Released over 30 years ago, Hellraiser remains a fascinating entry point into a world of pleasure and pain. Angels to some, devils to others, the Cenobites continue to hold audiences’ imagination. Pinhead instantly leapt to icon status alongside Michael Meyers, Freddy Krueger, and Jason Voorhees.
Part of what makes Pinhead so effective comes down to how little we see of him and his fellow Cenobites. So much of their power and horror emanates from the audience’s imagination. And that’s what we’ll examine today.
Mountains in the Distance
There’s a theory of world-building where the distant mountains, spoken of but not visited in the story, make the reality feel lived-in. In real life, you will never see and do everything in the world. Why should it be any different in your story? How could you characters possibly visit every interesting point on the map in one lifetime, never mind one story?
The mountains here are, of course, metaphorical. You want to populate the horizon with unvisited ideas and places and stories that never intersect with your own. This will give you the feeling of a an actual vibrant world and not just a thin stage created to tell your story.
Cenobites & Frank
The trick with Hellraiser is that it’s not really about the Cenobites. Most of the story deals with the resurrected Frank, who has escaped the Cenobites and seeks a new body. He teams up with Julia to lure men to their house, kill them, and take the needed body parts for himself.
The Cenobites lurk at the edges of the movie. We get glimpses of them as Kirsty discovers what her dead uncle and living step-mom have been up to. We know they come from another place, focused wholly on pain and pleasure. And that’s about it.
But that little bit goes a long way. The Cenobites, with their creature designs and dialogue, invite the audience to fill in the gaps with horrifying details the filmmakers could never afford to put on screen. They weaponize our imagination against us and make su fascinated with what other stories could be taking place in such a world. We become both attracted and repulsed by these demons. We want to know more, but also fear what we can already guess.
Future sequels would delve more and more into the Cenobite mythos, mapping out the mountains that once stood in the distance. The more we see, the less room for us to create our horrors. But the original remains as a singular piece of horror-fantasy that we can return to and learn from.
Applying To Your Own Work
When world-building, make sure you fill in the edges of the map. Give us the sense that just around the corner from this story are a million other stories also happening. The successful worlds like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings achieve that and invite the viewer in.
And when it comes to horror, even if you’re not world-building it’s still worth considering how you can use the audience’s imagination against them. Be careful in how much you reveal and how much work you let them do for you. Because nine times out of ten that will be far scarier than anything you can come up with.