Summer of Blood: The Hell you know
The story of how Hellraiser: Hellseeker came into being as the sixth film in the Hellraiser franchise, the second to go direct-to-video, is rather more complicated than it ought to be. The short version is that it's a heavily rewritten version of a script, titled Hellraiser: The Hellseeker (note the definite article), that was commissioned as the fifth film in the Hellraiser franchise, and which was shelved when the production lost its director (so that he could go make Highlander: Endgame, of all things). Meanwhile, Hellraiser: Inferno, which had been initially been commissioned as the sixth film, came off without a hitch, and was a big enough success that Dimension Films fast-tracked a follow-up. The Hellseeker was mostly scrapped except for the basic concept (a man has no memory of his recent past; it returns to him in the form of visions that involve horrible suffering and flashes of the hellish creatures known as Cenobites), which screenwriters Carl V. Dupre and Tim Day revised to follow the new formula that Inferno had introduced. And then it was revised more, when Rick Bota (a cinematographer directing his first film) showed the workprint to Clive Barker, who gave some notes, and thus made his last creative contribution of any sort to the series that had emerged from his dark visions in the 1980s.
All this turned out a film of notorious reputation that I frankly don't think it earns. It's not a "good" movie, but given everything stacked against it (sixth film in a franchise that hadn't had a good movie since the 1980s, direct-to-video horror movie from 2002), it's about as close to good as any but the most foolhardy optimist would hope for. I'd go as far as to say that it's better than Inferno, and Inferno was already better than either of the Hellraiser films from the 1990s. So you could argue, and make it hold water, that the series was at this point on a protracted upswing, which is surely the only time that happened simultaneously with a series making the jump from theatrical to home video releases.
So what, then makes up this shockingly above-par thing, this Hellraiser: Hellseeker? One thing that doesn't make it is anything that could properly be described as "hellseeking", though I suppose it depends on how you define that made-up word. At the very least, our shitty dickhead protagonist du jour, Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters) isn't trying to deliberately crack open a portal to a hell dimension full of indescribable sensory experiences at the vanishing point where "pleasure" and "pain" can no longer be distinguished, even if that concept makes a couple of half-hearted appearances during the few minutes that Doug Bradley shows up to play Pinhead (who is still very much in the "executor of Judeo-Christian moral judgment" mode that the last film introduced). All Trevor really wants to do is to figure out where his memories have gone. The film opens with him and his wife getting into bad car accident: Trevor swerves off the road to avoid a head-on collision and can't regain control quickly enough to avoid plunging off a bridge and into a river, where the two quickly sink. And just like that, he's bolting awake in a hospital bed a month later, with a lot of questions facing him from the cops, and just as many questions himself, since he's not only lost that month, it turns out that he's also lost a lot of other details. Making matters all the more urgent, his wife's body wasn't found with the car. Making matters most urgent of all, his wife was Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence), who was more or less the protagonist of both 1987's Hellraiser and 1988's Hellbound: Hellraiser II, so we can be forgiven for assuming that there's probably something going on with her disappearance that goes beyond a simple tragic accident, or even beyond the possibility that somewhere in his amnesiac past, Trevor actually murdered her and hid the body. Especially in a film titled Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Heck, maybe she's even the hellseeker, I don't know what they were thinking at the time.
Probably my biggest single problem with Hellseeker - setting aside the boring problem of "well, that's not how it was in the first two movies", which isn't a complaint that the rest of the series shall address, I suspect - is that it's coming directly after Hellraiser: Inferno substantially revised the rules for what kind of stories could be told in this cosmology, and it's entirely too easy to assume very early on that the New Thing that happened in Inferno was going to be the same New Thing that will turn out to happen here. Spoiler alert: this assumption is correct. Hellseeker does, indeed end up going to the most likely possible spot for it to go, and that sucks a ton of the fun out of the first two-thirds of the otherwise tight 89-minute film. It's not like Dupre, Day, and Bota meant for us to get out in front of the movie, I don't think, although I can imagine that having been a fruitful strategy in the right hands. There's too much genuine investment in tying the film's structure to Trevor's perspective, which keeps short-circuiting around between incomplete and semi-complete scenes, and introducing new character relationships out of nowhere as we meet people talking about things that our main character doesn't understand. We are definitely meant to find this all a puzzling mystery, with its dream logic derived from Trevor's shattered memory. And I guess it's fair to say that in terms of the specific details, it is a mystery. The specific reasons why Trevor meets three women - Gwen (Sarah Jane Redmond), Tawny (Jody Thompson), and Sage (Kaaren De Silva) - who all seem to think they're having a passionate love affair with him are hidden until near the end. So are the reasons that these same three women are killed in cryptic visions, in which they're not actually being killed, but he can see it happening anyways. So there's a mystery, it's just not the mystery.
