‘No tears please – it’s a waste of good suffering!” Thirty years on, this rerelease of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser amplifies its mostly intentional black-comic horror.
Clare Higgins gives an entertainingly queenly performance as Julia, who comes back with new husband Larry (Andrew Robinson) to live in his late mother’s creepy old London house, only to find it secretly contains the mangled, zombified body of Larry’s brother – and her former lover – Frank (Sean Chapman), who has sold his soul to netherworldly demons, summoned with an occult antique box.
These demons include the iconic and weirdly elegant pale man with the spikes coming out of his head. But she still fancies the pants off this grotesque Vesalian flayed monster and agrees to tempt men to the house during the day to let Frank kill them and feast on the blood that will return him to full humanity.
Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.
