Clive on Hellraiser IV : Bloodline

137 - LOCK-UP, MINOS
PAUL : It's what my family has lived for for two centuries. It's my destiny. My duty. To free the world from the monsters my bloodline unleashed.
CORINNE : By building a space station?
PAUL : By building a trap. And destroying them forever. But the satellites aren't ready. The Elysium Configuration can't be triggered. What I built as a trap has become a nest.

Fifth draft - by Peter Atkins - May 1994

"We're laying plans at the moment... you can't keep a good monster down! Unlike many people, I don't mind sequels. There's really no reason why they have to dwindle down to be dreary echoes of the movie before. What I can guarantee is that Hellraiser IV will be completely different... actually more different from the other three than they have been from each other..."

Exclusive Interview With Clive Barker, Creator Of The Hellraiser Series

By [ ], Video Business, 23 April 1993

"Hellraiser IV will hopefully go before the cameras before the end of the year, this is a Hellraiser movie such as you've never seen before. We're actually taking the mythology places it hasn't gone. We're going to see Pinhead in some situations we haven't even remotely seen him in. We've got female cenobites, and we're determined that somewhere down the line the Black Pope of Hell himself is going to get laid."

Hellraiser

By Jay Stevenson, Imagi-Movies, Vol 1, No 2, Winter 1993/94

"Even in 'Hellraiser IV' we're trying to make some differences [from current horror movies] but there are only so many differences we can make because some place the audience is going to say, 'Where the fuck's Pinhead?' And you've got to bring him in."

Lord Of Illusions - Filming The Books Of Blood

By Michael Beeler, Cinefantastique, Vol 26 No 2, February 1995

"In Hellraiser: Bloodline, we're upping the stakes in all kinds of ways. With the first Hellraiser we were trying to make something more intense and offbeat than many of the genre pictures that were around at the time. We took that first movie very seriously and were attempting to, on a million dollars, do what we could to give people a serious scare. Our intention is to try and get back to the very dark, perverse, almost surreal quality that the first picture had. We've also got a narrative that has more ambition than any of the three pictures before in the sense that it takes place over three distinct time periods. Peter Atkins is attempting to give us a narrative which makes us believe in the characters and in the circumstances they find themselves in and, hopefully, feel afraid for them.
"Pinhead is a very powerful character. One of the thoughts in this picture is that somebody from his side is challenging his authority, and in this case, a woman. Angelique wants all his power and authority. I don't think that there are enough villainesses in movies.
"I want to find fresh ways to excite people. the game is never over, is it? Good monsters never die; they just lie down and pretend to be dead for a while."

Hellraiser: Bloodline

US Press Kit, March 1996

"It's a mythology which really should have laid down and died a long time ago, and if someone said, "Hey Clive, there aren't going to be any more Hellraiser movies", I certainly wouldn't weep. But when a filmmaker wants to make a movie based on my work, I can't say, "Well, I'm not going to become involved." Instead I keep my finger in the pie and try to create a better movie. However, as the series goes on, it becomes harder and harder to scare audiences with images that they've seen in the three previous films. I thought Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth would be the last chapter but, in reality, Hollywood is built on pure profit and, provided there's a profit, the concept will continue - even if there isn't a brand spanking new story to tell."

Lord Of Illusions - A Fable Of Death And Resurrection

By Simon Bacal, Sci-Fi Entertainment, Vol 1 No 5, February 1995

"Right now it's out of my hands, and it never was really in them. I always said they never finished shooting the movie. That schedule never really allowed Kevin to film what he had to, and it's my belief that there is much work shooting-wise that still needs to be done."

Illusions Update

By Anthony C. Ferrante, Fangoria, No 143, June 1995

"I have a very remote relationship on this one. But I can say that it's definitely been the most troubled of the four [Hellraiser] pictures. Vey much so.
"And I think part of the reason for that is the first estimations about how long it would take and how much it would cost were hopelessly optimistic. I'm talking about the very first shoot now, way back when I was shooting Lord Of Illusions. They were in cuckoo land believing they could achieve all that needed to be achieved within the financial framework that they had laid down. It just was not possible. It wasn't practical. And the consequence was, and I said this plenty to Miramax, I said, 'You're closing down this movie with three weeks of shooting still to be done.' "

Hellraiser IV - Bloodline

By Michael Beeler, Cinefantastique, Vol 27 No 2, November 1995

"Hellraiser 4 has been released in the States. It's not very good. I think they are making another one. Oh God!"

