Clive Barker is a specialist subject and I'm no expert, but these to films are dear to my heart and I had to go there.

So in this Title Fright I’m putting the original Hellraiser (1987) up against the original Candyman (1992). 

Hellraiser was directed by Barker himself, and stars Doug Bradley as Pinhead. When a pleasure seeker follows his appetites to their limits, he draws down a punishment that ensnares his entire family.

Candyman was directed by Bernard Rose and stars Tony Todd in the title role. When a curious academic explores urban myths in the ‘hood, she awakens the ghost of a murdered slave.  

Just a reminder, this is not a review, it’s a Title Fright. There won’t be plot summaries, and there will be spoilers.

The Similarities…

Parallel 1 Curiosity.

The engine behind both stories is curiosity. Frank in Hellraiser is desperate to know what lies within the Lemarchand Box – what new realm of pleasure it can reveal to him. Helen in Candyman is obsessed with finding the source of the Candyman legend. 

Parallel 2 Portals

In both films, a door is opened to a horrifying supernatural world. It is typically Barkeresque for there to be a magical realm alongside ours full of oddly liberating horrors, whether accessed by opening a box or by urban legend.

Parallel 2 ambiguous villains

Both the Cenobites and Candyman fulfill a morally ambiguous function within the narrative. They are terrifying, sure. The Cenobites are completely pitiless, for example they don’t differentiate between those that call them on purpose and those that call them by mistake. Candyman kills innocent people and steals babies.

But the Cenobites also restore order to the world. They do this by taking Frank – an even greater aberration than they are in some ways - back to their realm.

Similarly, Candyman occupies a kind of moral high ground. He’s a consequence of an even greater aberration than himself - racism. His pursuit of Helen is payback for history.

…and the differences

Round 1 – Taboo

Hellraiser tackles the taboo of unbounded human desire. This is explicitly sexual in Barker’s original book, The Hellbound Heart, where it’s spelled out that Frank opens the box in search of erotic pleasure. Similarly, Julia helps Frank because she’s sexually infatuated with him. 

The taboo that Candyman deals with is race. It’s an incredibly bold and direct foray into the complexities of this issue in modern America. 

As an academic ethnographer in a position of white privilege, Helen has been exploiting the culture of poor black people. When Candyman comes to life he doesn’t just haunt her, he frames her as a murderer of black people, turning her whiteness into her biggest problem.

This allows us to confront things that even now, over a quarter of a century after the film was made, are still hard to talk about.

I call this round for Candyman.The taboo of race is far harder to tackle than pleasures of the flesh. Additionally, it breaks all sorts of meta-taboos about how race should be portrayed in film – no equating blackness with evil, no interracial relationships, respect white people’s viewing pleasure. It also, incidentally, deals with desire as well. It’s incredibly brave, it doesn’t shrink away from any prohibited topic. 

Round 2 – Scale

Hellraiser takes place in a small suburban house and revolves around a single family. It’s very British, very insular, very claustrophobic. Nobody is a victim of circumstance, there’s no broad sweep of history. Just petty venality and benighted personalities. There’s no backstory for any of the characters, except perhaps Frank, but it seems he was born bad.

I’m not minimising Hellraiser. The Cenobites are remarkable and unforgettable – they are the film’s cruel conscience, the cold superego that finally provides a boundary. But Hellraiser is about horrors that come from within – our own wilder desires.

Candyman, on the other hand plays out on the big expansive social and historical canvas of race in the US. It’s just a bigger film.

I call this round a draw. I don’t think one is better than the other. Hellraiser may be a kitchen sink horror, and Candyman an epic. But both do their thing beautifully.

Round 3 – Translation

Barker wrote and directed Hellraiser. It was based on his own original novel The Hellbound Heart which he wrote intending to turn it into a film. It’s his vision all the way, transferred faithfully from book to screen. This accounts, I think, for its formal elegance – it’s magical in its perfection.

