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Oh my god HELLO and welcome to Screen Time with Sarah Ruthless! This is a
weekly podcast where I watch a bunch of movies I’ve never seen before and
then get super nerdy about them, usually nding ways to rant about how the root
of all con ict is just unhealed trauma, and rest assured, this week will be no
different. We’re getting damn near the end of my premiere season which has
been about the #1 genre I’ve avoided my whole life – horror – and the Screen
Time Subject for today is the notoriously beloved and outrageously campy cult
classic phenomenon Hellraiser, written and directed by queer icon Clive Barker.



…I just have to say that until THIS WEEK in the year 2021 I legitimately thought
that this movie was TERRIFYING. Much like my experience with Stephen King’s
IT I remember seeing Hellraiser on the shelves of Blockbuster and being
objectively terri ed by Pinhead. The movie looked bonkers scary, and I’ve been
dreading the experience of facing my fear head on. 



SO IMAGINE MY ABSOLUTE SURPRISE when I started watching it and realized
it is – again, much like Stephen King’s IT – SO SO SILLY!!! Oh my GOD it is so
silly! And yes, if I had watched it as a child I would 1000% be scarred for life at
how scary it was. But as an adult... it’s pure theatre. It’s bigger than theatre, it’s...
opera. It’s a giant, campy, ridiculous, buckets-of-red-sludge, oor length leather
dress wearing, blood splattered sexiness and outrageous puppetry OPERA. This
movie should be an opera

Now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, some trigger warnings for this lm and this
episode include: Religious Trauma Syndrome! BDSM! The Evangelical Church!
The Catholic Church! Self-harm, eating disorders, a prayer event called

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Maranatha, some questionable abuse towards children, the fear of Hell,

Adventures in Odyssey, and so, much, leather.

So while I was watching this movie I was lled with this sort of overwhelming
dread because I realized really quickly that I knew exactly what I had to talk
about, and had a pretty good idea of what my primary source of information was
going to be for this episode… my life! There were just a lot of things that were
brought to mind while watching the movie that made me kinda go, “Huh. I have
an unusual perspective on these subjects.” The primary subjects of the lm
being, of course, pleasure vs. pain, and heaven vs. hell. I have a long and weird
history with those four concepts, and I realized that they irrevocably alter my
perception of this lm; so it would be impossible to talk about it and how I felt
about it without really getting into some autobiographical shit.

Of course there are other elements that I will de nitely be diving into as well, and
I’ll be addressing those rst: the lm’s expansive mythology, its divisive
interpretation as a “queer horror story,” the complex villainy of Julia, the
psychology of BDSM, and all that religious imagery. Because of the particular
puzzle pieces that make up my background, I have distinct thoughts and feelings
on all of these subjects, which I will be sharing at the end to connect all these
magni cently fucked up little dots. So there you go, you’ve been warned: this is
going to be the TMI of all episodes. I am terri ed but also kind of excited because
just from a purely literary standpoint, even I have to admit that my weird and
fucked up life has been objectively fascinating. Now let’s dive in. *It’s time for
some info-dumping, yeah!*

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The IMDB synopsis for Hellraiser is: “A woman discovers the newly resurrected,
partially formed, body of her brother-in-law. She starts killing for him to revitalize
his body so he can escape the demonic beings that are pursuing him after he
escaped their sadistic underworld.” 1 …Mmm that’s a radical understatement of
all that happens, but sure.

Now I feel like to fully appreciate this movie we need to know a little bit more
about the history of its creator and what he was trying to accomplish, because
Clive Barker is a fascinating character. The biographical bullet points are:
-  He was born and raised in Liverpool, England, and one of his earliest
memories is when he was 3 years old and watched the famed aerial
daredevil Leo Valentin plummet to his death from a botched stunt. Hashtag
childhood trauma.
-  Unrelated to those events, he came out as gay when he was 18
-  He studied English and Philosophy and in his early 20s and became
heavily involved in theatre, as a young gay does, as well as writing short
horror and fantasy stories
-  When his writing wouldn’t pay the bills, he would occasionally moonlight
as a sex worker to make ends meet
-  He was heavily in uenced by the New York City BDSM dungeon scene,
and describes himself on a kink scale of 1-10 as “about a 6”
-  Although he doesn’t subscribe to any particular religion, he does note the
Bible as one of his primary sources of inspiration.
-  Hellraiser was his directorial debut, and even he didn’t know how weird –
or how famous – it would end up becoming.

