#elevated horror

Horror stories are political.

Human created works are political, cause we don't exist nor create in a void.

The opening of Hellraiser 2022 is dark. Visually, I mean. It's even drab. It's pretty well trodden ground at this point to criticize the poor lighting of contemporary cinematogry. Even within its class, though, Hellraiser dedicates itself to keeping information out of the frame, and excitement out of the plot. The mansion orgy that starts the film's action barely makes it onto the screen, for example. We follow a youth through this sequence--will he be seduced by this predatory-seeming cougar? No, she diverts him down the hall like any secretary. Finally, this random victim's encounter with orgy impresario Roland Voight--and the monster-summoning puzzle box that Hellraiser centers on--is as chaste as can be. Maybe the film just wants to set our expectations properly for its first kill... ah, no, it bafflingly happens out of focus in the background, while Voight recites spooky ritual nonsense. It's... pretty deflating!

Much of this could be run of the mill mediocrity and a contemporary set of stylistic choices that I just find kind of bland and unsatisfying. Rewatching the film a year later felt like a dull slog, the tendency to underlight scenes making for a toxic combo with its editors' refusal to cut the fat (the movie is an indefensible two hours long). I think there's more than technical problems dampening the enthusiasm in the film, though. It struggles on a deeper level with its choice to replace the central metaphor in Hellraiser--the allure of transgressive, kinky, queer sex--with a new one: drug addiction. 

It's not alone in that fixation, or its muddy results. Contemporary "elevated horror" increasingly feels to me like a tune played with one sad grey note. The sex the protagonist of Hellraiser 2022 has is sad. She can't have a meal with friends, because her asshole brother is there to make it sad. Drinking or doing "pills"? Sad. Sad and nondescript. All she does is "pills", and what are their effects? "Sad" and "drug". What happens in an orgy? Sex, in another room from the one the characters are in. Eroticized bondage murder? A backdrop to a liturgy.

Well, until a trans woman shows up covered in spikes and then for a brief moment I am transported to untold realms of experience. That's no thanks to the film makers, though. That is just how I respond to trans women. Especially scary ones.

I like having all my neurons lit up by seeing Jamie Clayton decked out as this film's cenobite leader Pinhead, and hearing Clayton's gorgeous voice saying spooky shit, because broadly that's something I come to horror for: fear and revulsion and sadness, yes, but also the pleasure of fear mixed with attraction. I sort of thought that was the whole, like, point of Hellraiser, actually. In Clive Barker's original film, the Cenobites are "demons to some, angels to others, explorers in the far realms of experience." The horror, paired with fascination, comes from entities that have transcended the boundaries of pain and pleasure colliding with more conventional human beings. Humans creep and scheme, but Cenobites are a force.

I may as well lay my cards on the table here: I find this very hot, conceptually.

Now, I had to reflect on this a little bit, as I worked on this article. The original Hellraiser is a movie about Frank, a guy who, bored with conventional perversion, seeks out a cursed puzzle box and gets ripped to actual shreds for his trouble. He then comes back as a melty skeleton to seduce his ex (his brother's wife) and menace his niece. She in turn solves the puzzle box, summons the Cenobites, and in desperation offers them the escaped Frank in exchange for her own life.

Eroticism, sexual menace, and masochism all play a part in this film, but I'm not sure that the protagonist Kirsty experiences, on screen, the commingled desire and terror the Cenobites represent. The Cenobites are not even necessarily directly erotic monsters (though apparently the film was developed under the title Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave, which rules). Some of the eroticism was apparently in part taken out due to MPAA censorship. Go figure. And yet, what remains is a kind of eroticism of texture. It's looking at these practical effects, these monster designs, and being repulsed but also wishing to see more of them. What makes it read that way for me is not necessarily in the story itself, but in the sensory imaginary of Chatterer putting its fingers in Kirsty's mouth and going [clickclickclickclick] next to her ear. The first time I saw that I recoiled from the screen!

...But I kept looking, and have returned again and again.

Maybe it's this dynamic that inspires the drug (or more broadly "mental health" or "cycles of trauma") metaphor increasingly popular in contemporary Elevated Horror. The possibility of relapse certainly hangs over everything in Hellraiser 2022. Protagonist Riley is treated with constant suspicion from everyone from her brother to his friends to paramedics over the possibility she's relapsing, something I could get if the film seemed to understand "substances" as offering something appealing to the user. Something seems to have gotten lost in stylistic translation, though. The metaphor is suggested by the stylistic allure of the genre, then the metaphor becomes sort of heightened by the modern vogue for horror films to not just mean something but Mean Something (Elevated), and in the gloomy ponderousness of the style the original aesthetic that carried the meaning gets lost.

