Review of Hellraiser (1987) by Al M — 04 Nov 2010

Hellraiser remains one of the great classics of horror cinema. Clive Barker personally direct this faithful adaptation of his novel, The Hellbound Heart, and the results are spectacularly horrific. Hellraiser is a profound exploration of desire and pleasure--in essence, it concerns what Jacques Lacan termed jouissance, the state in which pleasure and pain slide into one another.

Hellraiser is about pushing beyond the pleasure principle. In fact, Hellraiser is almost biblical or mythical because it concerns eating from the tree of knowledge or the opening of Pandora's box.

Hellraiser is a Faustian story of our desire for knowledge and the forbidden; indeed, it is Lacanian once again in its depiction of desire. Desire represents nothing more than the desire for desire itself.

When one has pushed beyond all the limits in physical world, then one comes face to face with desire itself as an urge to taste the forbidden and unknowable. Aside from its deeper content, Hellraiser also functions a perfectly gruesome, supernatural horror film in which humankind comes face to face with the legions of hell.

Still today, Hellraiser features some of the most memorably brutal scenes in horror film history that simultaneously churn the gut and stimulate the mind. Artfully directed and conceived, Hellraiser remains a masterpiece of horror cinema that will continue to influence films for decades to come.