back and forth between these two characters and spaces, steadily constructing a complex sequence of symbolic cross-cuts that culminates in one of the film’s most vivid and spectacular practical effects, the (re)birth of Larry’s hedonistic brother, Frank (Sean Chapman/Oliver Smith).
The act of penetration lies at the centre of this sequence: Julia recalls Frank’s incestuous seduction on the eve of her wedding day while, in the stairwell below, Larry struggles to lift the marital mattress. As Larry pushes and pulls at the obstinate object, Frank penetrates a willing Julia; Larry’s pained grunts are mirrored in Julia’s heavy breathing whilst Larry’s strained movements find their reflection in the penetrative thrusting of his brother. This cross cutting offers an insight into the sexual dynamics of the brothers and their shared lover: Larry’s struggle with the mattress implies his own impotency in the martial bed; he literally cannot get it up (the stairwell). His forceful back and forth thrusting of the mattress is contrasted with Frank’s own, almost casual, thrusting, but whereas the mattress will not yield to Larry, Julia has willingly given herself to Frank.
As Julia nears her climax, Larry nears the stairwell landing, oblivious to a protruding nail in the bedroom doorway. And, just as Julia orgasms, Larry drags the back of his hand across that nail, gouging a deep and bloody gash. Julia and Frank, both naked, rest from their lovemaking as Larry falls back against the stairwell wall and then staggers into the bedroom. The sound of his blood dripping onto the wooden floorboards breaks Julia out of her reverie. She turns, sees the blood. She carefully takes hold of Larry’s hand, wrapping the wound in his handkerchief. More blood spills onto the floorboards but neither Julia nor Larry notice that it is being absorbed into those same floorboards. Amongst the cobwebs and dust, a heart forms and pulses, a pallid fluid pooling in the ruptures of the wood. Slowly, steadily, more organs form, bone and muscle encasing them, as a flayed man is born into the darkness and the dust.
The nail is clearly phallic, projecting outward, erect but also rusting, the metal corrupted. As such, it symbolically associates itself with brother Frank, the dangerous sexual predator who seeks to seduce the bride-to-be while simultaneously usurping his brother. Both of these behaviours are momentary conquests but enough to temporarily slake his sadistic nature. The damage the nail causes, a deep and bloody gouging, enough to warrant stitches, is both a physical and psychological wound inflicted upon Larry, an injury to both his hand and his already fragile sense of masculinity: as he gingerly walks into the bedroom towards Julia, he holds his bleeding hand as far away from himself as possible, sweating and shaking. The mere sight of blood, let alone the injury (“I haven’t looked” he says when asked how deep it is), is enough for him. “You know me and blood,” he says, “I’m going to faint… I’m going to throw up.” Despite calming himself, he continues to berate himself for his inability to cope. Embarrassed by his weakness in front of his wife, he mutters “I’m so stupid… So stupid.”
The sequence contains a further phallic object, Frank’s flick knife. While it is used in a number of different ways throughout the sequence, it retains a strong sense of predatory and barely repressed violence. Standing in her camisole, Julia asks “What about Larry?” to which Frank replies by taking the knife from his back pocket and, holding it in front of Julia’s face, flicks the blade free and calmly suggests, “Forget him.” The implication is obvious, the knife functioning as a dangerous weapon: should Larry challenge their congress, then Frank would seemingly have no qualm in using the knife to incapacitate, injure, attack (or possibly kill) his brother. But, given the adulterous/incestuous nature of the flashback and the couple’s state of near-undress, the knife simultaneously functions as phallus, the flicking of the blade correlating with Frank’s genital arousal.
While both symbolics are disturbing, it is their collapse that disturbs further – the suggestion of violence, murder, and possibly death stimulating sexual arousal. Such a collapse reverberates throughout the rest of Hellraiser and, in doing so, emerges as one of the film’s narrative preoccupations – the correlation between sex and death: Julia seduces businessmen with the promise of sex at her house only to beat them to death with a claw hammer; these murders are committed out of love, the spilt blood facilitating Frank’s slow but steady resurrection; when his resurrection is complete, he can engage is further sexual activity with Julia. As Hellraiser moves towards its bloody climax, Frank’s use of the flick knife collapses sex and death again into that one object: (sexually) desiring Larry’s daughter, Kirsty, more than he does Julia, Frank stabs Julia in the stomach, the deathly phallus penetrating her reproductive organs in a further and final act of casual deceit.
The penetration of the nail into Larry’s hand juxtaposed with Frank’s sexual penetration of Julia can also be framed as part of Hellraiser’s wider preoccupation with pleasure, pain and the seemingly liminal nature of the boundary that exists between them. The most obvious manifestations of this are the Cenobites whose purpose, when summoned by the solving of a puzzle box, is to provide – as the recently resurrected Frank describes – “Pain and pleasure, indivisible.” Such acts are writ large across their bodies, with the aesthetically balanced wounds that peel back the skin and expose the flesh simultaneously beautiful and grotesque, their construction a pleasurable act that is conducted through the infliction of immense pain. This binding of opposites is also played out by Larry who, while watching a televised boxing match, finds great pleasure in the violence the men inflict upon each other. His grin widens as each punch lands, watching intently as the skin puckers, splits, bleeds. He invests himself further in this violence by mimicking the boxer’s actions – while his clenched fists merely move through the air and connect with nothing, mentally Larry has placed himself within the ring; it is Larry who is fighting, it is Larry’s punches that land and inflict pain. Although Larry is clearly gaining some sort of sadistic pleasure from this behaviour, it is also functioning as an action that reinforces his impotency. He is watching a version of masculinity he cannot embody or achieve (as well as one which threatens his own fragile sense of self) being repeatedly beaten, punched again and again until either knocked out or concedes to submission. By mentally positioning himself in the ring, Larry is able not only to embody that masculinity but also to overcome it, hit it and hurt it without fear of reprisal or injury. The little man finds pleasure in inflicting pain knowing full well it cannot be returned upon him.
Later, in the moments leading up to Julia’s first murder, pleasure and pain are unified once more in Hellraiser as she stands in the shadows of the attic, taking deep, heavy breaths, her cheeks flushing as the anonymous adulterous male behind her drunkenly undresses. She is at once horrified by what she is about to do and, just as equally, aroused by it. In murdering this man (and all the other men she lures back to the attic), she, like the Cenobites, embodies the film’s wider preoccupation – for her aggressive actions are motivated by sexual desire: in her violent spilling of blood, she can enable her lover to fully form and, once fully formed, she can again experience an intensity of sexual pleasure and incestuous transgression.
***All of the images included within this manuscript have been downloaded from Anatomy of a Scene – Hellraiser (part two) from Revelations, a Clive Barker website.
James Rose is an independent film academic who specialises in Horror and Science Fiction Film and Television. His first authored book, Beyond Hammer: British Horror Cinema since 1970 was published by Auteur in 2009. Since then he has continued to author books and has been widely published in a range of international peer-reviewed edited collections and journals as well as in mainstream magazines. He is currently undertaking his PhD at Leeds Beckett University (UK) where his research focuses on the intersection of Indigenous American and First Nations filmmaking, Horror and Representation. He can be found on Instagram @jamesrose1973.
