AN EXISTENTIAL ANALYTIC OF LIMINAL TRANSGRESSIVE EKSTASIS:

Or, The Ephemeral Horizon of Abjection, Desire, and Death in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser

Carlon Robbins

PHIL 6120
Emanuela Bianchi, PhD.
Department of Philosophy
UNC Charlotte
December 2010
 Of central importance in what follows is the way in which a space situated for an

ontology of the meaning of the experience of death and horror is opened up by a critical analysis

of an ecstatic transgression of liminality that occludes subjectivity occurring at the horizon of

death, abjection, and desire as represented in the contemporary horror film. In that the abject, as

described by Julia Kristeva, is that which threatens to cross, and/or crosses, “borders,” or

“thresholds” of liminality in which identities become ruptured or convoluted, Clive Barker’s film

Hellraiser will prove to be of great “sacrificial” or “erotic” import, in the sense offered by the

theory of Georges Bataille. As will be shown, when the theoretical concepts of these thinkers are

put into conversation, a form of “ethical” sacrifice is found in the given film and the horror genre

in general. This idea will help to clarify Martin Heidegger’s ontological purview of Being-

toward-death. But to put all the frames into proper perspective the analysis begins by placing the

latter into perspective, then moving in proper order to the sacrificial notion of eroticism found in

Bataille, Kristeva’s concept of the abject, and culminating with the descriptive analysis of

Hellraiser.

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger analyzes the concept of Being, which, he argues,

has been forgotten or presupposed in some manner by traditional ontology in such a way that

renders it so “obvious” that the very philosophical engagement with the question has been

ignored. His goal, then, is the phenomenological, existential, and hermeneutical retrieval of both

the question and, more importantly, the meaning of Being—a methodology he refers to as

“existential analytic.” The term “existential” here is distinguished from the similar term, is

“existentiell.” The latter concerns the ontic questions of existence, whereas the former concerns

the ontological. The ontic refers to the being of some thing in general, e.g. particular modes of

science study particularly types of being. However, the ontological pertains to the understanding

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of Being itself. Within this enormous pursuit of the meaning of Being, Heidegger conceives the

particular type of being, amongst the number of entities, who have the capacity for an

ontological understanding (i.e. human beings) as Dasein, a term which means, “being there.”

Dasein, at least in part, is constituted by several fundamental factors such as “facticity” or

“thrownness,” which is to say, the being-in-the-world of each Dasein. Additionally,

compounding the facticity of each Dasein is her/his historicity, the particular place in time,

culture, and the social of each individual Dasein.

According to Heidegger, there are two ways of being in one’s facticity or thrownness.

The first is the way in which the vast majority of Daseins go about being-in-the-world, which is

inauthenticity. The other mode of being-in-the-world, one that Heidegger’s philosophy

encourages us to manifest, is authenticity—that mode of being in which each Dasein is her/his

ownmost, or in vulgar terms, s/he is her/his “own person.” Crucial to Dasein is its ability to

recognize and exude its ownmost authenticity, its being its “ownmost” rather than being what

Heidegger calls Das Man, “the One,” or “the They” which refers to modes of being in which

Dasein is caught up or subsumed into the social. Of even greater importance is the ontological

delimitation of Dasein’s ownmost being precisely in its angst-laden mode of being-in-the-world

which is Being-toward-death—“the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein.”1

For Heidegger, death is that to which every Dasein is propelled as soon as one comes into

Existenz (existence). The death of every individual Dasein is, also, her/his ownmost “absolute

impossibility,” or finality. In other words, everyone will die, and no one can die in the place of

another. Although, it may be the case that one can die for another, such as through dying to save

1
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans., John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, (New York: Harper & Row,
1962), 294.

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the life of another, every Dasein dies her/his own death—a fate no one can escape. Dasein’s

mood of being-in-the-world as being-toward-death is angst, or anxiety—in this case being not so

much the mode of fear as anticipation.

Dasein is constituted by disclosedness—that is, by an understanding with a state-

of-mind. Authentic Being-towards-death can not evade its ownmost non-relational
possibility, or cover up this possibility by thus fleeing from it, or give a new
explanation for it to accord with the common sense of the “they”. In our
existential projection of an authentic Being-towards-death, therefore, we must set
forth those items in such a Being which are constitutive for it as an understanding
of death—and as such an understanding in the sense of Being towards this
possibility without either fleeing it or covering it up.2
It is through the circumscription of Dasein in her/his historicity, in/through anxiety in one’s

ownmost being-toward-death, that Dasein is able to reconfigure and engender her/his existential

authenticity through the recognition of death. For Heidegger, once Dasein recognizes and is able

to incorporate an authentic Being-toward-death, s/he is (re)situated, again in authenticity, and

capable of existence in her/his ownmost historicity, this time without self-subordination into the

Das Man. Yet, for as coherent, and perhaps even reassuring, as Heidegger’s notion is, it

unfortunately remains lacking. In short, the problem in trying to account for an ontology of death

in Heidegger’s thought has to do with the simple fact that it is not something we can experience.

Once we die, that is it. Even though Heideggerian thought allows us to authentically cognizant of

our end, there is no space for the interiorization of death that allows for the meaning of death.

