Hellraiser treatment on the way
Breaking away briefly from writing the next installment in his “Abarat” series, Clive Barker phoned ShockTillYouDrop.com to catch up on a number of topics – from the forthcoming DVD/Blu-Ray release of Midnight Meat Train to Pascal Laugier’s take on Hellraiser. Of the latter, Barker tells us he feels confident Laugier is going to bring something unique to the table.
“I fuckin’ love Martyrs,” he enthuses. “I’m glutton for intensity, extreme stuff. Martyrs is certainly extreme, it’s a movie that has courage and commitment. [Pascal] is someone who really, really cares about horror movies. I’m supposed to be seeing a treatment soon. I’m not certain but I believe he is going to back to the first movie but not with an obsessed loyalty. He’s taking the first movie as a launching board, a rock model, but there are things you can obviously do now both visually and sexually. It was always a sexual movie. The censors [when I did the original] told me I had to cut a scene because it has spanking in it. You’re telling me I can have the skinning, but I cant have the spanking? It’s a different time, so I’m excited.”
At the beginning of the month, Gary Tunnicliffe – who had served dutifully on the Hellraiser sequels as the makeup FX artist – used Fangoria as a platform to show off his redesigned interpretation of Pinhead, a role made famous by Doug Bradley. Barker admits for the first time publicly that this take (see it here) does not work for him. “The whole point about Pinhead is that he is geometrically severe. Very measured and the energy of the character comes out of the fact that you have surgical precision which is part of a much larger, sadistic, maybe masochistic, design. By turning the bloodless cuts or scarifications into bloody, irregular gashes removes the point of what made the character interesting in the first place.”
More with Barker to come!
Source: Ryan Rotten, Managing Editor
