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).