AOL Appearance

Transcript of on-line appearance 16 July 1996

"In terms of "servicing the franchise", Miramax wanted to focus on the prime character, Pinhead. Now, my argument about Pinhead has always been that less is more. But the American audiences just go crazy when this guy comes on screen, so the studio said, 'No, more is more.' And I said, 'Well the more you put this guy on the screen, the less scary he's going to be.' And their response to that was, 'Well then, we'll just put more blood in.'
"I think there are some fine things in Hellraiser IV actually - at the beginning and the end, but I don't like the middle very much. Even so, there are some things that return almost to the tone of the first one. It's uneven, no question, but overall I prefer it to number three."

Clive Barker - Lord Of Illusions

By Nigel Lloyd, SFX, No 16, September 1996

"[Galilee] is a piece of intimate art, deeply felt by me over 14 or 15 months of my life - a very private investigation of personal obsessions. That's the novel. Hellraiser: Bloodline is a corporate decision made by people who want to make money and hire and fire people at will to make that happen.
"But I still have a kind of loyalty to these creatures that I've created. I can't turn my back on them. Also, in every case there has been somebody involved with the pictures whom I've like and loved as a friend. Pete Atkins wrote the sequels. Doug Bradley - whom I've known since I was 15 - is the man behind the makeup on the four movies. So even as each movie may be more removed from my initial place of inspiration, they're still my mates. And so there's not just a loyalty to the films, or to the idea of the films, there's also a loyalty to friends.
"If Doug was to decide he never wanted to get into the makeup ever again and Pete was to decide he never wanted to write one ever again, I would not feel anything like the kind of connection that I do to that material. I don't, for instance, feel it the same way to the Candyman films."

Lord of New Illusions

By W.C.Stroby, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

...other comments

11 - CHATEAU DE REVE, GAME ROOM - NIGHT
Delvaux works as his fellows watch, quoffing drinks or taking snuff. L'Escargo is next but it's De Conduite who calls out.
DE CONDUITE : Time, sir, time! Pass it on!.
L'Escargot reaches for the Box but Delvaux snatches it away.
DELVAUX : No! I've nearly... There !!
The box moves to another setting. All eyes turn lustfully to Angelique who obligingly removes the first of her petticoats.
DE L'ISLE : Play on. Play on.
L'Escargot takes up the Box and begins.
MONTAGE - The Box moving from hand to hand, from position to position - Angelique removing successive layers of clothing - Increasingly flushed and excited faces - A secret excitement growing in De L'Isle's eyes - Jacques watching, as excited as his master - Lemarchand's face beyond the glass, fascinated and shocked.
Finally, the Box comes back to the hands of Corbusier. He looks at Angelique - now clad only in a corset and bloomers.
CORBUSIER : It occurs to me, Madame, that should there be more secrets on the table than on the floor, we will need fresh inducement for our endeavours.
ANGELIQUE : Oh, there are always more secrets, sir. Always more surprises. Now - will you talk or will you play?

Fifth draft - by Peter Atkins - May 1994

Doug Bradley: "In a way, we made three films in one: a gothic horror film, a contemporary horror film and an almost a genre-crossover, a science fiction horror film. It's one continuous story that just happens to take place in three separate locations and across four hundred years.
"This is something entirely new for Pinhead; he's never had a demonic cohort, so to speak. He's had his other Cenobites in the previous films, but the pecking order was always pretty clear. Angelique is at least his equal, and certainly in Angelique's own mind possibly his superior. Pinhead doesn't quite see things that way, so their relationship is a little sparky."

Hellraiser: Bloodline

US Press Kit, March 1996

Doug Bradley: "This is a more mythology-driven movie than a Pinhead-driven movie. It's a more ambitious and complicated story. It opens up in 18th Century Paris with the creation of the box, we briefly touch base in the present and then we wind up 200 years from now in the last place which I would have expected to find Pinhead, which is outer space."