Heidegger’s thought fails to consider the possibility of “substitutions” for death, even the

ownmost death of each Dasein. Substitution here is not be confused with the idea contrary to

Heidegger that suggests that one can die in the place of another. But there remains a problem to

be confronted regarding the rupture of subjectivity in the face of the death of the other procures a

2
Ibid., 304-304.

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generative psychological and ontological hermeneutic of our ownmost finality. In its lacuna,

Heidegger’s conceptualization leaves vacant the desire and need for identification with the other,

and/or sublimation, particularly through the undoing or rupture of subjectivity in the space of the

abject and transgression—in the victims, the sacrificed, or the tortured. The sacrificial notion

here is of ontological import. Heidegger’s own “fundamental ontology,” although not explicitly

stating as much, circumscribes itself within a tacit religiosity. This may be in part due to his

theological training, but nonetheless, the construction of his “unitarian” ontology resonates with

the sense of a mode of “sacred”-Being. In the post-“death of God” world inhabited by Heidegger,

such a proposition at first may seem to “beg the question.” However, conjoining this inference

with theories of one of Heidegger’s contemporaries, Georges Bataille, whose work can be

described as an atheological ontology of transgression, the question, and in fact the necessity, of

the inclusion of the sacred in the analysis of Being, not only becomes clear but, shows the

fundamental void left by Heidegger’s reconstitution of Dasein in its historicity.

In the philosophy of Bataille, existence is grounded in “base materialism”—a concept

proposed in rejection of the popular notions of “dialectical materialism,” and “ontological

materialism,” which, as Fred Botting and Scott Wilson explain, “anticipates the distinction that

Jacques Lacan made between ‘the Real’ and a Marxian notion of social reality.”3 They continue

by positing that Denis Hollier suggests Bataille’s base materialism is a type of “duality”—

existence comprised of two “totalities.” On the fundamental level, there is the totality of base

matter itself, and this is layered by the secondary totality that becomes comparable to the level of

social totality or reality, which is constituted in language. As Bataille states, “Base matter is

external and foreign to ideal human aspirations, and it refuses to allow itself to be reduced to the

3
Fred Botting and Scott Wilson, Bataille: A Critical Reader, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998), 9.

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great ontological machines resulting from these aspirations.”4 These two modes of totality,

Botting and Wilson continue, are linked to two notions of expenditure:

the first referring to ‘the cosmic movement of energy’ that underlies production,
that enables, or ‘produces’, production in order to have more to expend, and the
second involving the language, the unconscious and the ‘form’ that productive
activity (thought, work, dream-work) takes, and the detours and deferrals that it
effects (without cause) in the continual movement of expenditure.5
This ontological ground is that in/from which the human emerges as an animal with the capacity

to distinguish itself from the world of animality through four essential characteristics, not only

language, but that which is ultimately linked to the symbolic, what Bataille calls the “utilitarian”

world of work. Similarly to Heidegger’s Dasein is the characteristic of the capacity for

recognition of death. Finally, but most importantly for Bataille, is the distinctly human

characteristic for eroticism, i.e. a mode of sexuality (or desire) which is not based on “genital

finality”6—the utilitarian production of offspring. This fourth characteristic Bataille equates

to/with religion.

The critical question then is, what is “religion” or the “sacred,” according to Bataille, and

how is related to eroticism—and further how are these two categories related to death? In what is

perhaps his most highly intricate and consolidated text dealing with the subject, Erotism: Death

& Sensuality, Bataille’s opening statement reads, “Eroticism, it may be said, is assenting to life

up to the point of death.”7 This assent is a reflection or manifestation of the fact of human

existence as discontinuous beings. It is in this sense that the thought of Bataille and Heidegger

converge, yet this confluence is evanescent. Discontinuity is a gulf that exists between separate

4
Georges Bataille, “Base Materialism and Gnosticism,” Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and
trans. by Allan Stoekl, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 51.
5
Botting and Wilson, Bataille, 9.
6
Bataille, Visions of Excess, 118.
7
Georges Bataille, Erotism: Death & Sensuality, trans. by Mary Dalwood, (San Francisco: City Lights, 1986), 11.

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individuals, and in a tone of similitude with Heidegger Bataille states, “If you die, it is not my

death. You and I are discontinuous beings.”8 However, Bataille’s thought quickly exacerbates

this existential gulf, which he says, cannot be referred to “without feeling that this is not the

whole truth of the matter. It is a deep gulf, [one which cannot] be done away with. None the less,

we can experience its dizziness together. It can hypnotise us. This gulf is death in one sense, and

death is vertiginous, death is hypnotising.”9 He further articulates that death is identifiable with

what he terms continuity, and these concepts are likewise fascinating. It is this (perhaps morbid)

mesmerizing enticement that is, according to Bataille, the dominant constituent of eroticism.

Thus, the erotic, for Bataille, represents the space of both desire and rupture, the site of

death, whether actual, metaphorical, or symbolic. He later divides eroticism into three

taxonomies: physical, emotional, and religious. But the shared scope of each type of eroticism is

the exchange of the experience or feeling of discontinuity in the subject with that of a intense

continuity. It is precisely an experience of the primordial continuity—while comported in the

world of utility, calculation, temporality, differentiation, and the symbolic, i.e. discontinuity—

that human beings so urgently long for in the depths of their being. In another of his texts,

Theory of Religion, Bataille parallels this desire to the appellation of the search or longing for the

immediate immanence of all Being. In other words, it is this selfsame ontological ground, from

which eroticism, ecstasy, the “experience” of shattering in the face of death, and ultimately that,

which is to be defined as “religion,” emerge.

Religion, whose essence is the search for lost intimacy, comes down to the effort
of clear consciousness which wants to be a complete self-consciousness: but this
effort is futile, since consciousness of intimacy is possible only at a level where
consciousness is no longer an operation whose outcome implies duration, that is,

8
Ibid., 12.
9
Ibid., 13.

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 at the level where clarity, which is the effect of the operation, in no longer
given.10
In many ways, “religion” as outlined above seems to return its meaning to the etymological root

found in the Latin re-ligo (to tie or bind, again).11 As it is implicated with “bondage,” the

linguistic condition of religion, then, ontologically confers itself to a form of conjugality,

unification, or undifferentiation. This is tacit to the notion that the essence of religion is the

search for intimacy. But what is it that is being bound, conjoined, or unified? What is the nature

of the intimacy in question, and to whom, or what, is it that this intimacy has been lost?

