The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy (28 page)

The Key to Dreams

Dreams are an essential element in
Hellraiser III
. As we have seen, they hold the key to bringing Elliott and Joey together, but dreams hold a much greater significance for the characters than simply as doorways. Joey’s nightmare is a manifestation of the failure in her own working life, her inability to break through the glass ceiling in the television industry. Her true dream is to be a reporter, or have her own TV show. At the start we see her in the hospital waiting for a story to come up, but her first gig which is not reporting about “kindergarten kids”—once again linking her to childhood and children—seems to have coincided with the only day when nothing newsworthy is occurring. Pictured through the blue viewfinder, a color which prefigures her later dealings with the Cenobites, she bemoans: “It’s as if death took a holiday. It’s a mystery to me. A mystery to me how those assholes at assignment knew it.” As Doc points out, there’s no way they could have bought off every accident victim in the city—it is just a case of her bad luck again. To add insult to injury, Doc is called away just before the man with the chains arrives, so there is no video evidence of what happens in the emergency room. This further compounds Joey’s failure, but it does pique her curiosity enough to follow up the lead.

“The story of your life,” Doc says before he leaves, “could be just around the corner.” The story of Joey’s life up to now has been the story of many women’s lives in the late ’80s and early ’90s, a battle in itself for recognition in their chosen fields. We’re given a sense of this when she’s back at the studio, and co-worker Brad is commenting on her technique after a recent TV appearance. This seems to involve Joey showing more thigh so she’ll get noticed. In an early script this sexism is even more explicit:

Brad: What, you think I’m kidding? I guarantee it. An inch more flank. Boys upstairs get hot. Bingo, you’re an anchorwoman.

JOEY: (to herself) Jesus Christ ...

DOC: Ah, give her a break.

DOC leans over and stops the tape.

BRAD (to DOC): What’s with you?

He swivels his chair round to face JOEY.

BRAD: C’mon, Joey. I’m just trying to help you climb that ladder.

JOEY: Yeah? The one to my bedroom window?
³

The wonderful line, “I want to do it the right way. Tight stories, not tight skirts,” survived intact, though. But the irony is Joey spouts this while wearing the shortest and tightest of skirts herself. It could be read that Joey already knows this is one way to make her dream a reality, and in spite of her protestations is just playing the game. Or were the makers of the movie just as guilty of this as Brad?—while they had Terry Farrell on hand they would exploit how she looked to please the horror audience? Certainly the S&M shots of her towards the end, strapped up in leather, are more for titillation value than anything else.

That said, Joey definitely follows in the tradition of feisty female reporters from the past, the most famous of which has to be Superman’s love interest, Lois Lane—brilliantly rendered by Margot Kidder in the Richard Donner movie version from 1978. But the closest pure cinematic comparison must be Jane Fonda’s character of Kimberley Wells from
The China Syndrome
(James Bridges, 1979). Wells, too, is a TV reporter hoping to advance from cutesy features to hard news, and she even has her own Doc in the shape of Michael Douglas’s Richard Adams, whom she hires for a feature on nuclear energy. Like Joey, they just happen to be in the right place at the right time (depending on your perspective) when a crisis arises. It must say something about how the world has changed that this is exactly the predicament a man finds himself in as part of the premise for the recent
Bruce Almighty
(Tom Shadyac, 2003). Here Jim Carrey is the lowly TV reporter so desperate to distance himself from giant cookie stories that he uses the powers God (Morgan Freeman) has given him in order to
create
news, such as a meteor crashing just over his shoulder.

As the first ending stood, Joey’s dreams—in the real world and in other dimensions—actually do come true. But the price she has to pay is allegiance to Leviathan. In the version that was made, Joey finds the “story of her life” but it gets away from her again. She thwarts the Pseudo Cenobites by solving the Lament Configuration, and sends Pinhead back to Hell. But there is no evidence, no footage to back up her story. She ends the film in exactly the same position, no further along the road to becoming that serious television reporter. So while victorious in one way, in another way Joey still remains a failure.

