Hellraiser Hellbound: Where Does Desire Come From?

If you caught part one of Sweet Sweet Suffering, you know that Hellraiser is about the paradox of desire. Frank Cotton doesn’t just want pleasure — after finding the ultimate experience, he wants to want again.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II expands the world of the first film in a way that’s easy to miss if you’re watching it as a typical horror sequel. Of course, it dials up the content of the original to even more outrageous, absurd levels. But viewed through the right lens, it’s doing something much more ambitious — it’s attempting to visualize the system that produced Frank’s conundrum in the first place.

Thus, where the first film asked what happens when desire reaches its annihilating endpoint, Hellbound asks the even bigger question: where does desire actually come from? Why do we feel it?

To answer that, we descend into the labyrinth of Leviathan. It’s a place easily mistaken for Hell, but it’s something quite different. We again encounter Julia, who returns from the Cenobites’ realm transformed — no longer an object of someone else’s desire, but a desiring subject in her own right. And we follow Dr. Channard, a man who believes he can study and master the system, who discovers too late what folly that is.

The key concept this time is Lacan’s notion of the Real — the dimension of experience that resists language, meaning, and understanding. The labyrinth of Hellbound, I’ll argue, is one of horror cinema’s most interesting and entertaining attempts to give that ineffable concept, and its impact on the human condition, a visual representation.

Part three, concluding with a reading of Bloodline, drops in two weeks.