The films of Clive Barker have always come off to me like pre-Lincolnian oratory: histrionic in narrative and visual effects, prizing eloquence and grandiosity over lucidity. Rather than heightening their intensity, they are weighed down with a crushing earnestness that similar filmmakers (Sam Raimi, Rob Zombie, and, less successfully, Eli Roth) have mediated with comic seasoning. Where it works it works only with actors capable of matching Barker’s written magnificence, like Tony Todd, Doug Bradley, and Kenneth Cranham. But even with these resources, the desired elevation fails to go very high.
That Clive Barker’s work has left me cold may be a matter of taste, to say nothing of a minority opinion. Like Lovecraft before him, Barker’s aesthetic stamp on horror is as definitive as it is difficult (though not impossible) to wash off. On paper, such as his story series Books of Blood, his deft balancing of Kingian narrative conventions with Sadean vividness has left him no real equal among the splatterpunk authors besides Poppy Z. Brite. When he arose in the mid-1980s, he gave a well-timed shock that saved popular horror from a slasher-dependent stupor. He broke the taboos that needed breaking and he was not bereft of ideas.
But that is to repeat a truism. Horror’s equal role of intellectual exhortation alongside artistic expression is as old as the genre itself. And when the art fails to keep the horror upright, the ideas are there to catch it. But what if the art fails often? Certainly that requires you to consider the strength of the ideas with special care. In the case of Barker it is mixed. The discourses on race relations and urban planning are much more robust in Candyman compared to the broader urban psychogeography of Midnight Meat Train or the rural equivalent in Rawhead Rex. The struggle of monstrous outsiders evading persecution in Nightbreed is like a Wildean fairy tale without its graces. I’m not actually sure what Lord of Illusions is trying to get at. Yet it’s the one film that rises above all of them that is most contentious, because it is the most stylistically audacious and intellectually challenging.
Hellraiser remains Barker’s signature film, and a calling card for his strengths and weaknesses. Sui generis when it was released in 1987, much of its impact has been blunted by progress, both cinematic and cultural. The inventive special effects—such as making a drop of blood grow into a full man—appear crude today, even against its five-year predecessor The Thing. While the transgressive flair of its sadomasochistic themes and aesthetics—the leather, the hooks, the unquenchable lust for more extreme pleasures—has greatly diminished into conventional sexuality. The very concept of Pinhead, even after trying to reboot him into a her in 2022, has lost much of its disturbing power. If anything is keeping the film’s value afloat, it is what might be called its moral thrust. And even that has been threatened by the increasingly convoluted mythologizing of the sequels, which I will ignore for my present purposes.
The film tells of the Cotton family—father Larry, daughter Kristy, and stepmother Julia—who move into a house recently vacated by degenerate uncle Frank. Frank, the viewers are shown by way of prelude, went off into another, sexier dimension by way of an enchanted puzzle box. But when blood from Larry’s hand brings him back some of the way, he enlists Julia to complete the process by luring and killing more men and completing his resurrection, which ultimately requires taking the skin of Larry. Kristy discovers this arrangement, along with the puzzle box. She unknowingly summons the deformed, leather-clad Cenobites, who have run of the other dimension and are none too pleased with Frank’s breaches of protocol. Mayhem ensues; such sights are shown to you, etc., etc.
Much, to be sure, has already been said about the unusual dynamics of the film. Though “Pinhead” (then-unnamed) is the iconic “monster,” he is not the antagonist. That distinction goes to Frank and Julia, former lovers with equal aptitudes for sociopathy, as they murder their way to second chances at more fulfilling lives. The Cenobites, by contrast, kill no one who isn’t already dead and only come when called. They are not bound by any code other than their own; that code is not explicitly delineated, but it’s shown that once you go into their realm you are not expected to leave, and any action you do to stay out is forbidden by implication. Any wrong they perceive as being done against them will be righted. They are self-described as “explorers” beyond the bounds of pain and pleasure; though it is clear that their most acute thrill is enforcing the rules.
The moral role of the Cenobite at first appears to be difficult to pin down by the film’s standards. Though in isolation it’s more of a hybrid of recognizable authority figures. The Cenobite is part cop, part judge, part priest, part concierge, and part chaperone. It provides a service, it pursues anyone who breaks the terms of service, and condemns those they apprehend in the pursuit. Barker’s dungeon master conception of the Cenobite was provocative on its own at the time of Hellraiser’s release. It endures today through its flexibility, its force, and its restraint.
The most important horror totem Barker smashed was that of opportunistic killing. Through Hellraiser and Candyman, victimhood became an option rather than the outcome of caprice. Nothing would happen to you if you did not invite the monster into your life using the prescribed methods. Otherwise you were at the mercy of their agenda. Barker’s work is an echo of a punitive approach to horror initially articulated by The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tobe Hooper’s film illustrated the libertarian consequentialism that arises out of disrespecting the property of others. The Candyman took a bottom-up, vengeance-based approach rooted in real-world injustice. The more abstract Cenobite functions on a top-down and broadly authoritarian position. There is no escape from accountability they exact, and it will be exacted to the most reasonable extent the Cenobite’s abilities allow. Stripped completely of its horror trappings, the Cenobite’s utopian appeal shines more brightly. Its binding, uncompromising authority need not function exclusively in a separate dimension requiring a safe word.
Not that implications of normalizing the Cenobite in any context can be so easily anticipated. Horror, being the most reliable barometer of moral hygiene, could not be more disinclined to a punitive purpose. Barker’s hard-edged vision has eroded somewhat against the spread of the more subjective, therapeutic style of Mike Flanagan, wherein the horror is not the judge condemning but the wound to be healed or the conduit toward self-improvement. Therapeutic horror is punitive horror’s reflection, creating its own utopian ideal, the Good Person, and working towards closure, albeit the closure you seek rather than the closure you bring upon yourself.
How a shift from therapy to punishment happens or can be made to happen is unclear. And to say that one style will one day be rejected in favor of its opposite may be the wrong way to think about it. Just as the film’s subsequent mythology showed that a person could transform into a Cenobite, a Cenobite is easily transferable in the other direction, in whatever form you think it fit to take. If the Cenobite is already a hybrid, what is to stop it from going one hybrid further or many variations thereof—say a programmer, a podcaster, or a social worker? Pinhead can easily become, and may always have been, a Good Person.