Deadlights: Fingernails

There is a wide range of physical sensations from the frustrating to the debilitating with which most of us are familiar. We've all stubbed a toe. We've all had a nosebleed, a hangnail, a cut in an inconvenient place. Given that horror seeks to elicit a physical response from its audience, it makes sense to build on this language of universal sensations. Clive Barker's Hellraiser is one of the best examples to be found, a primer for using these commonly held experiences to build up a more complex and grotesque lexicon of visceral terrors which nonetheless remains nauseatingly easy to imagine ripping not into the characters' flesh but into our own.

It starts, after an initial glimpse of infernally-wrought gore, with little things. We see spoiled food and vermin crawling over it. A homeless man eats crickets in a pet shop. Family patriarch Larry cuts his finger on an exposed nail. From there, quite literally, the grotesqueries grow. What's important to observe in Hellraiser, though, is not that it escalates its horrors but that it preserves the visceral relatability of its first nasty, intimate little violations in its later and more showy images. The hooks that pierce Frank's body at the film's climax pull at his skin exactly like the nail pulls at Larry's hand. The glimpses we get of raw meat in motion are clear visual echoes of Larry's wound and of the rotten meat found in the house's kitchen.

By tugging at our instinctual responses to stimuli we've felt in our own lives, Hellraiser renders even its most extreme spectacles relatable. It's not so much genius filmmaking as it is good craftsmanship, an expert showing his work along the way to the finished thing. Over thirty years after its release Hellraiser remains tremendously influential and a well-regarded movie in its own right. Its place in body horror is cemented not just because its imagery is sadistic and inventive and its special effects gruesome but because it's impossible to watch without wincing at every crunch and squelch and wet, rubbery tearing tearing sound.

Horror, as a genre, is talking to you when you watch it. You'll feel what it's saying even if you aren't paying attention, but if you do then you can start to unravel the why and where of the sensations it inspires. How we think about our bodies, the anxieties about penetration, contamination, and disfigurement with which we all move through our daily lives -- these are primal human drivers the comprehension of which fosters a richer, more complex relationship between ourselves and our own bodies.