Hellraiser

This is my second rewatch of Hellraiser, and it just gets more horrific every time. The first time I watched this movie, the bleak and gruesome violence (somehow) passed me by. The second time, I appreciated the gore but it still didn't quite hit home for me. This time, however, Hellraiser blew my mind.  Maybe it's the fact that I'm in a different place in my life, I've grown a little more sensitive to blood. Maybe it's the frenzied pace that this movie throws each new nightmarish idea at you, never letting you rest before getting you with the next. Maybe it's the fact that I've watched so many slashers recently that I thought I was more prepared, my hubris in the face of such grisly scenes came back to bite me like a chattering Cenobite.  Or maybe it's that there is no movie quite like Hellraiser.  It's not perfect in many ways. Some scenes are inscrutable, unimaginable, filled with cruel and mean-spirited violence. The dialogue goes from the  silly ("They'll never find us. Not in the whole wide world") to the sublime ("we have such sights to show you"), and the acting is a little rough in places.  It also dabbles in concepts that have been done many times before. The themes of pain and pleasure and demonic summoning are nothing new. But still.  There's is no movie like Hellraiser.  There's a definite point at which, if you were living within the fiction, your sanity would just snap. You can even feel it as a viewer: the movie pushing you beyond anything you would have experienced before, and that's a real testament to the filmmakers. The special effects are fantastic - Frank's recomposing corpse a particular highlight - as is the final scenes with the graphic tearing apart of a human by giant clawed chains.  Hellraiser is a wonderfully gory, grisly, creepy, imaginative horror. The really is nothing like it.