Elliott’s dreams are, like Joey’s, that of a war-torn landscape and a past he’d rather forget. Yet, although this is never stated outright, it is obvious he also yearns to return to his human state—much of this a tribute to Bradley’s acting. Elliott’s most immediate concern is to take back control of the Pinhead husk and prevent its rampage. But below the surface is a pining for love, for understanding—and companionship. The close-up when he shakes Joey’s hand signifies a meeting of kindred spirits—literally. “Brave girl,” he says admiringly, “probably never shaken hands with a ghost before, am I right?” But Joey is a ghost herself, like the Pseudo Cenobites a shadow of the woman she was and still could be. In her long, white nightdress, she unquestionably looks the part, and her haunting of the Vietnam scene denotes that she has much in common with Pinhead’s alter ego. Elliott’s haunts are the trenches, and the particular moment he solves the puzzle box in India. Frozen in time, a crossed-legged soldier sits holding the Lament Configuration, leaving his more mobile counterpart to wander through the dream limbo.

The all important Pillar of Souls under construction (courtesy Gary J. Tunnicliffe).

We are not shown J.P. Monroe’s dreams as such, but one suspects they would revolve around power, sex, death and art. His bizarre and very dark taste in ornaments and paintings is what draws him to the pillar of souls—his club a haven for all manner of weird sculptures, like a baby covered in barbed wire and a hand protruding from a wall holding a heart (which it later crushes). The picture in his bedroom that Sandy admires just after their tryst depicts a blinded man screaming with his scalp opened up. “It’s really ... really dark,” she comments. (In the original script Atkins describes another painting here, called “Biker Crucifixion,” a Hell’s Angel stripped to the waist and tied to a tree with barbed wire.) Moments later she is skinned and sucked into the pillar by Pinhead who, in his speech to Monroe, paints a much more vivid portrait. “You enjoyed the girl,” states Pinhead matter of factly. “Yes,” Monroe replies. “Good. So did I. And that’s all.”

To Monroe she is one in a long line of women he has used for sex, trading on his station as owner of the club. For Pinhead she was nourishment. There is little to choose between each. “If you have a quality, let it define you, whatever it is,” Pinhead continues, repeating the lines Monroe used to seduce Sandy. He refers to Monroe’s art collection as “tawdry representations.” What Pinhead is offering is the ability and imagination to use “the body as canvas, the body as clay. Your will, and mine as the brush and the knife.” He knows that J.P. murdered his own parents with the gun he possesses, to gain their wealth and power. Just as the club owner seduced Sandy, Pinhead does much the same to Monroe with his promises of even greater supremacy and the answer to his wildest dreams: “There is a place at my right hand for you, Monroe. For a man of your tastes. Tastes I can help you to indulge. Flesh. Power. Dominion.” As for any qualms he might have, Pinhead assures him: “There is no good, there is no evil, Monroe. There is only the flesh, and the patterns to which we submit it.” And the first target of their attentions is another one of Monroe’s conquests: Terri.

Terri is the odd one out in
Hell on Earth
in that she doesn’t dream at all, not in the common sense of the word anyway. When Joey explains about her nightmares, Terri discloses, “I don’t dream; never have.... Maybe it’d help if I slept sometime.... Just kidding.” It’s a source of concern and also of envy. “No, so it’s always neat for me to hear about dreams. I’m jealous. It’s like everyone has another world except for me, you know? Be nice to see something else. Have a nighttime world.” As he does with Monroe, Pinhead uses this to control Terri. When Monroe’s attempts to sacrifice Terri to the pillar go awry, Pinhead must talk her into drawing closer. She is poised at the door to Monroe’s apartment, struggling with the locks, as he utters his first persuasions: “Do you know where you are? You are at the door to dreams, Terri.” It is what she has always wanted and his enticement causes her to forget all ideas of escape.