To arrive at the answers to these questions, it is first vital, however, to clarify what

Bataille means by “religion,” as well as to filter the signification of “religion,” as appropriated,

through or away from common descriptive categorizations. Although Bataille does not spell out

a standardized definition of religion, his various synecdochical circumlocutions point to a

generalizable normative conception of the meaning of religion. In his work The Tears of Eros,

Bataille reminds us that, “We usually associate religion with law and reason. But if we confine

ourselves to what ground religions as a whole, we are forced to reject this notion.”12 Religion,

Bataille informs us, is subversive; it is transgressive in its paradoxical relation to law. “At least,”

he continues, “what it demands is excess, sacrifice, and the feast, which culminated in ecstasy.”13

For Bataille, it is this fundamental linkage to sacrifice and excess which religion is itself bound.

He suggests in the essay “The Notion of Expenditure,” that, “Cults require a bloody

wasting of men and animals in sacrifice. In the etymological sense of the word, sacrifice is

10
Georges Bataille, Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley, (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 57.
11
Latin Concise Dictionary, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003).
12
Bataille, Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor, (San Francisco: City Lights, 1989), 71.
13
Ibid., 72.

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nothing other than the production of sacred things.”14 The sacrificial victim is bound to the altar.

The sacrifier is bound to his rites. Additionally, it is religion which binds individuals to their

community of established rites, laws, and order, as well as that which binds them to the ground

of Being marked by the undifferentiated continuity. Nevertheless, as Bataille makes clear, the

potentiality for this continuity within a discontinuous existence that is transient is itself only

temporary.

We are discontinuous beings, individuals who perish in isolation in the midst of

an incomprehensible adventure, but we yearn for our lost continuity. We find the
state of affairs that binds us to our random and ephemeral individuality hard to
bear. Along with our tormenting desire that this evanescent thing should last,
there stands our obsession with a primal continuity linking us with everything that
is.15
Finally, linking back all the seemingly disparate parts of the Bataillean corpus to that articulated

in Erotism, it is confirmed that the interstice of violation, or transgression, is “in essence, the

domain of eroticism.”16 Religion then, is not structurated by law, morality, and differentiated

experience, as held in the traditions. It is that violent provocation which establishes boundaries,

limits, taboos, if only ultimately to violate them. Eroticism/religion is the site of “disequilibrium

in which the being consciously calls his own existence in question.” It is that space that is no

space (chora) at/beyond the liminality where, as Bataille puts it, “the being loses himself

deliberately, but then [by wording it as such] the subject is identified with the object losing his

identity. If necessary I can say in eroticism: I am losing myself.”17

As already alluded to, this rupture of self, consciousness, or discontinuity, occurs in the

space of convergence of desire, taboo, prohibition, sin, transgression, violation, perversity, death,

14
Bataille, Visions of Excess, 119.
15
Bataille, Erotism, 15.
16
Ibid., 16.
17
Ibid., 31.

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murder, sacrifice, blood, horror—in short, the abject. Such notions may heighten the sensors of

the ethical watchdogs of the world. If continuity is that which all humans, in the very core of

their being, desire, and in some way or another have lost since discontinuity entered human

existence, and it is correlative to violent transgression, how is it to be had in, as Bataille puts it,

“ethical civilization?” Before answering that question, it is necessary to examine the other side of

this phenomenon—that outside of the consciousness necessitated by the being of the

discontinuous human being in its desirous contingency of the manqué—lack.

Whereas Bataille’s corpus focuses on the inner experience “assented to” at/within these

transgressive limits, the work of psychoanalyst /philosopher, Julia Kristeva directly addresses

that which stands in the periphery of the thresholds and is the phenomena that threatens those

very boundaries that establish law, order, taboo and prohibition, and the very discontinuous

parameters of identity. Indeed, in The Powers of Horror, Kristeva pitches us outside of

familiarity, comfort, and our very selves. At the core is the concept of the abject, that which

defies or threatens boarders, transgresses limits, and crosses thresholds. It is that which is neither

subject nor object, neither inside nor outside, and that which is thought of as something that was

once a part of my “self” that no longer is. When the abject crosses the threshold, the subject is

undone, after which the subject attempts to shore up the boundaries again. Kristeva indicates:

The abject is not an ob-ject facing me, which I name or imagine. Nor is it an ob-
ject, an otherness ceaselessly fleeing in a systematic quest of desire. What is
abject is not my correlative which, providing me with someone or something else
as support, would allow me to be more or less detached and autonomous. The
abject has only one quality of the object—that of being opposed to I. if the object,
however, through its opposition, settles me within the fragile texture of a desire
for meaning, which, as a matter of fact, makes me ceaselessly and infinitely

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 homologous to it, what is abject, on the contrary, the jettisoned object, is radically
excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses.18
The threatening nature of the abject causes an intense anxiety about the security of one’s

selfhood. But what is the phenomenal thing being described as abject which generates such fear,

disgust, and the undoing of subjectivities? What is to be gestured to which is fits no boundaries

including those of subject and object? Kristeva provides several disgusting, morbid, and macabre

examples these abject things. The seemingly less dizzying samples include the likes of the

surface skin of warm milk. But the degree of abjection increases with the disgust of the particular

samples, such things as whatever is filthy, particular items of food, sweat, urine, pus, vomit,

feces, blood, and other bodily wounds, fluids, or wastes. The abject includes anything of decay,

defilement, repugnance, nausea, fear, and loathing. But one of the most significant examples of

the abject is, “the corpse (or cadaver: cadere, to fall), that which has irremediably come a

cropper, is cesspool, and death; it upsets even more violently the one who confronts it as fragile

and fallacious chance.”19

These vile entities conjure up or foreshadow one’s ownmost possibility of impossibility,

that ultimate undoing: death. The abject can be that which was once identifiably a part of

oneself; physically, emotionally, or psychologically, but is cast out of oneself in some way. As