Candyman too is based on Barker’s writing – a short story called The Forbidden, which is set in the housing projects of Liverpool occupied by the white British working class. But it’s been changed. When English director Bernard Rose, who also wrote the screenplay, took it on as a film project, he moved it to the US and made Candyman black.

 So it’s a series of translations – from  book to screen, from writer to screenwriter, from Liverpool to Chicago, from class to race. 

Significantly, a white British director translates the stories of black Americans. During development, Rose went to Cabrini Green, the housing project where Candyman is set. It was by talking to residents that he learned about the derelict apartments, the backless medicine cabinets and the urban myth of Bloody Mary, who kills you after you say her name a number of times.

In his essay The Demon of Racial History, Antonis Balasopoulos says Candyman pulls in two directions – a progressive direction that deconstructs white priviledge and a more reactionary, conservative, racist direction. The progressive element is the way in which Helen’s academic objectivity is revealed to be the real ‘fairy-tale’, a luxury made possible by privilege. 

The reactionary aspect is that the social reality of black lives is ‘transcoded’ (this is the term Balasopoulos uses). It’s transcoded into a more manageable trope for white people, a figure from the bourgeois gothic imagination - a hook-handed monster. 

Candyman gains a strange sort of indeterminacy from all this I think, a messiness that is absent from Hellraiser. 

I call the translation round another draw. Hellraiser is a note-perfect rendition of one man’s vision, whereas Candyman is a fractured, cacophonic rendition of multiple viewpoints refracted through a very diverse set of minds. Both great in their different ways.

Round 4 - Control

Another way of contrasting the two films is to consider Barker’s ongoing theme of blowing open the door between the real and the imagination, creating a literary microcosm of the ‘further reaches of experience’ he ascribes to the Lemarchand Box.

I was lucky enough to get my hands on Endless Laceration, an essay by Daniel Pietersen which will appear in the forthcoming Thinking Horror: A Journal of Horror Philosophy Volume 2. Pietersen says that Hellraiser ‘reconfigures’ our whole understanding of horror – it’s not a deviation from the norm, it’s a permanent condition with no end. Not unlike the way we are trapped with ourselves.

You could probably get a similar feeling from reading about serial killers, but I know I’d much rather watch Hellraiser, because even if there’s no end to it, it does at least go back inside the box. Barker is in consummate control of the door that he opens and the way we explore the world that lies beyond. It’s an exquisitely composed, perfectly safe journey to a very unsafe place.

Whereas the portal that is blown open by Candyman opens onto such a volatile world - the whole sweep of racial politics in the US. And the film can’t contain it. 

This, I think, is why the end of the film – when Helen not only saves the black baby on behalf of the black community,  but also becomes a new ‘Candyman’ - is so unsatisfying. As Elizabeth Erwin, writing for Horror Homeroom puts it, “Are we to equate the motivations of Helen, who has been slighted by her husband, with the motivations of Candyman, who has been lynched?”

I call the control round for Hellraiser. Hellraiser takes you to hell, and it brings you back changed, but it does at least bring you back. Candyman dumps you into a much more dynamic and complex hell, and leaves you there, with a sour taste in your mouth and a feeling that the film has lost its way.

IT’S A DRAW!

In Hellraiser, the monsters are inside us. Barker knows exactly what he’s doing and he takes us through a cathartic encounter with them.  

In Candyman the horror is much more out of control. The story doesn’t end properly because, in a film so explicitly about racism made by white people, how can it? It’s deeply  flawed but rescued by the fact that it literally opens a forbidden box – questions of race and class – in a way that opens up new possibilities for understanding ourselves and our place in the world. Very Barkeresque, at the end of the day.

As to which film is better, I just can’t call it. These are both terrific films and personal favourites of mine. Both the Cenobites and Candyman stay with us. They even exact a kind of affection, because like a lot of horror villains, they embody something true but unspoken that’s liberating to acknowledge. 

Can you help me? Can you call it?