The Hellbound Heart
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The Hellbound Heart is a horror novella by Clive Barker. It was the basis for the movie Hellraiser. The novella, which had been unpublished at the time Barker adapted it for the screen, was brought out by HarperCollins in 1988 (reprinted by HarperTorch in 1991) after the success of the movie. It retains the gory, visceral style that Barker introduced in his series of collected short stories, The Books of Blood, and distorts clichéd narrative devices to depict ordinary people drawn into a confrontation with spiritual terror beyond traditional definitions of morality.
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[edit] Plot synopsis
The story, ostensibly about one man's experimentation with the occult in order to satisfy his jaded appetite for sexual pleasure, revolves around a tragic love tangle. Vaguely set on the outskirts of an unnamed English city, it concerns three members of the Cotton family: Frank; his younger brother, Rory; and Rory's wife, Julia, as well as Rory's long time friend Kirsty, who has long pined for him. Frank's pursuit of pleasure has trapped him in an extradimensional hell, and his brother's wife provides him the opportunity for escape. Frank's resurrection provides Julia with the opportunity for escape from the marriage she has quickly grown bored of. Rory, who naively adores his more worldly wife, becomes their innocent victim while Kirsty is drawn into this dangerous realm by her desire to protect him and show him the truth about Julia. Kirsty soon becomes the main character as she tries to save herself and Rory from the consequenses of what Frank has unleashed.
[edit] Plot summary
Frank is a traditional "bad boy". He is a career petty criminal with no interest in stable employment. He roams the world in search of his next score and in pursuit of greater and more extreme sexual delights, always one step ahead of the law or his creditors. Approaching thirty years of age, he feels life no longer worth living, his every desire yielding to ultimate disappointment, unable to find anyone whose passion matches his own. In various countries while travelling among others of his ilk, he hears rumors of a puzzle box, the Lemarchand Configuration, created by a French toymaker in the style of ancient Chinese puzzles. The box purportedly gives access to unimaginable pleasure. Unsure of what to expect but fixated on the possibilities of sexual heights beyond anything he has known, he performs the required rituals and solves the puzzle... and the fabric of the universe begins to unravel.
The box creates a "Schism", a doorway to another reality that touches ours. Frank gets a glimpse of impossible numbers of carrion birds and scenes of torture before the Schism is concealed. Through the Schism have arrived the Cenobites, hierophants of the Order of the Gash. These four ash-colored beings are mutilated, tattooed, scarified and pierced in horribly painful ways yet seem to delight in their disfigurement. As they question Frank as to his intent and desires, they promise sensual experiences beyond that known in this world. He gleefully submits to them, only to be overwhelmed by the blinding, deafening and excruciating intensity of his suddenly heightened senses. He begins to realize that he may have been deceived about the box or perhaps the Cenobites definition of "pleasure" does not match his own, when the sensory overload subsides and he is presented with the fourth Cenobite. Unlike her apparently genderless associates (who have vanished), the fourth one is visibly female, nude, with scarred genitalia. She perches on a mound of rotting severed heads and wears their tongues as an apron. Frank realizes that he has made a terrible mistake.
The story jumps forward a year, as Rory and his wife of four years are moving into the same house where Frank experimented with the Lemarchand box. The house was left to Frank and Rory by their grandmother; Rory is aware that Frank had stayed in the house for several weeks before disappearing again, and Rory now wants to renovate the place and make it a home. Rory is the prototypical "good boy", a hard-working wage earner and solid citizen. Julia is a great beauty whose every word and movement is graceful and charming, but inwardly she is petty and cold. The marriage is in trouble, but Rory is oblivious to the growing distance between himself and Julia. Julia, who had an intense and violent fling with Frank just days before her marriage, grows increasingly bored and annoyed with Rory and finds her thoughts returning to Frank.
Julia has nameless reservations about the house and finds the moving process frustrating. Her annoyance is further incensed by the frequent presence of Kirsty, an old friend of Rory.
Kirsty is the opposite of Julia. Plain and socially awkward but intelligent, she envies Julia's beauty and grace. Kirsty is also somewhat intimidated by Julia, and has harbored a crush on Rory for years.