Kristeva makes clear, the abject is that which “‘I’ do not assimilate, ‘I’ expel it. [However]… I

expel myself, I spit myself out, I abject myself within the same motion through which ‘I’ claim

to establish myself.”20 This “I,” the “ego” of psychoanalysis, or simply the subject, is the identity

formulated and constructed by, and in the field of, language, or in Lacanian terminology the

Symbolic. Following the work of Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan (re)configured psychoanalysis
18
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1982), 1-2.
19
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 3.
20
Ibid.

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through Structuralism, the school of thought in Linguistics founded by Ferdinand de Saussure.

With this particular proclivity in place, the dimension of language becomes primary for an

understanding of the formation of subjectivity. Lacan divided what, for lack of such a

designation in his work, amounts to the ontological, into three registers or orders: the Real, the

Imaginary, and the Symbolic.

In short, the first is the “real” state of being prior to constraints implanted on the human

through her/his engagement in/with the world, or subjection to the Law. The middle term is the

register in which the human child of approximately six-months-old enters what Lacan referred to

as the “mirror stage.” It is here where the ego formation of the “ideal-I” occurs when the child,

either literally or figuratively, perceives its reflection in a mirror in conjunction with that of the

parental. The “I” or “self” then, is not an intrinsically located, or stable, identity or unity.21 The

last register is, in essence, the dimension of language in which the spectral self reaches

culmination as a placeholder in the system of signification. Thus, just as with Heidegger and

Bataille, the psychoanalytic genealogy from Freud, to Lacan, to Kristeva, all share the

fundamental premise that the subject is a non-essentialist element of the human individual. It is

rather produced and formulated through the engagement within the social world that is

demarcated by utility, temporality, and language.

It is precisely because of the “illusionary” characteristic of the “I” that covers over the

fragmentary nature of the libidinal subterranean being that confrontation with the abject causes

the spewing forth of the “self” from itself in horror. Complicating the anxiety accompanying the

confrontation with the abject, however, is the bubbling up of desire. In Lacanian psychoanalysis,

21
Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, (East Sussex: Routledge, 1996), 117-116.

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desire is always in relation to lack (manque in Lacanian terminology22). This complex

constitution results in the “binding” of fear with desire. In that abjection was in some way of the

interiority of the body, but is that exuded, that of the exteriority; in the presence of, or at the

space of the abject, the affect of the subject is irrupted. The attempt at compensation emerges in

the space of collapsing borders.

Urine, blood, sperm, excrement then show up in order to reassure a subject that is
lacking its “own and clean self.” The abjection of those flows from within
suddenly become the sole “objet” of sexual desire—a true “ab-ject” where man,
frightened, crosses over the horrors of maternal bowels and, in an immersion that
enables him to avoid coming face to face with an other, spares himself the risk of
castration. But at the same time that immersion gives him the full power of
possessing, if not being, the bad object that inhabits the maternal body. Abjection
then takes the place of the other, to the extent of affording him jouissance…
transforms the abject into the site of the Other.23
As indicated in this passage, an important element or motif in Kristeva’s understanding of the

abject, specifically as it relates to the formation of desire, is the maternal, the feminine, or the

womb. It is this space (this chora—“receptacle”) from which the child is “thrown” into the

Being. Until the time of its final differentiation from the maternal body in the Symbolic, the child

finds its nourishment, pleasure, and comfort in, on, and from, the maternal body. Thus, the

maternal becomes the site of abjection—the child sets up her/his own borders. Although the term

used above in the designation of pleasure, jouissance,24 also has explicit reference to orgasm

(also known as la petite mort – “the little death”), or by extension lust, in Lacan’s corpus, it also

stands in relation to the “dark” desire of Thanatos, “the death drive,” as well as with excess.25

Upon coming to an ontological and metapsychological horizon interconnecting the

theories centered on the question of the meaning of death in anxiety, transgression, ecstasy,

22
Ibid., 95.
23
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 53-54.
24
Evans, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 91-92.
25
Richard Boothby, Freud as Philosopher: Metapsychology After Lacan, (New York: Routledge, 2001), 150-154.

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abjection, and desire, attention must be (re)turned to the questioned raised above regarding the

(re)attunement of the being of the human to the “lost intimacy” of the ground of continuity. Yet,

as whatever shock accompanying its summit should at this juncture be sublimated, recall

Bataille’s emphatic necessity on violent transgression, particularly as it is the sacrificial rite that

acts as the conduit between the discontinuous being’s existence, and the undifferentiated “inner

experiential” domain of continuity. The perplexity lies in the question of a tumultuous sacrificial

method for “ethical civilization.” What Bataille proposed as a “substitute” for physical violent

transgression (which relates to his three types of eroticism), is, in short, literature, although he

specifically uses the word “poetry” at the end of the introduction to Erotism.

He argues that he can make the concept of continuity “more readily felt, [as] ideas not to

be fully identified with the theologians’ concept of God, by reminding”26 us of the violent poetry

of Rimbaud. It is poetry he says, that “leads to the same place as all forms of eroticism—to the

blending and fusion of separate objects. It leads us to eternity, it leads us to death, and through

death to continuity.”27 By extension, however, the flexibility of this line of thought should do

well to incorporate the world of drama that is linked to literature, and even further, in our

“technological age,” to that of cinema in which we find the similitude of the textual with the

added dimension of the orchestrated visual. The major task of the aesthetic is, as viewed by both

Bataille and Kristeva then, is to beget a catharsis on par with that of ritual purification.