1 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093177/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0




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So let’s start by establishing exactly what some of the lore is that Barker created
in this mythology. For starters, The Cenobites (whom I refer to as Pinhead,
Vagina-Throat, Penis-Face, and Chatterbox, for obvious reasons) are named
after an actual monastic order - Cenobitic Monks were an order of religious men
who stressed community life above all else - which I think is really interesting. In
the actual book he wrote, The Hellbound Heart, the Cenobites are also known as
“The Order of the Gash.” (I was literally just talking about this with some friends
and we all agreed that our single least favorite word for “vagina” was “gash.”
Since this entire mythology centers around sex and pain, like, it makes sense,
because “gash” is obviously a double entendre for both a sex organ and wound,
but still… ew.)

Anyway - the Cenobites were once human, and transformed into their current
state by pursuing grati cation - so they’re like the sexier versions of how
Smeagel turned into Gollum by obsessing over The Ring, I guess? The
Cenobites are described as “having been so removed from their former humanity
and so dedicated to exploring physical experience that they no longer distinguish
between pleasurable sensations and pain. Humans who summon the Cenobites,
either by accident [like Kirsty] or in hopes of experiencing pleasures unknown on
Earth [like Frank] are often taken to their home dimension and become
“experiments” in discovering the limits of physical experience, resulting in torture
for eternity.”2

2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cenobite_(Hellraiser)



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“As for the cenobites themselves, their designs were directly inspired by S&M
clubs, both visually and emotionally. In an interview with The Guardian, Barker
talked about an underground club in New York called Cellblock 28 which had a
hardcore S&M night. This club is where Barker saw people being pierced and cut
on purpose and he witnessed the extremes people would go to for sex. "I was
validating a lifestyle," Barker said in his interview with The Guardian. "It was a
celebration of the beauty of these strange secret rituals.”3 



So there’s a couple elements here that we have to talk about: the religious
imagery of The Cenobites, and the intentional othering of the S&M community
and queerness. When the rst movie came out (and there are 10 in the series,
and counting, not to mention dozens of comics books), the character we know as
“Pinhead” did not have a name. He actually wasn’t even credited in the lm at all.
Barker had actually originally intended for Julia to be the central villain of the
series - and I have a lot of thoughts and feelings on the fairly obvious reasons
why that didn’t happen - spoiler alert, it’s sexism! - but more on that in a minute.
The point is, audiences latched onto Pinhead as the face of the franchise, even
though he’s only actually onscreen for about 8 minutes - and as human nature
would dictate, we like to name the things we care about, so the preciously
uncreative moniker Pinhead was born. Barker was NOT pleased, and made a
point of naming him “The Priest” in all subsequent lm and literary iterations, but
it was too late; Pinhead is an undeniably catchy name. But I don’t want us to
forget that his real name is The Priest because Barker is trying to tell us
something here, and we should listen. 



The second element here that begs discussion is the divisive “queerness” of the

3 Deininger, Keith


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lm. People have been arguing about this for literal decades, and there are
legitimate academic papers and entire books that have been written on the
subject, like that’s how seriously people take this. Several of these works are
referenced in a dense but fascinating Off Screen article by Colin Arason, and I’d
like to read an excerpt because he sums it up beautifully:

“[In a series of essays written in the late 70s, Robin Wood] examined the ways in
which horror lms re ect repression in contemporary society. This serious study
of a genre, one which has generally been regarded as something almost anti-
intellectual, attempts to shine a light on the shapes that lurk in the darkness, and
the way that the introduction of the Monster disrupts society. According to Wood,
the basic formula of the horror lm is that “normality is threatened by the
Monster.” This equation simpli es the engine that propels the horror lm into the
parts of the collective psyche that we’d seldom willingly explore.4

…While there does seem to be some merit to the criticism that there is a lack of
positive queer representations in Barker’s cinematic oeuvre, the logic applied by
Wood remains deeply problematic for a number of reasons. The argument
revolves around the notion that lms like [Hellraiser] want us to reject the sights
we see as being repugnant or negative, when the reality is that these directors
nd these images to be compelling and horror lm audiences are more likely to
be fascinated than disgusted.

