The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (13 page)

And the fact that
Hellraiser
won Le Grand Prix de la Section Peur at the sixteenth Fantasy Film Festival only added to its credibility. But from a financial perspective, which is something Hollywood takes more notice of than the written word,
Hellraiser
netted approximately $14,564,000 domestically and overall generated revenues of $30 million on its release.
²
It made Barker a major player and saw offers heading his way to direct the third film in the
Alien
saga, his response to which was, why would anyone want to make the third in any franchise? He wasn’t even interested in helming the second in his own movie series. That would be the territory of two men, two men who would take us even further into Hell, and bring us back again.

6

TO HELL AND BACK

Even before the official release of
Hellraiser
there had been talk of a sequel. In fact, it was following early screenings of the movie at Cannes in 1987 that Barker and producer Chris Figg first pitched the notion of
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
to New World. Said Barker at the time, “We proved our point with
Hellraiser
.... We thought New World would only give novices enough money for one haunted house and no sets and it turned out to be true. There were clearly many questions left unanswered by the film which we couldn’t do the first time around as we didn’t have the budget. The sequel was conceived with this in mind.... In many ways I see
Hellbound
as an advance from the teaser trailer that was
Hellraiser
.”
¹

Unfortunately, promotional commitments to the first film as well as for his next novel,
Weaveworld
, meant that Barker had time neither to write nor direct this. Instead he would settle for executive producer status, which would allow him to oversee the production but still maintain a reasonable distance from it. By this time, Barker and Figg had also founded Film Futures, seemingly tailor-made for this purpose. As Figg explained, “We set up Film Futures so Clive could executive produce, write plot synopses and supervise projects. Directors can get branded all too easily and neither of us wanted that to happen with Clive’s film career.”
²
Reading between the lines, one might speculate that, with the move into more fantasy-related fiction, Barker was attempting to escape the trap of being pigeon-holed as simply a horror writer and director, something a follow-up horror movie so soon would further compound. But at the same time the
Hellraiser
franchise was fundamentally his baby, so he was loathe to entrust it to just anybody.

The first person he turned to, therefore, was his old friend from the Dog Company, Peter Atkins. Atkins and Barker first met in 1974 when the former was only eighteen years old and had just finished his A-Levels—with an aim to go on to university the following autumn. Atkins was waiting in Allerton library, Liverpool, for his friend, Graham Bickley, who’d promised to introduce him to someone on Atkins’ wavelength. “You’re very alike,” Bickley had told him, “you both read books.”
³

While he was waiting, Atkins actually bumped into this mystery person. His first impressions were not entirely favorable: “I saw an example of the type I’d learned to dismiss as the Would-Be Russian Poet—collarless shirt, tatty trousers, little wire-framed glasses, and a very embryonic beard. He needed only the long, black greatcoat and the volume of Pushkin to fit my arrogant preconception completely.”
⁴
Atkins, himself dressed like a stereotypical musician, was gigging in bars with his school rock band. When Graham arrived, he introduced Atkins to the stranger, who turned out to be Clive Barker. Within an hour of meeting Barker, Atkins had already met the rest of his fledgling theater company and a week later he was preparing to work with them for the duration of the summer.

This time would be a revelation for Atkins, opening his eyes to the creative process:

“You grow up in a working-class situation in a depressed industrial town like Liverpool and one always thought that the artistic life was something other people did. And Clive was very good—without lecturing or trying to make cod speeches about doing this stuff—he simply seemed to offer an example that, my God, actually you can do this. It’s just up to you. If you want to try this there aren’t any rules, you don’t have to pass an exam, you can just start doing theater, you can start making movies, you can start writing, you can start drawing, painting, whatever.”
⁵

Abandoning his plans to become a teacher, Atkins pitched in with the group, acting in plays, and starring as the lead in
The Forbidden
: “In the same kind of arrogant assumption that we could make world-class theater on no money, we decided we could probably make world-class cinema on no money, too.”
⁶
It was Atkins’ first, but far from his last taste of making films.

Atkins was with the Dog Company for five years, then for about five years he followed his childhood dream of trying to make it with his band, The Chase. Although they never scored it big with a record contract, they were able to make a living playing regularly at pubs and clubs. “After the acting and music,” explained Atkins once, “I turned thirty, and mid-life crisis hit. It was kind of financial and directional. In a way I had lived all my twenties for the pleasure principle.”
⁷

The music wasn’t really satisfying him anymore and so Atkins returned to writing, something he had dabbled in before but never pursued aggressively. He produced some short stories and then a novella called
The Vampires of Summer
, which he showed to Barker. As a consequence, his old friend rang him in July 1987 and asked if he’d ever written a screenplay. Atkins replied that he hadn’t but having been a cinephile all his life would like to try. Barker then encouraged Atkins to lie through his teeth at a dinner meeting in London with himself and Chris Figg, and suddenly he was being offered the job of scripting the next installment in the
Hellraiser
saga.

Following the meeting, Barker took Atkins back to his flat and, with the help of a bottle of bourbon, they came up with an outline for a story. Ideas were thrown back and forth, but what was paramount in Barker’s mind was that this movie should show a lot more of the
Hellraiser
universe than they were able to before. “It would be great to get some sense of mythology,” commented Barker later, “I’m very much into pulling the elements of myth together. I would be pleased if people could get a sense of the history of the Cenobites and this puzzle box.”
⁸
The mythology would also include a reason for the Cenobites’ existence, including the god that they serve. Barker was very keen on making Julia the central figure this time, though, someone who might even take the series into a third chapter.