With serious consideration to the transgressive necessity circumscribed by Bataille, the

cinematic genre in focus is horror. Nevertheless, to do justice to the argument, this is narrowed to

the occlusion one particular film of relative contemporaneity, Clive Barker’s 1987 film

26
Bataille, Erotism, 24.
27
Ibid., 25.

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Hellraiser.28 The film is the first of a series of nine cinematic adaptations of Barker’s 1986

novella The Hellbound Heart. The film is set in an undisclosed locale in England, and staged

primarily in a relatively old, sinister, and gothic house into which Larry Cotton and his second

wife Julia are moving. Yet, unbeknownst to them at the time is that fact that Larry’s brother

Frank (what’s left of him), who they thought had abandoned the house, is entombed in the

floorboard of an upstairs room which might be likened to the chora.

In this “receptacle,” or “sacrificial space,” of the opening scene, we find Frank after he

has purchased “the box” in a dingy café of sorts somewhere in North Africa. In addition, it is this

space, indeed, which centers the mise-en-scène of the scene itself, but foreshadows the

reoccurring chiaroscuro composition of the overall film. In this dark and dusty room, Frank sits

in a yogic like posture squarely entrenched by candles while he anxiously attempts to open the

puzzle box and unleash its mysterious pleasures. Here too, the visual effect undergirds the

thematic dimension of the present analysis. Very clearly, the liminal parameter between

inside/outside, sacred/profane, natural/supernatural, and pleasure/pain, etc., is established by the

illuminated demarcation of Frank and the puzzle box which serves as an axis mundi—cosmic

center or axis point that functions as the threshold between extradimensional realms, composed

of both feminine and masculine parts.

Momentarily, the dust begins to unsettle, ominous smoky light peers through the skeletal

remains of the walls reminiscent of exposed ribs. An exquisite foreboding engulfs the room as

Frank’s coyly operating fingers begin to unlock the puzzle box. The portentous sound of

incantatious bells breaks the subsuming silence bringing a paradoxically troubled but curious

28
Hellraiser: 20th Anniversary Edition, DVD, directed by Clive Barker, (1987; United Kingdom: New World
Pictures, 2007).

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expression to Frank’s sweat covered face. It is all one can bear to do not to turn aware in abject

terror as hooked chains, lightening forth from box now in a solar reconfiguration, penetrate and

rip Frank’s flesh in morbidly voluptuous agony.

A cinematographical transition from the Reaction Shot of the tortured Frank via the

echoic effect of his ololygé (Ὀλολύγε—“sacrificial scream”29), to the Establish shot of the

framing the decrepit house in which all but minor exterior plot developments occur. Although

the details are not elaborated on in the film, perhaps from presupposition that viewers are

familiar with the novella, the puzzle box is more properly known as the Lemarchand’s Box or

the “Lament Configuration.” It is the product of an 18th century French merchant and toymaker,

Philip Lemarchand, who was obsessed with the occult. As mentioned, the box is a threshold

between worlds, or as the Lead Cenobite, Pinhead, indicates in a later scene, “it is a means to

summon us.” These Cenobites (a term that stems from the Latin coenobium meaning “common

life” and referring to a monastic Christian order originating in 4th CEN Egypt30 signifying their

hierophantic status) are extradimensional being—former humans who unlocked the Lemarchand

Box. Once crossing the periphery between dimensions, the Cenobites must subject their

summoner(s) to an excessive, gut wrenching form of sadomasochism, which ultimately results in

the fatal butchery of the summoner’s “soul,” after which she/he is taken with the Cenobites to

their “hellish” dimension known as the Labyrinth.

It is these four beings: Pinhead, the Female Cenobite, also known as The High Priestess,

Chatterbox, and Butterball, shown in the frame as viewers are taken back to the room—a

macabre scene of dizzying proportions. The butchered remains of Frank are rummaged through

29
Boothby, Freud as Philosopher, 184.
30
Goehring, James E. “Withdrawing from the Desert: Pachomius and the development of Village Monasticism in
Upper Egypt.” Harvard Theological Review Vol. 89, No. 3 (1996): 267-285.

- 15 -
by the grimy ghostly pale hands of Pinhead who repositions the remaining sections of what was

Frank’s face on the floorboard. Chains and hooks of various sizes twirl around the room

glistening with blood, and circumnavigating several spinning beams that are decorated with a

perplexing array of mangled pieces of flesh, skulls, and other bone fragments, and several

ceramic phalluses. The frame moves into a close-up shot of Pinhead reconfiguring the box into

its closed form. His putrid index finger following the line of the circle in the center the box,

pushing the two open layers back together, the visual effect a metaphoric of conjoining phallic

and vaginal sections, all their instruments of pain, and the excess remains of the annihilated

Frank all vanish into thin air.

With this overwhelmingly shocking and macabre opening scene, Clive Barker positions

the spectators of his film, from the very beginning, in a highly fractured, and vulnerable, yet

mesmerized state. A smooth transition takes us immediately into the actual storyline of the film

with Larry and Julia finally getting the front door of “the old homestead” unlocked. It is clear

from the outset that Julia is not happy. Although there are no signs of an abusive relationship,

Julia’s facial expressions, and meanderings from Larry’s presence indicate that she is a woman

left wanting. She discovers what she takes to be evidence of squatters upstairs and calls for Larry

who, when arrives, provides the alternate hypothesis that Frank must have been there. The very

mention of Frank puts Julia bodily and facially in an awkward constitution. The viewer is left

guessing: what is it we are missing about Frank? Why does Julia react the way she does at the

simply mention of his name? The ring of a telephone disrupts the scene, Larry asks, “What the

hell is that?” in such a manner as to signify the very enclosure of disruption and heightened

anxiety.