Julia finds herself increasingly drawn to the shuttered upstairs front room. Although it is the best candidate for the master bedroom, Julia is disturbed yet strangely comforted by the room and refuses to let Rory move the bedroom furniture into it. Over time she finds herself obsessed with the room and spends much of her free time there, alone in the dark.
While making repairs to the house, Rory cuts himself badly and rushes to Julia for aid. He finds her in the upstairs front room. While she bandages the wound and dictates a visit to hospital, Rory spills a significant amount of blood on the floor. When they return from hospital, Julia finds no blood on the floor of the room.
When Julia investigates further, the fabric of reality thins and she is given a vision of Frank. He has regenerated a portion of his physical form from Rory's blood and his own semen (spilled during his initial interview with the Cenobites), but he is trapped between worlds and requires blood and flesh to complete his new body and return to this world. Initially revulsed, Julia finds herself driven by desire for another encounter with Frank. She finds that she will obligingly do things she would not have thought herself capable of, including murder. When Rory is at work, she lures businessmen to the house and kills them or delivers them to Frank, who devours their life energy and tissues. Julia's disgust and guilt over what she has done and the knowledge that Frank is conscious and in the house cause her to behave strangely around Rory. Fearful and confused, Rory asks Kirsty to check up on Julia the next day. Kirsty is met with rejection by Julia, who will not let her into the house. Kirsty interprets Julia's behaviour and appearance as signs that she is having an affair. The next day, Kirsty watches the house and sees Julia and an unknown man arrive and enter the house. While debating on how to break the news to Rory, Kirsty hears a scream within the house. She finds the back door unlocked and enters in time to see Frank devouring his victim. Frank corners her, but she finds the Lemarchand box in the upstairs front room and uses it as a weapon. Frank realises what she is found, recoils, and demands the box. Kirsty throws it out the window and escapes while Frank is distracted at the open window. She grabs the box from the front garden on her way out, and after running for several blocks she faints.
Kirsty awakes in hospital. The doctors do not know what happened to her, only that she was found on the street unconscious and clutching the Lemarchand box. They allow her to keep the box. Unable to deal with what she has just experienced and with no other distractions available to her, she begins manipulating the box. Blood encrusted in the normally invisible cracks in the box's surface enable her to solve it fairly quickly, and the lead Cenobite appears. It is prepared to take her to the other realm, but hesitates when it realises that she solved the puzzle by mistake and was not aware of the consequences. She offers Frank in exchange, and the Cenobite agrees. Kirsty leaves hospital with the Cenobite accompanying her invisibly and returns to the Cotton house.
There, she finds Julia and Rory. Julia denies anything out of the ordinary, but Rory, who is covered in blood, tells her that he knows about Frank and has killed him. He begs her to let him and Julia inform the authorities, which sets off Kirsty's suspicions. When "Rory" then uses an expression peculiar to Frank, Kirsty realises that the skinless corpse upstairs is Rory and that Frank is wearing his skin. Frank and Julia attempt to kill her, but Kirsty throws Julia off balance and Julia falls on Frank's knife. Rather than chasing Kirsty, Frank turns and devours Julia. Kirsty, trapped upstairs, wonders why the Cenobite has not taken Frank yet and surmises that it is confused by Rory's skin. Frank finds her hiding place and moves in for the kill, but Kirsty taunts him into speaking his own name, at which point the Cenobites reveal themselves. Their flaying hooks seize Frank, preventing him from delivering a killing stroke. He makes an obscene gesture with his tongue and the Cenobites rip him to pieces. Kirsty flees to the downstairs and finds Julia in the dining room, not quite dead, clothed in her wedding dress, her severed head lying in her lap and pleading for Kirsty's help. Where Julia's head should be is a flickering, blinding light from which issues the whisper, "I am the Engineer." The house shudders and groans and plaster begins falling from the ceiling. Kirsty flees into the street, but hearing no commotion behind her turns to look at the house. It is as it was, unmolested and quiet. Confused, she turns to leave and collides with a running stranger. She glimpses its flaming head before it vanishes utterly, and recognises it as the Engineer, who has returned the Lemarchand box — free of blood — into her hands. The faces of Frank and Julia squirm, distorted, over its black surface. Kirsty wonders if she is intended as the box's guardian, and if there are other such boxes, perhaps one that will let her see Rory one more time.