Hellraiser IV : Bloodline

By Anthony C. Ferrante, Fangoria, No 140, March 1995

Bruce Ramsay : "Because Lemarchand has just created the box, he's only now discovering his genius - but he wants more. In the second story, his descendant, who is a husband and a father, is more mature and understands himself better. The third character is an old and weathered man who has spent his whole life trying to secure the ultimate trap for the horror which has plagued his entire family for several hundred years."

Raising Hell

By Simon Bacal, Sci Universe, No 5, February / March 1995

Kevin Yagher: "Essentially, I wanted to make a story about the box and be true to the fans by detailing the history of where it came from. My whole idea was that I didn't want to do a Hellraiser IV where Pinhead slaughters a bunch of people. It's been done before, and III was a good example of that, turning people into CD Heads and Cameraheads. I wanted to do something a little different. The script was wonderful - it was a Frankenstein monster story about the maker of the box and how his box - the monster - is killing people.
"The problem was that the money men came up with a budget thay thought the picture could be made for, but they didn't really talk to the filmmakers about it. They were looking into it, but nobody was putting any more money into it. Even Clive told them we needed three more weeks. So we just started pulling scenes out, which can be good and bad. Sometimes when you trim the fat, it makes the movie tighter.
"When I delivered my director's cut, we knew the kills were missing and we had to put those in, but the big concern was that Pinhead was not in the first part of the movie - he came in about 40 minutes into it. Pinhead is in the film, though for me, it's not about him. But they [Dimension/Miramax] wanted to restructure it and essentially turn it into one long story. The script was tight to begin with, and to go back and forth between the time periods is impossible if you want to believe this character is going through any change. Plus, the second act wasn't long enough to make it into a full feature.
"On an artistic level, the final cut I saw did not represent my vision, and it changed enough that I no longer wanted credit. There was a lot of me in there, but there were a number of things in there that I wasn't involved in. That's why I removed my name."

To Surrender Hell

By Anthony C. Ferrante, Fangoria, No 151, April 1996

Pete Atkins : "I'd written six versions of this script: six drafts. And [Miramax] always knew that the 18th century came first and Pinhead didn't appear until the 20th century story. So it's not that anyone could blame Kevin for delaying Pinhead's entrance because that's the way it was written, that's the way it was approved by Miramax.
"But, I think that when they saw the movie they suddenly felt, 'Hey, wait a minute, where's our monster? We made a terrible mistake!' They didn't finger point. They didn't say, 'Oh, it's Pete's fault or it's Kevin's fault!' They just figured, 'We should have known this originally. We should have brought Pinhead in earlier.' "

Hellraiser IV - Bloodline

By Michael Beeler, Cinefantastique, Vol 27 No 2, November 1995

Kevin Yagher : "I could understand the changes they wanted me to make but, for someone who has slept with it, which they didn't do, it's tough to give up what you've kind of created. I had given everything to the one script. So, the bottom line was I had to decide to either basically dedicate another year to the film or go on with my life and continue with other projects. In the end, it wasn't so much the direction that they wanted to take, as it was that I just didn't have the time and energy.
"It was less painful for me to walk away than to sit there and watch it day to day. Then I could just see the final thing and say, 'Well, they did this and they did that to it.' But I didn't have to see every step. It's like pulling butt hairs out... Every day they pluck just one! I would rather they just yanked them all out at once! That's my attitude."