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 “Kirsty!” exclaims Larry after answering the phone. The conversation—its tone, mood,

and metaphor, and the simultaneity of screen shots between the facial expressions of the two

characters begins to deepen the establishment of the story as essentially a “family saga” as

Barker describes it in the commentary. In an intricate cut of parallel development, viewers are

pulled into “a number of storylines” simultaneously with Julia rummaging through dirty, and

provocative, photos of Frank with a masked prostitute, as Kirsty’s negative Oedipus

complexities31 bubble up to the surface engaging in dialogue with her father. The doubling of

sexual desires is both perplexing and captivating as Larry’s mannerisms switch to a more

manifestly positive and happy mode of being. Julia is caught up in her own rapturous

engagement with the images of Frank.

Aided by psychoanalytic theory, a very intriguing sexual matrix is uncovered in the

(inter)relationship of the characters: Larry, Julia, Frank, and Kirsty that eventually unfolds. The

structure of the storyline hinges on S&M undertones of dominance and submission, equally

gendered by the opposite couplings (i.e. Larry/Kirsty: submissive, Frank/Julia: dominant).32 This

is, perhaps simply but importantly, a synecdochical quality of the personalities of the characters,

which serves as a reflection of the underlying dichotomous philosophy of S&M, and themes

suggested by a Bataillean analysis, of the transgression of limits, or binaries. In S&M, the

boundary between pain and pleasure disintegrates, and the end sought by participants in the

scenes is ekstasis—“to stand outside oneself.” In Hellraiser, all boundaries are up for violation,

including, the very foreclosure of identities being positioned by the character development. This

in turn is naturally becomes woven into the fabric of a Bataillean valuation of the film which

shall be returned to.

31
Evans, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 127-130.
32
Thomas S. Weinberg ed. S&M: Studies in Dominance & Submission, (Amherst: Prometheus, 1995).

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 With the spark reignited for Frank, Julia agrees to move in. The following Sunday Kirsty

pays a visit to the house in which Julia is upstairs unpacking and Larry is attempting to move the

marital bed up the stairwell with the aid of two moving men, and the viewers are taken into a

very rich and complex deployment of simultaneity. Kirsty, who attempts to make coffee,

becomes drenched with water by the exploding kitchen faucet, as Larry returns to get the bed

moved. Meanwhile, Julia begins to have a physically and emotionally affectual flashback to her

passionate transgressive affair with Frank. Flashing back to their meeting, Frank stands at the

doorway of the newlywed home in the pouring rain. The younger Julia is cast in radiant light,

and her excitement builds for the mysterious brother Frank. As far as the horror genre goes, it is

incredible interesting here that Frank waits until being invited in, much like that of a traditional

vampire. This factor seems to maintain a foreshadowing play on Frank’s resurrected role as an

undead being.

Julia’s flashback is interrupted at the precise moment that Frank, stepping in from the

rain, asks, “do you have a towel?” by Kirsty’s, “have you got a towel?” Julia slips her photo of

Frank in her pocket, directs Kirsty to a towel, and slips away into the room in which Frank was

annihilated to continue remembering her affair with him in private. Her memory returns to their

erotic occurrence where she was thrown on top of her wedding dress lying across the bed. The

interplay of frames between the sex scene and the bed-moving scene “climaxes” with the

orgasmic ecstasy of Julia simultaneously interlaced with Larry’s hand being gashed open by a

protruding nail in the stair rail (what Barker metaphorically refers to as “the nailing and the nail”

in the film commentary). Larry slowly makes his way upstairs to locate Julia in the room; the

multiple drops of blood exuding from the abject vaginal-like wound of his hand are miraculously

absorbed into the nail holes in the floorboard.

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 From a Kristevan perspective, a plethora of relevant symbolism is being brought to the

surface in this multilayered scene, the most obvious of the psychoanalytical elements at play in

this development if, of course, the impending desire emergent in Julia. In that women are

always-already outside of the Symbolic, or patriarchal social order, an interesting question arises

as to the play of identity formulations in the film. Typically standard models position the male in

such configurations to embody a desire for the female. The female, on the other hand, as at least

tacitly gestured to in the description of psychoanalytic theory above, generally represents the site

of lack. In psychoanalytic terms, what we see before the fadeout, now at the end of the Inciting

Action, in what shall henceforward be called the “sacrificial room of abjection,” and/or the

chora, is the primacy of the phallic mother (or feminine) and the male whose primordial

psychological fear has just come true, that of castration or emasculation.

The notion of “castration anxiety” is an ever-present theme throughout the range of

psychoanalytic theory. Briefly, “castration anxiety” is an unconscious fear presumably motivated

by the young boy’s sight of female genitalia, which is psychological and symbolic structured as

“wounded,” or lacking by the patriarchal order.33 This metaphorical castration of Larry at play

in the scene forecloses his Symbolic significance as the bearer of the phallus—i.e. offsetting

Julia’s “generative” desire for Frank with her relational position as the dominant to Larry, albeit

that they have been playing the Symbolic roles of patriarchy, the underlying fecundity and power

of the desire symbolic emerges in Larry’s emasculation. In effect, Julia’s desire has already won,

and taken its place in the Symbolic register as the power of the phallic feminine/mother. Larry’s

engaging moment with Julia percolates her “maternal instincts” to the surface as she caringly

“mothers” Larry’s abject hand. Foreshadowing the Rising Action about to occur with the rising

33
Evans, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 20-24.

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of the object of Julia’s desire, which is abjection, we can see that “The eroticization of abjection,

and perhaps any abjection to the extent that it is already eroticized, is an attempt at stopping the

hemorrhage: a threshold before death.”34

Larry’s being marked by the wound of castration symbolizes this foreclosure. He

manifests castration. He stands at the threshold of his life; he is the embodiment of Being-

toward-death, in that he could not take up the mantle of the true object of Julia’s desire. He is

that archetypal form of the weak rival—albeit his brother, Frank, rather than their father.

