Nonetheless, the emphasis Barker places on the Gothic in Hellraiser’s narrative construction thus makes the body horror present in the film as indicative of a sociocultural critique of hegemonic gender norms that specifically highlights how domestic spaces that adhere to heteronormative patriarchal ontologies produce abject bodies. Hogle suggests that, since Gothic comes to signify such a wide range of implicit meanings, the Gothic should be understood as a “mode- a set of often-linked elements rather than a fixed genre” like Barker’s definition of Gothic as a style of horror fiction suggests (3).

Per Nick Groom, Gothic as a signifier “risks being emptied or nullified as a meaningful term” because this signifier has evolved into “an umbrella term for transgression, marginalization, and ‘otherness’” (xiv-xv).

it’s this family tragedy, family drama, with these things up in the attic, the bats in the belfry.” Echoing Bradley, Barker remarks in the introduction to Hellraiser Chronicles that Hellraiser “is essentially ‘Gothic’ in tone,” “a style of horror fiction which shuns pseudo-scientific or psychological explanations in favour of poetic or magical thinking” (12).īarker’s definition of Gothic aesthetic is not ubiquitous amongst scholarly approaches to the Gothic mode. As Doug Bradley, the actor who plays Pinhead in the first eight movies of the Hellraiser franchise, observes, Hellraiser “has elements of a slasher movie about it but it’s not that… In a lot of ways Hellraiser is a Gothic horror film…. Angels to Others.” Although Hellraiser, as a series, is notorious for its significant drop in quality following its first film- of the ten films in the series, the first Hellraiser is the only entry not to be rated as rotten on Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregator- Clive Barker’s original Hellraiser, an adaptation of his 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, is a multilayered film that skirts the horror genre by focusing on a plot that forgoes the slasher formula prominent in horror cinema during Hellraiser’s initial release in favor of a Gothic family drama. Released in 1987, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser remains one of the most significant horror films of its decade, introducing into a Transatlantic horror lexicon Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites, extradimensional beings the film describes as “Explorers in the further regions of experience. The interplay that occurs in the first Hellraiser film between gendered bodies, domestic spaces, and abjection-e.g., an affect based upon apprehension and revulsion (Kristeva 1)-provides a critique of traditional Western gender norms that synonymizes patriarchal-led households with the production of horror.

Hellraiser chronicles