[edit] Differences between The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser
Readers discovering the novella after seeing the film adaptation and its sequels are often surprised by the subtle changes between the two iterations of the story.
- In the film, Frank's brother and Julia's husband is named Larry.
- In the novella, Frank is the older brother. In the film, Larry is older.
- Kirsty is Larry's teenaged daughter, not his same-aged friend. In the film, she is beautiful and vivacious, as opposed to the novella in which she is plain and retiring.
- The leader of the Cenobites, who does not appear until the end of the novella, is the mysterious Engineer. In the film series, the leader of the Cenobites (later known as "Pinhead") appears at the beginning during Frank's initial encounter with them. The title of Engineer does not appear in the film series until Hellraiser: Inferno, in which it is used for an unidentified serial killer who turns out to be the lead character's own dark-side. (A non-Cenobite inhabitant of the Cenobites' realm is seen in the first film chasing Kirsty out of Hell. Although not identified within the film, the film's credits refer to this creature as "the Engineer".)
- In the movie, Pinhead is a tall male, and his head is gridded with incisions, but his counterpart in the novella apprears to be a teenage girl with "a soft, breathy voice" and has a grid tattooed on her head. Chains are woven through various slits in her face.
- This counterpart is not the leader of the four initial Cenobites. The leader in the novella is a character whose wounded eyelids and lips are held open by hooks on chains that are woven through the bones of its skull.
- Julia's death and final fate are explicitly described in the novella, but are not shown as clearly in the film. Instead, Kirsty finds Julia's body lying in her bed wearing her wedding dress, the Lemarchand box in her folded hands and her face removed.
- At the end of the novella, the Engineer returns Lemarchand's box to Kirsty, the only survivor, and disappears. In the movie, Kirsty attempts to destroy the box, but a flying skeletal figure snatches it from her and disappears.
- The box becomes known in the film sequels as "The Lament Configuration". In the novella, Frank and Kirsty are told that it is called the "Lemarchand Configuration".
[edit] External links
- Revelations - The Official Clive Barker Resource
- The Hellbound Heart Encylopaedia
- Hellraiser: The Hellbound Web
[edit] See also
| The Hellraiser Series |
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| Films: Hellraiser | Hellbound: Hellraiser II | Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth | Hellraiser: Bloodline Hellraiser: Inferno | Hellraiser: Hellseeker | Hellraiser: Deader | Hellraiser: Hellworld |
| Cenobites: Pinhead | Chatterer | Female Cenobite |
| Other topics: Philip Lemarchand | Lemarchand's box | Clive Barker | Doug Bradley | The Hellbound Heart |
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| Novels, novellas, and Short story collections |
|---|
| Stand-alone: The Damnation Game | The Hellbound Heart | Weaveworld | Imajica | Books of Blood | The Thief of Always | Sacrament | Galilee | Coldheart Canyon |
| Books of the Art: The Great and Secret Show | Everville |
| The Abarat Quintet: Abarat | Abarat: Days of Magic, Nights of War |
| Short story collections: Books of Blood | Cabal | In the Flesh | The Inhuman Condition | The Scarlet Gospels |
| Films |
| Directed by Clive Barker: Salome | The Forbidden | Hellraiser | Nightbreed | Lord of Illusions | Tortured Souls: Animae Damnatae |
| Directed by others: Rawhead Rex | Underworld | Candyman | Quicksilver Highway | Saint Sinner |
| Other |
| Art collections: Clive Barker, Illustrator | Illustrator II: The Art of Clive Barker | Clive Barker Visions of Heaven and Hell |
| Plays: Incarnations: Three Plays | Forms of Heaven: Three Plays |
| Video games: Clive Barker's Undying | Demonik | Clive Barker's Jericho |
| Recurring characters |
| Cenobites | Pinhead | Harry D'Amour |