Although no character’s age is revealed in the film, the play on the personality traits has a

significant bearing on the symbolic exchange at work in this interpretation. Whether or not Larry

is older than Frank is of little importance to the fact that the former’s assimilation and

internalization of the super-ego, i.e. Symbolic, that is representational of the “Father.” Thus, in

the psychological matrices that undergirds the interplay of cathexes, desires, and sublimation,

recast the soon to return Frank in the position of the filial rival of the Father.35 It is interesting to

note that during this scene, Larry continuously says, “I’m going to throw up,” and “I’m so

stupid.” metaphorically indicating his own approach to the abject, his naiveté of Julia’s taboo

desire and affair, as well as his rejection.36

Once Kirsty and Julia rush Larry to the hospital, various abject body parts of Frank

resurrect from the floorboard in the “sacrificial room of abjection;” the house itself then, by this

reading, manifests as the abject maternal body, with the room as the womb—the semiotic chora.

This room of interiorization becomes the incubating womb of abjection for the most retched and

vile beings (re)emerging from its lining by Larry’s blood. This is abject by all Kristevan

34
Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 55.
35
Evans, Lacanian Psychoanalysis, 127-130.
36
Ibid., 2-4

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descriptions—the reanimating, reforming, re-solving, rebirthing corpse. A foreboding undead

creature of much, blood, bile, vomitous slime, pus, and cadaverous lymph-nodal tissue lifts itself

up on its nubby arms and echoes the painful screech last hurt bellowing from its lungs prior to its

horrendous destruction.

Later viewers learn how powerful and extreme Julia’s desire is after she leaves Larry,

Kirsty and their guests, presumably to go to bed, and returns to the “sacrificial room of

abjection” as if being beckoned into the lair by an unknown force. Her initial fright when

encountering her resurrected lover quickly fades, accepting the horrendous reborn “undead”

creature that is the “abject-object” of her desire. Her paradoxicality positions her in such a dread

disgust that she embodies the desperate wish to flee, but simultaneously, in apprehension of her

lover she is rooted to the spot where she stands. On the idea of the abjection of self, represented

here, Kristeva writes,

If it be true that the abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject,
one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that
subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside,
finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very
being, that it is none other than abject. The abjection of self would be the
culminating form of that experience of the subject to which it is revealed that all
its object are based merely on the inaugural loss that laid the foundations of its
own being. There is nothing like the abjection of self to show that all abjection is
in fact recognition of the want on which any being, meaning, language, or desire
is founded.37
In the aforementioned scene, represented by the friends who have passed into the interior

world—they become demonstrations to Julia’s own eyes of her inability to fill the placeholder of

Larry’s wife, the being of the phallus. Now, Julia, in the impossibility of conforming to the

Symbolic registry finalizes the disavowal of the Symbolic in the recognition of her own being as

37
Ibid., 5.

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abjection in and through the confrontation with the “abject-object” of her desire in Frank—

whose being has become the impossible possibility.

It was the dissemination of Larry’s blood that brought Frank back from “hell” this far—

now all he needs is more. Therefore, Julia’s desire to have Frank again is a desire beyond/

without limits. Julia begins her quest is willing to hunt and lure other men to be sacrificial

victims bludgeoned with several blows of a hammer to the head, offered up to the “abject-object”

of her desire. Through the Rising action, Julia ultimately brings three men to their macabre and

sacrificial demise. It is only prior to the third victim that Larry brings his troubles to Kirsty over

dinner, explaining to her that whatever it is that Julia won’t leave the house for, whatever it is

that he feels she’s “waiting for,” is completely “beyond him.” He asks the favor of Kirsty that

she pay Julia a visit and try to “make friends.” Kirsty discretely follows Julia and her victim into

the house; only after she hears the ruckus upstairs does she cross the boundary into the world of

the abject and macabre. From the “sacrificial room” the heavily decomposed body of the last

victim reaches toward her whimpering, “Help me.” She reaches slowly toward the hopeless

figure—Uncle Frank jumps from behind him and grabs her, reformed up to his gory muscle

fibers, but still skinless and horrifying.

Here, clearly is the threatening abject crossing the periphery of the Symbolic order,

rupturing any stable ground of selfhood in the process. But in her attempt to maneuver around

her undead uncle, Kirsty is forced into the “sacrificial room” and corned by the monster. In her

struggle to escape, Kirsty discovers the box. Frank tries to negotiate. Kirsty violently throws the

box threw the dirty paper-covered window and runs away finally passing out from shock in the

street. She awakens in the hospital where, in an attempt to recall the recently repressed event, she

too unlocks the secret of the puzzle box. When the Cenobites appear, Chatterbox, whose mouth

- 22 -
is agape from fishhooks on wires encircling his head, his teeth constantly chattering, is a

representation of the mythical vagina dentata (toothed vagina)38 which Freud recounted as one

of the examples of the repressed fear of castration. Yet, Chatterbox embodies the rupture of

sexual identity as he extends two erect fingers shoving them down Kirsty’s throat, taking her into

a chokehold with the other. The Mise-en-scène disrupts the gaze of the viewer with blindingly

penetrating pale light and smoke, and the frame centers on a close-up of Pinhead, “The box, you

opened it. We came.” Here, Kirsty manages to “bargain,” explaining that Frank Cotton escaped

them. The requirement is that he confesses his identity.