Hellraiser IV - Bloodline

By Michael Beeler, Cinefantastique, Vol 27 No 2, November 1995

Pete Atkins : "Creatively, the most interesting thing as far as I was concerned was that they got Clive back and involved, because he hadn't really been part of Hellraiser III at all... His involvement with Bloodline meant, for me, a similar situation to the one we'd had on Hellraiser II : Hellbound, where Clive and I would knock some ideas around, and then I would go away and turn it into a complete story and a screenplay.
"I have to give Clive credit for the idea of a movie split across three time zones, although his idea was that the first part of the film would be set in Victorian London. The idea of having Hellraiser imagery right in the middle of Jack the Ripper territory was potentially very rich. In passing Clive suggested that what we should do was maybe follow the fortunes of a single family. As soon as he said that, I said, 'Well, if we're going to do a family, let's do the Lemarchand family. Let's forget Victorian London and set it in 18th Century France, and make it about the family of the man who created the Lament Configuration box'. My ulterior motive was that I thought it would nicely frame the Trilogy created by the first three movies...
"What I was trying to achieve with Hellraiser - Bloodline was to bracket the whole mythology that we'd created in the other three films. I wanted to tie up some loose ends. I thought that if someone was sufficiently motivated to do it, they could re-edit the four films in the way they created the Godfather Saga. One epic, five-hour long saga - Hellraiser Chronicles film."

Hell's Scribe

By Anthony Tomlinson, Shivers, No 53, May 1998

Valentina Vargas : "For the first time in my career, I'm playing a villainess in a horror movie, and I'm really loving it. In the third story, Angelique is a Cenobite because she's surrendered to Pinhead, but in the first two tales, she's like a serpent because she'll trick, seduce and manipulate people. They'll think they're in Heaven until she turns around and backstabs them."

Raising Hell

By Simon Bacal, Sci Universe, No 5, February / March 1995

Gary Tunnicliffe : "I have a very strong feeling about how Cenobites should look and we tried to come up with something horrific and yet amusing, something that was obviously insired by the Hellraiser mythos. The new female Cenobite that we came up with fitted the bill superbly. I'm really, really pleased with her, she's the one that I think has come out the best.
"I actually got the idea for her design when I was watching Sister Act, the comedy starring Whoopi Goldberg. It's true, honestly! I was watching these singing nuns and seeing the way their cowls fall down and I thought it would be interesting to do something with flesh rather than material and create a sort of nun from hell. So that's where the idea came from. I thought we'll split her head and pull the skin out to the sides and attach it to her shoulders. And that's what we did.
"We pushed all the bits that women have as high up as they would go and she's very sexy. I did some original concept drawings and usually you lose something when translating the drawings to the screen but it was really pleasing to see that we didn't lose anything and the drawing is virtually identical to the way she ended up."

Sex, Death And Pinhead

By David Howe, Shivers, No 21, September 1995

Peter Atkins: [Re. delayed release] "They needed to do some more shooting. They liked a lot of what they saw but some of it they didn't plus they wanted more. So they brought Doug back and a few of the other cast members and did what they call an enhancement shoot in early April this year. Since then they've been back and reedited. Now, they are about to do another six days of shooting to improve Pinhead's death. The movie will finally be released in March 1996.
[Re. further sequels] "Miramax is very interested, but you have to look at these questions from a creative viewpoint and a financial one. As far as I was concerned, part three was the end creatively. It seemed to round things off. I had taken away the remnants of the human soul that had driven Pinhead at the end of Hellbound when Kirsty reminded him that he was human. Part three, what I wanted to do was tell the story of the dissipated soul, to have the ghost of the English officer who had become Pinhead in 1921 be a driving force in one strand of the narrative and the thoroughly soulless Pinhead the other force. The end I brought them back together, thus putting Pinhead, more or less, in the position he'd been in at the beginning of the first movie. I thought we'd rounded everything off nicely there. But Miramax wanted to do a fourth part and Clive's had the nice idea of a three part which excited my interest. Then I thought, I did the Pinhead story but now I could do the story of the family of the box-maker. I thought that was another interesting thing to add to the mythology. And now I say, touching wood, creatively the series is over. I think from this point on it would be just telling more stories about the box and the demons. So I am not particularly interested in pursuing it. Miramax certainly wants to preserve the franchise. One reason why they are spending the extra money in having this extra shoot is to keep the franchise alive for part five and six."

From The Dog Days To Bloodlines

By [Stephen Dressler and Cheryl Bentzen], Lost Souls, Issue 3, 1996

Gary Tunnicliffe : "We really tried to get the Pinhead makeup back to the essence of what it was in the first film. I also wanted to bring the makeup application down to one-and-a-half hours, which has never, ever been done, and Doug Bradley said it would never, ever be done. Now I have a twenty dollar bill signed by Doug on my wall to commemorate the one-hour-twenty-nine-minute-fifty-seven-second application. We did it and he timed it. The only problem was that it took between three and four hours to do it every day after that."

