Saturday, 5 May 2018

Beyond the TARDIS Bafflegab Productions: The Hellbound Heart by Tony J Fyler



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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