It’s October, the season of the witch, so they’re showing more horror movies on television, for some reason. And lately I took a gander again at Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, where solving a puzzle box, roughly the side of a Rubik’s Cube, but put together more like a Chinese Box, summons the Cenobites, sadistic demons who act like pain equals bliss. I used to wonder how he came up with this idea, but I think I have worked it out.
I have to figure that Clive Barker was given a Rubik’s Cube at some point, and he couldn’t solve it, and everyone he knew could, so they all taunted and teased him about it, and that he then came up with Hellraiser as a revenge fantasy story whereby anyone solving a similar-looking puzzle box gets killed by demons and tortured in hell.
You know, just like how most slasher films were made by nerds, and all the people who got killed were either asshole jocks or hot girls: you know, the ones who probably beat up and rejected the filmmakers when they were in school. You know, kind of like that.