Hellraiser: Bloodline

US Press Kit, March 1996

Doug Bradley : "The results are uneven, but the first 20 minutes - the bit I'm not in - are as strong as anything in any of the previous movies. I'm happy with it, overall. Certainly it was something of a minor miracle that we had a movie at all."

Truly, Bradley, Creepily

By David Hughes, Fangoria, No 175, August 1998

Doug Bradley : "It was the shoot from Hell, literally! If anything could go wrong, it did. There was a whole raft of bad employment decisions that the producers were rectifying while we were shooting it. Two directors worked on it, Kevin Yagher and Joe Chapelle, and we had a total of four directors of photography. How they managed to sort out the colour grading, God alone knows.
"That's not to say that the film is without merit; some of it is outstanding. The first sequence, in 18th Century France, is as good as anything we shot in all four films. We had the same amount of money as Hellraiser III, but the film was just too ambitious, technically. Part Three was character driven, but Bloodline had a complicated script and specified a major special effect on just about every page. The problems were not helped when the art department and camera crew were sacked at the end of week one. There was a fire, a flood and a strike, and the young boy got chickenpox. Try to pick a movie out of that lot!
"The original ending involved the space station folding up into the puzzlebox. Then a hand came through space, picked up the box and dropped in onto a merchant's table. Back to the first film, we had completed a time loop. When that was dropped, the final shot was going to be the shuttle returning to Earth with a trail of pins following it. Then they dropped the pins, so all you have now is the shuttle flying away."

Hell To Pay

By Nick Joy, Shivers, No 57, September 1998

Pete Atkins : "The similarity [between Wishmaster and Hellraiser], I suppose, is that Pinhead and the Djinn are both talkative bastards, both in love with language and the sound of their own pretensions...
"I'm certainly not ashamed of my screenplay for Bloodline. In fact, people who've seen the original called it the best screenplay of the series. So imagine my disappointment when the movie turned out to be the worst of the lot... the movie is an abortion. Or at least some hybrid child born of three parents at war. It's a mess.
"What's interesting is that the movie, considering its troubled history, didn't actually do that badly. It's certainly a testament to the strength of the franchise that the worst flick in the series could do so well."

Just For The Hell Of It

By Mandy Slater, SFX, No 39, June 1998

Doug Bradley : "It got a bit lost and and a bit muddled, but in the final section of Hellraiser IV you would have seen a bit more of that [eloquent sparring] in the confrontation between Pinhead and Merchant in the final section. Bruce Ramsay, who played Merchant, picked up on that very strongly and it was his call to shave his head for the final section. He also changes his vocal performance, he drops his voice. He was deliberately doing that, he and I discussed it together, he wanted to bring Merchant close to Pinhead and make them become close to each other to the point where they were going to wipe each other out and end the bloodline.
"Unfortunately, the structure of the final part of the film got very heavily tampered with and much of that got lost. It was an immensely complicated storyline for Bloodline and by far and away the most complicated and ambitious of all four of the screenplays. Really too much for the time and money that we were getting."

Done With Demons

By Tom Mes, Project A, [1999] (note : full text online at www.projecta.net)

Doug Bradley : "[Bloodline] was the shoot from hell - it was the most miserable professional experience of my career.
"One of the main differences [from the original concept] for me is the final sequence in space, it's quite clear that what Merchant is doing is two things. He's modelling himself on Pinhead and he's saying, 'Well I'm the end of the bloodline. There will be a fight and I'm taking myself down with you.' And they tack on this stupid silly happy ending, where Merchant has to escape from the space station, which was much more psychologically meaningful and interesting in the original version.
"I mean, I did two weeks of re-shoots, which weren't really re-shoots at all, they were [shooting] whole new material, and there were at least two other sessions which didn't involve me. I think when I left L.A at the end of '94 we had shot the final film. But I couldn't have told you the story if I tried as they were dicking around with the script so much and we probably had a sixth or a seventh of a movie, so we rescued something from that."

Pins And Needles

By Chris Fullwood, Firelight Shocks, Issue 4, September 2002