That's too bad, really, because Hellseeker has some thoughtful ways of putting that mystery across; "the better version of Inferno" perfectly describes it, I'd say. There's one genuinely inventive scene in which Trevor sees a murder happening through the eyepiece of a video camera, and as he moves the camera around, he gets different angles on that murder, but he's pointing it at an empty chair. It's not the most bold and unthinkably radical of all setpieces, but on a DTV budget, it more than gets the job done.
I also appreciate that Bota's general approach is so much less heavy and squalid than Scott Derrickson's in the last film. Inferno was very overtly "what if Se7en was a Hellraiser?" and it was frankly a bit wearisome and mean by the time all was said and done. Hellseeker is just pulling discordant dream logic from wherever it can find it, making a movie that's mostly about the cottony fog within Trevor's brain as he tries to make sense of the conflicting and often contradictory information he's being given about the last 30 days and some indefinite time before that. The result is that cinematographer John Drake is using soft blues more than grainy browns, and editors Anthony Adler and Lisa Mozden are being altogether shameless about using little "flash to a new scene across a white frame, to hell with continuity" gestures to stitch together just a hell of a lot scenes.
David Lynch it ain't, but the focus on confused subjectivity at least makes this feel like a horror film about the internal psychology of our main character again. In other words: dream logic might be new to the Hellraiser series as such, but it feels like it ought to fit in the Hellraiser series. And it even manages to use Kirsty's one-off return to the franchise in a fairly intelligent way; it's not completely free of the sin of character assassination, and of course the conception of who the Cenobites are is so alien to the movies she anchored that can't really feel like a worthy follow-up regardless. Still, it's a thoughtful wrinkle to the inevitable twist that comes barrelling down throughout the whole running time, and even manages to make Pinhead's role as moral arbiter feel at least slightly more connected to the first movies than it did last time. It's not really that big a deal, all told, but it's enough to make Hellraiser: Hellseeker feel like a bit more effort was spent than needed to be, by the degraded standards in which projects like this live.
Body Count: It isn't quite as opaque a question as it was for Hellraiser: Inferno, but I think it still makes sense to apply the same cheat as last time: the plot specifically requires that 5 people die, and basically all 5 of them die during the course of the movie.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (García, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
All this turned out a film of notorious reputation that I frankly don't think it earns. It's not a "good" movie, but given everything stacked against it (sixth film in a franchise that hadn't had a good movie since the 1980s, direct-to-video horror movie from 2002), it's about as close to good as any but the most foolhardy optimist would hope for. I'd go as far as to say that it's better than Inferno, and Inferno was already better than either of the Hellraiser films from the 1990s. So you could argue, and make it hold water, that the series was at this point on a protracted upswing, which is surely the only time that happened simultaneously with a series making the jump from theatrical to home video releases.
So what, then makes up this shockingly above-par thing, this Hellraiser: Hellseeker? One thing that doesn't make it is anything that could properly be described as "hellseeking", though I suppose it depends on how you define that made-up word. At the very least, our shitty dickhead protagonist du jour, Trevor Gooden (Dean Winters) isn't trying to deliberately crack open a portal to a hell dimension full of indescribable sensory experiences at the vanishing point where "pleasure" and "pain" can no longer be distinguished, even if that concept makes a couple of half-hearted appearances during the few minutes that Doug Bradley shows up to play Pinhead (who is still very much in the "executor of Judeo-Christian moral judgment" mode that the last film introduced). All Trevor really wants to do is to figure out where his memories have gone. The film opens with him and his wife getting into bad car accident: Trevor swerves off the road to avoid a head-on collision and can't regain control quickly enough to avoid plunging off a bridge and into a river, where the two quickly sink. And just like that, he's bolting awake in a hospital bed a month later, with a lot of questions facing him from the cops, and just as many questions himself, since he's not only lost that month, it turns out that he's also lost a lot of other details. Making matters all the more urgent, his wife's body wasn't found with the car. Making matters most urgent of all, his wife was Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence), who was more or less the protagonist of both 1987's Hellraiser and 1988's Hellbound: Hellraiser II, so we can be forgiven for assuming that there's probably something going on with her disappearance that goes beyond a simple tragic accident, or even beyond the possibility that somewhere in his amnesiac past, Trevor actually murdered her and hid the body. Especially in a film titled Hellraiser: Hellseeker. Heck, maybe she's even the hellseeker, I don't know what they were thinking at the time.
