The illustrations by John Bolton are appropriately oldee-fashioned (even if they’re more Renaissance than medieval), looking like they’re painted on canvas and stuff, but the story is so stilted and convoluted that I’m at loss for words. It’s written by Erik Saltzgaber, one of the writers who attended the Barker Bible session, and it’s pure, unadulterated crap. Reading this first story in the first issue, my heart sank (and my stomach churned). Epic obviously doesn’t have this problem here, since they have almost no source material to work from. The Eclipse adaptations suffered from being way too respectful of the resource material, and sometimes read like illustrated books. However, Eclipse only (I think?) did adaptations, and only of the short stories from The Books of Blood. I assume that’s what he meant, and the idea that he’s referring to the comics hasn’t even occurred to me.Įclipse Comics did a bunch of Barker things, starting a bit before Epic started their Barker things.
And then they’re giving that bible to a bunch of writers to see what they get back, and it sounds like the only edict they’re given is that there should be no “twist endings”, which has always been a staple of horror comics.Ĭhichester also says that after the foreword, “things are going to get horrible”, and the next thing after the foreword is the introduction by Barker. So what to do when trying to make a franchise out of it?Īssociate/consulting editor DG Chichester (and the only editor associated with it throughout the run of this book, I think?) explains that they sat down with Barker and hammered out a bible. But it’s based on a short story, and the first movie more than exhausted the source material. I’m not ragging on Hellraiser it’s an innovative and scary movie. It’s just a scary puzzle box and some bondage monsters. And then… they had no idea where to go next, because the Hellraiser “mythos” doesn’t exist.
The second movie they basically just redid the first movie, so that was OK. The problem came when they tried to make more movies.
The puzzle box in itself is just intrinsically scary, and the bondage gear monsters were just perfect for their time. It’s scary and it’s gruesome, yes, but it had two very striking things: The puzzle box and the Cenobites (and by that I mean Pinhead). Hellraiser (the first movie) had something going for it. I recently(ish) watched all of the Hellraiser movies. By a whole bunch of people, including a bunch of editors
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