Every cursed relic is a drug. Every drug is fentanyl.

Here's a question though: if the puzzle box the Lament Configuration represents drug addiction, why would anyone ever fucking start? The whole thing seems viscerally unappealing. You move a couple parts around (this is actually pretty cool and appealing in an autistic kinda way) then a blade snaps out and jabs you. The original puzzle box was content to summon a bunch of demonic angels to pierce your flesh with meathooks, but this has an added Drug Metaphor Effect. Which... mostly constitutes making you kinda droopy, before sending you screaming to hell.

I may not act like it but I've smoked a drug or two in my day and idk man I'm sorry but if this is what they did, no one would fucking do them.

To read the rest of my review of the movie, as well as Talk To Me (2022) and, of all things, a short film made between the first and second American Ring films that I think actually does a lot of this stuff much better than contemporary horror, check out the full article on my website:

It had me, then it lost me, then it had me again, lost me again, had me again. It looks cool; being competently shot isn't a very unique quality for a modern horror movie to have, but it checks the box of showcasing creative sets with a nostalgic eerie feeling. This is one of those movies where a narrator monologues the theme directly at the audience to pretend that this is an elevated horror flick instead of just a jumpscare parade, but as far as shoehorned thesis statements go, I thought Mary and Clark's subplots were interesting. The dialogue starts out ripping off a Westworld monologue, but that dinner table scene ended up taking the concept in a direction Westworld hadn't, so that's actually pretty commendable. Will Soodik worked very hard to try to make A24's stupid cash grab meme movie have a point, and that's all I can really ask.

The main problem is just how little these character arcs and meditations on memory and change have anything to do with the suspense scenes of the characters blundering around in the titular backrooms. And I do mean blundering! I get that the story is set in 1990 to explain why nobody is whipping out their cell phones and why they don't have a name for this particular supernatural occurrence, but I'm still pretty sure if I found a wall I could walk through, my first instinct would be to tell everyone I knew, specifically because I would be worried I was going crazy (or I'd seen something I wasn't supposed to) and would want to leave a breadcrumb trail in case I died. I get that Clark is lonely, so he doesn't have many friends or family members to blab to (and he's black so I can't blame him for not calling the police), but I at least would contact the local newspaper the second I had any VHS footage of my hand going through the wall. I'm surprised it never occurred to Clark to try to use this anomaly to fix his money problems. I sure as hell wouldn't wander around a creepy parallel dimension alone at night after I'd been drinking! Even when Clark DOES think to come back with a rope and a camera, he doesn't secure the tether outside to the normal world; come on man, even the Simpsons knew better than that! These aren't nitpicks; when horror movie characters are stupid in service of the plot, it totally takes me out of it. I couldn't fully enjoy Annihilation just because the characters took off their helmets too flippantly.

I'm ambivalent on the liminal-space craze, and even if I was super into this aesthetic, I'd say Backrooms isn't quite as good as "I Saw the TV Glow" or the "Subliminal" video game or hell even "MyHouse.wad". I'm one of the few millennials that actually likes being an adult and am able to appreciate our present 2020's dadaist slop hellscape era for what it is, so I don't have this fondness for the 80's/90's/2000's that can make yesteryear feel comforting enough to be uncanny. Dead malls are just the modern gothic mansions, and considering this movie feels like a literal haunted house tour, I think I'll stick with "Suspiria". If anything, I'm a little disappointed that the movie isn't set in 2026, because so much of what the Backrooms represent could not exist in the cultural consciousness at any other time. So much of this movie feels instantly dated - right down to the fact that the creepypasta's heyday was already a few years ago - but I might mean that as a compliment; that this is a time capsule for things about this decade we won't miss until it's gone. Same way when it actually was the 90's, all we wanted was to go back another 30 years, our children in the 2050's will look back on the melting-content culture of today with rose-colored glasses too.

i’m doing like queer threesome challengers inspired very original book faithful frankenstein in nyc right now and if you’re around you should come check it out it’s about what happens when you’re so afraid of sex and intimacy that you give birth to an insatiable sex monster who hates you?

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