Once the pair had a basic plotline, Atkins was sent to a hotel for the next two and a half weeks to write a first draft screenplay, armed with a copy of
Hellraiser
to help him lay it out correctly. During this time, both Barker and Figg showed a great deal of trust in the new writer; Barker avoided pressuring Atkins if he saw him out socially, and Figg would only ring to ask in passing what page Atkins was on. Remarkably, he delivered a 95 page screenplay on time, and one which showed he had a natural talent for it.

The story picks up just hours after the events in
Hellraiser
, with Kirsty in a psychiatric hospital. She tries to convince the authorities of what has happened, but the only person who will listen is the institute’s director, Dr. Malahide. Unfortunately for her, Malahide is an occultist, desperate not only to open up the doorway to Hell again, but also to bring back a guide in the form of Julia by spilling blood on the mattress where she died. Add to this a young female patient called Tiffany who is obsessed with puzzles and Kirsty’s compulsion to save her father from Hell, and you have the crux of what would eventually become
Hellbound
.

There was an agonizing three day wait for Atkins while both Barker and Figg read what he had done, but they were extremely pleased and had only made a few notes about changes. Typically—considering what he wanted to do with Julia and Frank’s lovemaking scene—Barker wanted to take the sex between the doctor and skinless Julia even further, alluding to what he called “flayed fucking.” Not even Frank and Julia had attempted this. Atkins did the rewrites back in Liverpool, which led to some embarrassing phone conversations dictating the skinless sex scenes to Figg’s assistant, Louise Rosner, over a rather bad line.

In the meantime, the search for a director had been taking place, something that wouldn’t prove as hard as Barker or Figg initially thought. Seven weeks into the shooting of
Hellraiser
New World had sent one of their employees to oversee the final stages of filming, and of postproduction. At first it was something Barker resented and he was prepared to fight this executive tooth and nail if he caused trouble. Thankfully, nothing could have been further from the truth. The person they sent was Tony Randel, who grew up watching late night horror films and whose favorite films included
Rosemary’s Baby
and
Invaders from Mars
. He’d started out in the film industry toiling away in the mailroom at the old New World (when Roger Corman had been in charge) and worked his way up to special effects editing, soon moving on to trailer and feature editing. Randel eventually became postproduction chief for Corman’s new Millennium company before rejoining New World and working on the rejigging of the Japanese perennial,
Godzilla
, for a Western audience.

When they met for the first time, he and Barker immediately hit it off and Randel was very supportive of the kind of film they were trying to make. He persuaded New World not to cut back on the usage of the Frank character (their reasoning being that the main villain shouldn’t be seen as much as he is), brought Christopher Young on board, and helped out in the editing room. In addition, Randel suggested the shots of Kirsty down by the docks, to open up the film a little bit more, and even secured the £15,000 needed to shoot this scene. His help earned him not only a special thank you on the credits, but also the respect of Barker and Figg, all of which was leading, inevitably, inexorably, to Randel taking over the reins for the sequel: “Having done so much work on the original film I had become very familiar with the material, and had an affinity for it.... I had come to Chris and Clive and said I would like to do the sequel, because they’d actually hired or wanted another director to come onboard before but he had to drop out, and once he’d dropped out I said I think I’d like to come in and give it a whirl.”
⁹

As a consequence, the first draft of the script was passed on for New World’s executives and the new director of
Hellbound
to read on August 8, 1987. The sense of urgency Atkins had experienced suddenly dissipated, as it took them until October 7 to get back to the team. Atkins was brought to London again to work on a second draft, but this time Randel was also flying in from Los Angeles to collaborate. Obviously, never having met Randel, Atkins was worried about how they might get on. “I had very little experience of the film world,” said Atkins, “so my assumption when I heard that a former executive of New World Pictures is coming in to direct the movie and you’re going to work together, was I pictured a guy at least ten years older than me in a three-piece suit. And Tony, having read the script, apparently pictured a multi-pierced tattooed punk.”
¹⁰
It must have been like déjà vu, being back in that library not knowing what to expect.

Director of
Hellbound: Hellraiser II
, Tony Randel (photograph credit: Colin Fletcher).

Randel did little to calm Atkins’ fears when he rang him from his—more expensive—hotel to discuss the script: “Dr. Malahide. That’s a great name.... I’m going to change it.” Atkins’ reaction was, “My God, all the stories are true. These directors, they fuck with you.”
¹¹
Upon meeting an hour later they discovered that none of their preconceptions were correct. The pair got on famously—and have in fact been firm friends ever since. Randel even introduced Atkins to the wonders of word processing on his own portable Compaq. (Atkins’ first draft had been pounded out on a Smith Corona typewriter).

Naturally Randel brought some of his own ideas to the table, but the main concern was from New World, who wanted a whole new third act. The story points of the ending, such as Julia’s revenge on Frank, the reversion of the Cenobites to their human forms and Kirsty and Tiffany’s escape, would remain, but there was to be more made of the hospital sequences, including a chase sequence that resulted in one of the major myths about
Hellbound
. In this scene Pinhead and the Female Cenobite appear in full surgical regalia, and, as Atkins told
Dread
magazine some years later, “The girls got in an elevator, went downstairs, real creepy atmosphere. Two surgeons arrived and questioned them. As they were talking, the surgeons suddenly turned into Pinhead and the Female Cenobite.... It could have been a good scene. Then the Cenobites chased the girls.”
¹²
Sadly, due to technical difficulties when filming, the scene ended up looking quite bad. This didn’t stop the marketing department placing pictures of Pinhead and the Female Cenobite in their gowns on video covers, causing much speculation about the deleted scenes.