Identity, the symbolically constructed illusion, disrupted by the abject, sacrifice, and

desire, is leveled to its rudimentary nothingness throughout the multiple variants of taboo, horror,

supernatural, abject, and violent transgression of limits in representation. In the finalization of

the Rising Action, we are tacitly presented with the sacrificial murder of Larry; Julia finally loses

herself in the conjugal jouissance of sexuality, embraced by a man with a dual-non-identity:

Frank in Larry’s skin. When Kirsty returns, they tell her Frank was killed by her father, the

boundary of identity blurred again as she is caringly touched by both Frank and Julia. But

discovering that the game has only worsened when the interior Frank reveals himself through the

exterior Larry (the abject disrupting boarders and selfhood yet again).

Kirsty eludes the monstrous couple, Frank accidentally stabbing Julia and follows Kirsty

upstairs, ultimately to the “sacrificial room” where, after telling Kirsty who tripped over Larry’s

still-steaming gory corpse, “Everything’s alright now, Frank’s here.” The Cenobites reveal

themselves, seeming to appear form the very shadows of the room and their myriad apparatuses

38
Melford E. Spiro, Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality: An Essay on Cultural Reproduction, (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1997).

- 23 -
of extradimensional sadomasochistic torture descend from the ceiling, hooking every inch of

Frank’s body. “Climax” occurs with the body, stretched to its explosive limitations, only after

Frank defiantly laughs, “Jesus wept!” Kirsty reworks the box to return the Cenobites to “hell”

and save herself. As she leaves the house, the door slams itself shut, and a cleansing rain falls

from the night’s sky.

With an element of ritual purification closing the film, the analysis brings us to another

question. What becomes of the Heideggerian limitation situated by the inability to experience our

own death when considered in light of the perspectives of Bataille and Kristeva whose work

provide accessibility to substitutional possibilities vis-à-vis experiencing the abject and/or the

“victim” of transgressive violence and death, particularly as related to the filmic text? If

Bataille’s notion is right that in that we are discontinuous beings desperately searching for, even

a brief moment, of the experience of continuity, and that forms of sacrifice are the only way to

achieve continuity, then we in the so-called “civilized ethical society” must submit to the

aesthetic and erotic forms of sacrifice that he offers. The horror film in general and Hellraiser in

particular, does precisely that. It pitches the viewer into a mode of ekstasis, it does this by toying

with the psychological boundaries substantiated by patriarchal culture, particularly with that of

themes of abject, desire, and transgression, as Barbara Creed explains:

Their presence in the horror film may evoke a response of disgust from the
audience, situated as it is within the symbolic, but at a more archaic level the
representation of bodily wastes may evoke pleasure in breaking the taboo of filth
and a pleasure in returning to that time when the mother-child relationship was
marked by an untrammeled pleasure in “playing” with the body and its wastes.
The modern horror film often “plays” with its audience, saturating it with scenes
of blood and gore, deliberately pointing to the fragility of the symbolic order in

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 the domain of the body which never ceases to signal the repressed world of the
mother.39
In many horror films, but Hellraiser especially, an aesthetic commentary is presented regarding

the ordering of society. In this case, the structured Symbolic order that resides outside of the

house, which represents the type of maternal body explicated by Creed, vs. an unordered world

(or an alternative model of gender reconfigurations, role reversals, perverse sexualities,

angels/demons, etc.) of chaos, the abject, the disintegration of liminality, and fractured

subjectivity in the face of death. A film such as Hellraiser demarcates a type of abstract, and

“atheological” sacred space in which an immediate confrontation with the abject and death can

be sublimated, thus repositioning subjects in their existential and ontological Being-toward-death

for their ownmost possibilities to rethink, rather than just subsume, their historicity.

39
Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in The Dread of Difference:
Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 43-44.

- 25 -
 Bibliography

Bataille, George. Erotism, trans. Mary Dalwood, San Francisco: City Lights, 1986.

Bataille, Georges. Tears of Eros, trans. Peter Connor, San Francisco: City Lights, 1989.

Bataille, Georges. Theory of Religion, trans. Robert Hurley, New York: Zone Books, 1992.

Bataille, Georges. Visions of Excess: Selected Writings, 1927-1939, ed. and trans. by

Allan Stoekl, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985.

Barker, Clive. The Hellbound Heart. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1986.

Beaver, Frank. Dictionary of Film Terms: The Aesthetic Companion to Film Analysis.
New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

Boothby, Richard. Freud as Philosophers: Metapsychology After Lacan. New York: Routledge,
2001.

Botting, Fred and Scott Wilson, Bataille: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection,” in

The Dread of Difference: Gender and the Horror Film, ed. Barry Keith Grant35-65.
Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996.

Evans, Dylan. An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. London: Routledge,

1996.

Goehring, James E. “Withdrawing from the Desert: Pachomius and the development of
Village Monasticism in Upper Egypt.” Harvard Theological Review Vol. 89, No. 3
(1996): 267-285.

Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, New York:
Harper & Row, 1962.

Hellraiser: 20th Anniversary Edition, DVD, directed by Clive Barker, 1987; United Kingdom:
New World Pictures, 2007.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez, New York:
Columbia Press, 1982.

Latin Concise Dictionary, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2003).

Spiro, Melford E. Gender Ideology and Psychological Reality: An Essay on Cultural

Reproduction. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997.

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Weinberg, Thomas, ed. S&M: Studies in Dominance & Submission.
New York: Prometheus Books, 1995.

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