Unbeknownst to Frank, the merchant then says, “It always was.” He gives the merchant a wad of cash, who says, “Take it, it’s yours.” Frank does just that, and after getting up and taking one last look at the merchant, he walks away. Frank replies, “The Box.” He is referring to the antique brass/gold puzzle box that is etched with arcane symbols, sitting on the middle of the table between them. Cotton?” the Asian merchant asks Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) in a hot and humid Middle Eastern establishment. If you’d shown me a plate of spaghetti and said that was a lens, I might have believed you.” When taking into consideration his statement in The Hellraiser Chronicles on his then minimal filmmaking skills, Hellraiser is a remarkably confident, mature, and intelligent directorial feature debut – “I didn’t know the difference between a 10-millimetre lens and a 35-millimetre lens. With backing by New World Pictures, and with little filmmaking know how, he would shoot for ten weeks from his own screenplay. He saw in his novella The Hellbound Heart, the potential it had to be made into a low-budget film. He knew that if you needed something done right, you do it yourself.

The producers would not allow him anywhere near the production, and the final cut would bear little resemblance to his screenplay.

He would also give birth to his own famous movie monster.īarker felt so frustrated and was left crushingly disappointed by his total lack of creative input into Rawhead Rex, the 1987 film adaptation of his shot story in Books of Blood Vol. Something was needed that was wholly original with a serious tone that was deeply unsettling, and it would come out of Britain later in the same year from Clive Barker, an author turned novice filmmaker, who had only two experimental short films to his name. While Sam Raimi’s brilliant sequel Evil Dead II would come out bursting with creativity in 1987, it was deeply rooted in black comedy. Other independently produced and distributed ultra-low budget slashers had also become box office poison that would end up on the scrapheap of the long forgotten, and for good reason. Sure, Wes Craven rejuvenated the template that same year with his dreamscape terror masterpiece A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Freddy Krueger would become the next big thing in horror, but it was a shot of adrenaline that would not last.

The sub-genre’s Golden Age ended three years before with what should have been the final death of one of its most iconic slashers – Jason Voorhees in 1984’s Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter. The American slasher film flourished in the late ‘70s, ripened in the early/mid ‘80s, but was rotting at this point with mostly formulaic offerings.

Hellraiser chronicles