The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy by Paul Kane Page A

unexplored corridors in the hope of finding, ultimately, the final solution. We have to see, we have to know.
    It prefigures beautifully the unseen and unexplored corridors he will soon be venturing down in Hell.
    Channard’s underground cells, where he keeps the particularly gruesome cases, come with their own slots in the doors that he can peer through—and we, too, are given a sample of what’s inside. Later, when he is walking with Julia along those corridors of Hell, we can see the similarities between his cells and the private purgatories prisoners are kept in. Channard once again has the opportunity to look through an opening and sees male and female figures writhing with a mixture of pleasure and pain. In a scene dropped from the second draft Channard was also to be granted a glimpse of Browning trapped in another cell at this point, the insects still crawling all over him.
    Channard loves to witness the anguish of others, but always surreptitiously, without them knowing. It is his very own secret self. In contrast, Kyle—who is everything Channard isn’t—kind, sympathetic and helpful—almost throws up when he is forced to watch Browning’s demise from behind a curtain in Channard’s house. A couple of glances are all he can take, and even these disturb him so much he has to escape as soon as possible. By the time he returns to the house, he has built up some nerve and compels himself to look inside the slaughter room, ignoring the warning from Julia that, “It’s just terrible.” And this curiosity will lead to his death when, after he sees the corpses, Julia kisses him in a parody of the kiss she and Frank once shared.
    The “seeing” motif recurs with other characters as well. The first shot of Kirsty is a close-up of her eye, pulling out and slowly rotating as if to emphasize that she has already seen far too much, but there is more to come. Julia, also, when we first see her on the mattress, is identified by her eyes. Filmed in reverse, the stark whiteness against the red of her skinless body is both surreal and potent. Like Kirsty, she is no longer the person she once was; Julia, too, has seen things no one should ever have to see, the sights Pinhead spoke of in the first Hellraiser . Even when she is wrapped in bandages, it is her eyes that stand out, and she can’t help raising Channard’s finger to one orb, trailing it through the blood beneath.
    Even the Chatterer Cenobite receives a pair of eyes in the time between our earliest meeting with him and our last. This was meant to be bridged by a scene showing him being altered, but as confusing as it is for viewers it does visually compound what the Cenobites go through when Kirsty tells them the truth, opening their eyes metaphorically to their past.
    And it is not just the Cenobites who are shown a reflection of who they actually are. Mirrors may not be a means to travel to the Underworld, as they are in Cocteau’s Orphée , but they do feature heavily in Hellbound . Julia smashes the oval mirror in Channard’s lounge when she sees herself for the first time (itself a re-creation of the Princess smashing a looking glass when Cégeste dies in Orphée ). Is it because she has lost her beauty or because the outside now more closely resembles the inside? Once dressed and mummified, she is able to cope better with her reflection, recognizing her potential as a sexual being again, a scene that was initially written with her standing and looking at herself in a full-length mirror in Channard’s bedroom.
    It is via a mirror in Hell that Kirsty realizes she has been duped into traveling there. On a dressing table she sees a repetition of the words her father supposedly wrote on the wall, “I am in Hell, Help me,” but this time they are penned in lipstick. The association is clear: that it was the womanizer Frank who called to her using the mirror. Only now it shows her who he really is, if she didn’t know already.
    Tiffany is also the victim of