There were reasons that
when he read his work, horror legend Stephen King declared Clive Barker ‘the
future of horror.’
Barker has written
intensely imaginative, richly detailed and characterized work for over thirty
years, but the depressing truth is that if you were to ask most
non-afficionados what they knew about Clive Barker’s work, they’d be able to
tell you about the Hellraiser movies, and not much more.
If you’re going to have a
legacy, a thumbprint on the popular culture of generations, though, the
Hellraiser movies, and their chief villains, the Cenobites, are not a bad way
to leave that imprint on the minds of the world.
The Hellbound Heart is
where the Hellraiser world, and the Cenobites particularly, first drew breath.
The novella was largely
the basis for the first (and arguably still the best) Hellraiser movie, but
there are significant differences. They’re differences the new, audio version
of The Hellbound Heart from Bafflegab Productions exploits to enormously good
effect.
While the story of Julia
Cotton, trapped in a loveless, undersexed, underthrilled marriage to the nicer
and duller of two brother remains, Larry from the movie reverts to Rory from
the novella here. Likewise Kirsty, who was re-cast as Larry’s daughter in the
movie, is here, as in the novella, simply someone who’s a long-term friend of
Rory’s, and who fancies her chances of being with him. That makes for a more
legitimately tense dynamic, and also stops Rory seeming so irredeemably
pathetic as he did in the movie, by proving that while Julia may want the
harder, more macho love of his disreputable brother Frank, someone fancies the relatively feckless Rory. That’s the set-up
here then – unspoken, hidden relation drama boiling away to eventual multiple
murder.
But oh yes, then there are
the Cenobites, led by the ‘Pinhead’ character so definitively brought to life
by Doug Bradley on screen.
Pinhead who’s here played
by Evie Dawnay.
Now, while some horror fans’ heads explode, with
the words ‘It’s political correctness gone maaaad!’ on their lips, it’s worth
going back just briefly to the novella itself. Here’s how it describes the Pinhead Cenobite:
Its
voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy – the voice of an
excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid,
and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jewelled pin driven
through to the bone.
Yes, Pinhead was always
meant to be female and breathy, and her pins anointed with jewels. Almost everything
you think you know about the character is probably wrong.
Everything about the
Bafflegab version though is gloriously right. Casting Tom Meeten as both Frank
and Rory Cotton allows for a vocal similarity that’s believable, but the
characters work as two sides of the same genetic coin, Meeten making his Rory
voice all lightness, concern and new man, and his Frank a growling, rasping,
whisky-soaked come-hither of primal power and muscle and violence. You can
practically smell the testosterone
dripping off Frank Cotton’s voice, whereas from Rory, you get the faint,
uninspiring whiff of niceness and a lived-with, undersexed frustration.
Neve McIntosh brings new
levels of weary despair to Julia in this audio version too – a character who
drifted towards Rory for the daylight safety and concern and veneration of his
arms, but who found a vicious thorn of sexual thrill with his brother Frank,
and who, from then on, was tormented by that sexually-driven love for the other
brother. Julia’s is very much a story of obsession with the love she feels over
the marriage in which she’s trapped – it’s a masochistic love that drives her
to do what Frank says, to get what Frank needs, and which therefore drives her
in the story of The Hellbound Heart to procure lovers in a local bar, who are
sacrificed to Frank’s need for flesh as he claws his way back to life, having tangled
with the hellish immortal sadomasochists known as the Cenobites. While Claire
Higgins in the movie has a touch of Lady Macbeth about her, McIntosh’s version
reveals more of the desperation to feel, to love, to be part of something with
a man who brings her sensuality to life. McIntosh brings a pathos to the part
that really drives Julia on in a way that makes dramatic sense to the listener,
and even allows us to sympathise with her.
Alice Lowe’s Kirsty feels
more alive and pro-active in this version too, more driven by her love of Rory
than Ashley Lawrence’s movie version. Part of that is the shift back to
Kirsty’s position of being a woman who loves Rory, rather than being his
daughter – the lines of loyalty and action are much clearer when she’s fighting
for him as a potential partner than they are when she’s fighting for him as a
father. But Lowe gives Kirsty something believably 21st century too,
a sense of not quite being able to give up on the man she wants, which allows
us to at least briefly wonder if it isn’t in fact Kirsty who’s on the wrong
side of the ethical divide in this dynamic, interfering in a married couple’s
relationship.
Evie Dawnay plays the
Pinhead Cenobite as slightly androgynous in her distance from human concerns, a
Borg Queen of pleasure and pain. Dawnay is hypnotic in this role, and she’s ably
assisted by her junior Cenobites, Chris Pavlo, Scott Brookman and Nicholas
Vince, making for a new-old iteration of the Cenobites that captures the
imagination, and run away to Hell with it.
Dawnay also takes a
gloriously perverse secondary role in the drama as Amy, Kirsty’s friend who’s
perpetually urging her to quit her obsession with Rory, but in the normality
and the everydayness of her Amy voice, you’d have to have the cast list in
front of you to tell that Dawnay’s doing double-duty. As with Meeten playing
both Cotton brothers, there’s a joyful internal symmetry in having Dawnay
deliver both the voice steering Kirsty away from the Cottons, and the voice
that demands she pay for their sins.
Lisa Bowerman, known among
other things for many audio roles at Big Finish, is never anything less than a
story-helper, though here, her dual role as both the Cottons’ neighbour, Susan,
and the nurse who tends to Kirsty in her post-horror hospitalisation, leads to
the faintest touch of confusion, and for a moment, we believe Susan has found
Kirsty on the street outside the Cottons’ house and gone to hospital with her
in the absence of anyone else who cares.
That’s the tiniest of nits
to pick in a compelling new audio version of The Hellbound Heart, though – at
just an hour and a quarter, the pace is punchy, the scares are delivered at
their full weight, and the elevated performances from Tom Meeten, Neve
McIntosh, Alice Lowe and Evie Dawnay make for a Hellbound Heart that’s true to
the original, while feeling new and bright and sticky for an audience perhaps
grown slightly complacent on the Cenobites’ continual returns to the screen.
Bafflegab’s diversion into
straight-up horror audio feels like the mark of a label that’s come home and
settled into its ideal niche. Staggeringly intelligent casting, and a blistering
treatment of the original material by Paul Kane makes The Hellbound Heart
better than 90% of the audio drama out there. Fans of Barker’s Hellraiser
universe will now be hoping for more in the same (ahem) vein in the future,
looking with optimistic eyes to Bafflegab and Kane for an adaptation of
Barker’s later Hellraiser novel, The Scarlet Gospels.
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