Probably my biggest single problem with Hellseeker - setting aside the boring problem of "well, that's not how it was in the first two movies", which isn't a complaint that the rest of the series shall address, I suspect - is that it's coming directly after Hellraiser: Inferno substantially revised the rules for what kind of stories could be told in this cosmology, and it's entirely too easy to assume very early on that the New Thing that happened in Inferno was going to be the same New Thing that will turn out to happen here. Spoiler alert: this assumption is correct. Hellseeker does, indeed end up going to the most likely possible spot for it to go, and that sucks a ton of the fun out of the first two-thirds of the otherwise tight 89-minute film. It's not like Dupre, Day, and Bota meant for us to get out in front of the movie, I don't think, although I can imagine that having been a fruitful strategy in the right hands. There's too much genuine investment in tying the film's structure to Trevor's perspective, which keeps short-circuiting around between incomplete and semi-complete scenes, and introducing new character relationships out of nowhere as we meet people talking about things that our main character doesn't understand. We are definitely meant to find this all a puzzling mystery, with its dream logic derived from Trevor's shattered memory. And I guess it's fair to say that in terms of the specific details, it is a mystery. The specific reasons why Trevor meets three women - Gwen (Sarah Jane Redmond), Tawny (Jody Thompson), and Sage (Kaaren De Silva) - who all seem to think they're having a passionate love affair with him are hidden until near the end. So are the reasons that these same three women are killed in cryptic visions, in which they're not actually being killed, but he can see it happening anyways. So there's a mystery, it's just not the mystery.
That's too bad, really, because Hellseeker has some thoughtful ways of putting that mystery across; "the better version of Inferno" perfectly describes it, I'd say. There's one genuinely inventive scene in which Trevor sees a murder happening through the eyepiece of a video camera, and as he moves the camera around, he gets different angles on that murder, but he's pointing it at an empty chair. It's not the most bold and unthinkably radical of all setpieces, but on a DTV budget, it more than gets the job done.
I also appreciate that Bota's general approach is so much less heavy and squalid than Scott Derrickson's in the last film. Inferno was very overtly "what if Se7en was a Hellraiser?" and it was frankly a bit wearisome and mean by the time all was said and done. Hellseeker is just pulling discordant dream logic from wherever it can find it, making a movie that's mostly about the cottony fog within Trevor's brain as he tries to make sense of the conflicting and often contradictory information he's being given about the last 30 days and some indefinite time before that. The result is that cinematographer John Drake is using soft blues more than grainy browns, and editors Anthony Adler and Lisa Mozden are being altogether shameless about using little "flash to a new scene across a white frame, to hell with continuity" gestures to stitch together just a hell of a lot scenes.
David Lynch it ain't, but the focus on confused subjectivity at least makes this feel like a horror film about the internal psychology of our main character again. In other words: dream logic might be new to the Hellraiser series as such, but it feels like it ought to fit in the Hellraiser series. And it even manages to use Kirsty's one-off return to the franchise in a fairly intelligent way; it's not completely free of the sin of character assassination, and of course the conception of who the Cenobites are is so alien to the movies she anchored that can't really feel like a worthy follow-up regardless. Still, it's a thoughtful wrinkle to the inevitable twist that comes barrelling down throughout the whole running time, and even manages to make Pinhead's role as moral arbiter feel at least slightly more connected to the first movies than it did last time. It's not really that big a deal, all told, but it's enough to make Hellraiser: Hellseeker feel like a bit more effort was spent than needed to be, by the degraded standards in which projects like this live.
Body Count: It isn't quite as opaque a question as it was for Hellraiser: Inferno, but I think it still makes sense to apply the same cheat as last time: the plot specifically requires that 5 people die, and basically all 5 of them die during the course of the movie.
Reviews in this series
Hellraiser (Barker, 1987)
Hellbound: Hellraiser II (Randel, 1988)
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (Hickox, 1992)
Hellraiser: Bloodline (Smithee [Yagher], 1996)
Hellraiser: Inferno (Derrickson, 2000)
Hellraiser: Hellseeker (Bota, 2002)
Hellraiser: Deader (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Hellworld (Bota, 2005)
Hellraiser: Revelations (García, 2011)
Hellraiser: Judgment (Tunnicliffe, 2018)
Hellraiser (Bruckner, 2022)
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
If you enjoyed this article, why not support Alternate Ending as a recurring donor through Patreon, or with a one-time donation via Paypal? For just a dollar a month you can contribute to the ongoing health of the site, while also enjoying several fun perks!