“Now, there are two keys in this room,” Pinhead continues, “One is in the pocket of this fool. You could take it out without me reaching you—probably. You could use it to let yourself back into the world you know. The world you’ve always known; banal, dreamless, hopeless....” “And ... the other?” asks Terri. “The other is the key to dreams, to black miracles, dark wonders. Another life of unknown pleasures. It’s yours. Complete the pattern. Solve the puzzle. Turn the key.” For someone who has never known such a life, it is an offer hard to refuse. In a reversal of what might have happened, Terri gives Monroe to Pinhead and consequently frees him from the Pillar of Souls. He holds out his hand, ready to give Terri her reward: to give her that nighttime life she spoke of—as a Cenobite who smokes through her throat and whose skin is pulled back so far up her arms it looks like she is wearing bloody gloves. “I can dream now,” she tells Joey at the building site. “Oh, you wouldn’t believe what I can dream of now....”

But these are not Terri’s only dreams. Though firmly rooted in reality, her own dreams are about belonging, and someone who will love her. At first she believed she had this with Monroe. We can imagine him going through the same pantomime with Terri that he did with Sandy, offering her a rose, smooth talking her into bed. And just when she thought she’d found what she was looking for, he abandoned her just like everyone seemingly has done in the past. As she elucidates to Joey, “All I know is—this is it for me. Just me, my bag, and a series of shithead boyfriends.” Her background is kept deliberately vague, but from the clues we are given we can easily piece it together. Terri is comfortable on the streets; she is able to break into the back of The Pyramid Gallery (“Five minutes, we’re browsing”). She looks the part of a punk—or even a Goth—but underneath there is a loneliness reflected in her expression and eyes.

She’s never been in a home like Joey’s before, as her excited reaction shows: “This is great. And it’s yours? You, like, own it? ... I’ve never owned anything. I haven’t even had a room of my own since I was fifteen years old.” Terri is over the moon when Joey lets her stay, so much so that she attempts to cook her breakfast. This goes horribly wrong, naturally, and the kitchen ends up looking like a war zone of its own. “Can I ask? Is it always this ... exploratory?” Joey ventures. “Ha! I don’t know yet. First time. I’m a kitchen virgin.” She can’t cook, can barely look after herself, let alone anyone else. Atkins’ scene about the wounded bird would only have driven home the message that Terri would give anything to stay with Joey, to be her friend. It is a dream that Pinhead shatters to lure her back to the club, leaving a false message at Joey’s about a nonexistent job in Monterey. Terri assumes she has just been using her, like everyone else, and flees the apartment. A scene only recently reinstated shows her sitting in a café with a cup of coffee, staring at the couples having intimate conversations. It is then that she sees a reflection of Monroe’s face in her coffee and we know her fate is sealed.

The final important dream is, of course, Pinhead’s. It is to be free from the Pillar, free from Elliott—his “conscience”—from Leviathan and all his duties. Free to do whatever he wants on Earth. Given the opportunity he will shape the planet in his own image, creating a Pseudo Hell. “My evil was too strong,” Elliott tells Joey. “It hid, waited.... The shell of the beast has been fleshed. What I was is out there in your world, unbound. Unstoppable.” Only Joey stands in his way.

Devil’s Radio

It is wholly appropriate that a film which used such innovative special effects should also have a technological theme running through it. The most prominent examples of this all have a link to communication devices; the first featured in
Hellbound
as well, right at the very start. Instead of drawing us through the circle on the side of the Lament Configuration box—as Barker did in
Hellraiser
—we enter the movie via an old-fashioned radio dial with a needle pointing to various cities of the world, London, Paris, Nice, Moscow, Oslo—a hint that the story is about to open up globally.
⁴
The voice of a BBC World Service announcer filters through as we pan along a table with Elliott’s belongings on top: the jacket of an English army officer in India, a gun in a holster, a fly brush and helmet. This radio was used once again in
Hellraiser III
in the scene where Joey wakes and hears a transmission coming from downstairs. She takes it out of her wardrobe and turns the knob, tuning in to Elliott’s signal, which instructs her to go to the huge window of her apartment. But as an audience, we see that the radio is not even plugged in. Like the Limousine and Ham radios in
Orphée
, it is a means by which to convey information across dimensions or even between the living and the dead. And like the radio in the unmade sequence with the Evangelist and Kirsty in
Hellraiser
it can be used to issue warnings.