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Hellraiser Reunion
Clive Barker, Doug Bradley and Ashley Laurence return to talk horror. By
Rob Vaux
April 20, 2009
A Hellraiser Reunion at this year's Fangoria Weekend of Horror Event(2009).
© Mania.com/Robert Trate
One of the high points of this weekend's Fangoria Weekend of Horrors was a reunion of horror Renaissance Man Clive Barker with the stars of his first film. 1987's Hellraiser--made on a shoestring and released by a now-defunct company--became a huge hit, spawning several sequels and cementing Barker's reputation as a one-of-a-kind talent. He was joined on stage by Doug Bradley, who played the monstrous Cenobite Pinhead, and Ashley Laurence, who played the film's heroine Kirsty. A transcript of some of their comments follows.
Question: How did Doug get chosen for the role?
Clive Barker: I went to Doug with two roles for the movie. One of them was this rather nice figure and one of them was this demon, who I hadn't named yet. Doug said, "I'll take the demon." Doug had played the Devil for me before in a play called History of the Devil, and it seemed right that he would do it. The rest is really the folks out there [gestures to the audience]. They were the ones telling us what worked. You have to trust the people you're making the work for, to give them your best and hope they like it.
Q: You two had met in high school?
Doug Bradley: Yes. I was, I think, fourteen or fifteen and I'd been aware of Clive around school. Even then, he was writing, directing, starring in and designing the posters for his own plays. Our headmaster used to give Clive permission to take over the school hall for a week and do what he wanted. This was the same teacher who had, about ten years earlier, given another pupil permission to form a skiffle band. I believe that pupil went on to have a bit of a career in the music industry. His name… it escapes me now… let me see if I can remember… oh yes, John Lennon! I always thought Mr. Popjoy went to sleep easily at night, knowing that he had helped launched the careers of John Lennon and Clive Barker.
Q: What was your first reaction when you met Clive?
CB: "What a homo." [Laughter.]
DB: You're gay?!
CB: Say nothing.
DB: This guy is the most extraordinary human being I've ever met, basically, and from the day that I went into those school play rehearsals, my life has been turned around. People ask me what Clive's like, and they're looking for all the dark, twisted, fucked-up stuff. What I always stress to people is how much fun he can be. The sense of the ridiculous. The wit. The constant laughter.
Q: Was that how the process of shooting Hellraiser went? Light?
CB: I hope so. We were all sort of in it together. We were making this movie with $900,000 of American money, and we'd never made a movie before. We'd made 8mm pictures and 16mm pictures before.
DB: With one light.
CB: With one light. It was Ashley's first movie and Doug's first movie. I hadn't been on a real film set, I hadn't written a real script, and I think if the picture has merit, it's because we were too ignorant to have a sense of ourselves. Sometimes you can get self conscious, and we weren't self conscious. We didn't know that there were rules to break.
Ashley Laurence: Absolutely. There weren't any projected ramifications, or projected aspirations. It was just doing it from the integrity of what we wanted to do.
CB: And we never tested the movie, or went through any of that nonsense that movies now have to go through, where you test it and make cuts and edits and so on.
AL: Though there was that sex scene.
CB: Yes, we had to cut one sex scene, but that wasn't because of the audience. I think the audience would have liked the sex scene.
AL: They would have loved the sex scene.
CB: We shot the sex scene and sent it over to New World, and they said "this is wonderful, but we can use none of it."
AL: "But can we keep it?"
CB: We never saw that footage ever again. Someone has that footage somewhere; it disappeared. In any case, we had to re-shoot it because the MPAA was going to prevent us from releasing it. Because of the violence in the sex scene: spanking. This is a movie in which we have people getting pulled apart by hooks, but the spanking scene was "violence." The one comment they had before the movie went out was that we could have two consecutive buttock thrusts, but not a third.
DB: Are you allowed to cut away?
CB: Yes, but you can't have three in a row.
DB: I'll have to explain that to my wife when I get home. "Two is okay darling, but three is obscene."
CB: But still, we had a freedom then that we don't have now… at least in the United States. In Europe, you can still make movies like this. That may be why we're seeing a lot of good horror movies out of France and Spain these days. In Hollywood, the focus is all on remakes. We're going to see a remake of Hellraiser, and I'm working to watch over that as a sort of Godfather figure. But when [Harvey] Weinstein first approached me and said he was going to remake Hellraiser, I said, "Why? Was the first one not good enough?" There are people out there--probably people in the audience here--with imaginations and monsters in their heads and scripts in their hands who should be given a chance over the same old, same old. I still prefer the 1933 King Kong. And don't get me wrong: I think Peter Jackson's a genius, and I don't use that word lightly. I've seen The Lord of the Rings 10 or 12 times now. They're amazing movies. But I would prefer that he spent two years of his time making something we hadn't seen rather than remaking something we had. When a cinematic genius like Jackson comes along, or like Guillermo Del Toro, they're only on the planet for a certain amount of time. You want people of that kind of caliber to be using their talents to create new things.
DB: My feeling--and this is from twenty years of meeting fans at conventions--is that you don't need a remake because there's a new generation finding Hellraiser for the first time all the time. It hits them right between the eyes, and in the pit of their stomach, and in the depths of their imagination just as much as it did for an audience twenty years ago. I don't have any sense that the movie has aged--okay, there's a degree of big hair and padded shoulders, but the genius of what Clive did was with the Cenobites. You could take the Cenobites out of Hellraiser and you would have-
AL: A well, well acted film! [Laughter.]
DB: A rather dull but fairly serviceable slasher movie. But the Cenobites in the movie are ageless and timeless. That, I think, is Clive's stroke of genius in the movie. If you go back to it in thirty, forty, fifty years time, they will not have aged. They're out of time. And the hell which is established in the film isn't seen to be one out of Christianity. Satan, Lucifer, the Devil, they were never mentioned. Hell in this movie is seen to be a private place.
CB: There's a little place in the heart of even the most hardened atheist: a spot that fears hell and hopes for heaven. My belief is we make our own hells and we make our own heavens. That comes out of William Blake: make your own rules or be a slave to another man's. The same could be said of heaven and hell. Make your own hell, make your own heaven, or be a slave to another man's. We are more in charge of our post-mortem destinies than perhaps we think. Whatever lies ahead of us beyond the grave, it won't be forced upon us by an act of some greater creator. The greater creator is in all of us. We are guiding ourselves towards that next adventure. Step by step. Breath by breath.
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Sweet interview. The first two Hellraisers are classics. They are above and beyond most entries in the horror genre. This is very cool to have Kristy, Pinhead, and Clive together. Sorry the spankings were cut, unless it was Frank being spanked!
[INSERT STANDARD REMAKE RANT HERE]
On the other hand, hopefully the movie will stay true to the story of the original, enhance the cenobite experience with superior FX tech, and lastly offer something new to Hellraiser. It is a rich and full mythology -don't let them blow it Clive!