There are elements of metamorphosis in much of Barker’s work, and the author/
director asserts that [the] “issues of transformation, of paradox and gender
ambiguity” are a constant presence. All three of these elements are present in
the manner of dress worn by the cenobites in Hellraiser. Designer Jane

4 Benshoff, Harry.
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Wildgoose [relates that Barker] gave her the explicit instruction to make [The
Cenobites] look like “magni cent superbutches.” To this end they are dressed in
leather aprons […] that are equal parts slaughterhouse attire and monastic
robes.

…It would be ridiculous to argue that Barker isn’t drawing a parallel between the
queer and the monstrous, but what must be examined is the essence of that
connection. If we consider the narrative arc of the lm as a metaphoric coming
out tale, then we can see how these barbaric acts that Frank commits with other
men are seen through the eyes of a typical heterosexual family who do not
understand his needs and desires. His brother’s family simply can’t comprehend
why he would want to do these things, and Frank’s ongoing relationship with
Julia is that of a con icted man trying to straighten himself out, so to speak.
Frank’s last-ditch attempt is to try to cobble together a family of his own, but it
simply can’t work and he is absorbed by the queer community. He cuts all ties to
his birth family, and sets off to be with those who accept him.

This interpretation is supported by Barker’s statement that “Horror ction tends to

be reactionary. It’s usually about a return to the status quo – the monster is the
outsider who must be banished from the sanctum. But over and over again, I’ve
created monsters who come from the outside and who call out to somebody to
join them in the sanctum.”5 



I’m including all this information partly because I think it’s fascinating, but also
because I want you to keep in mind what The Cenobites mean - community. I
understand the problematic nature being discussed in the article - it’s kind of a
nihilistic interpretation of “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” Or like in V for Vendetta,

5 Arason, Colin.



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when V says, “What they did to me was monstrous.” And Evey replies: “And they
created a monster.”

So obviously it’s not the ideal reality for every queer person to align themselves
with this philosophy, and this not-so-subconscious message of “things that aren’t
like me must be evil.” But honestly I think it’s unfair to tell a queer person how
they should or should not express their feelings of frustration, or cast judgement
on the metaphors and mythologies that a queer artist nds comforting. Barker
was by no means trying to write the Bible on How To Be Queer, he was just
telling his individual perspective on it, using the characters, tropes, and genre
that he found the most comfortable: fantasy and horror. 



Here’s the thing: community is important. It’s crucial. Finding your tribe, your
particular niche of freaks, your “found family,” it’s a big deal for folks who grew up
feeling like an outsider, and therefore particularly signi cant to queer people.
Which is why I’m simultaneously puzzled and delighted by the mythology of
Hellraiser. Like if they’re saying what I think they’re saying, The Cenobites don’t
live in Hell. And despite the name of both the book and the lm, I don’t actually
think anyone calls the dimension where they’re from “Hell” except for Kirsty,
who’s just exhaustingly heterosexual and clearly doesn’t appreciate nuance.

I guess what confuses me about the plot - and there’s a lot that confuses me - is
that Frank is trying to escape this dimension. Right? He was being quote-on-
quote “tortured” for all eternity, then his stupid brother’s blood accidentally
opened a portal and brought him back to Earth, and he desperately wants to
avoid going back to this dimension. …Or does he? Is the thing that bums him out
just that he’s back on Earth but literally has no skin and is just like this
amorphous blob of muscle and bone and excruciating nerve endings? Was he



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actually miserable in that dimension, or is he just miserable now that he’s back
on Earth? I mean it’s clear by the end of the lm he does NOT want to return
there, so much so that he’s willing to skin his brother alive and wear him like a
cheap suit - but is he pissed about getting caught by The Cenobites because he’s
dreading the rest of his eternal “punishment?” Or is he pissed because he’s
nally gotten his power back on Earth?

What I’m trying to say is, I don’t know if the dimension was actually the issue for
him. I think what makes Frank miserable is a lack of power. I don’t think he
actually gives a fuck what reality he’s in, as long as he has power there. “Better
to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.” Of course according to the mythology, if
he just stays in The Cenobite dimension for like a couple more millennia, he’ll
eventually turn into one of them, and then he’ll have way more power than he
ever did on Earth. Honestly, I think Frank is just fucking impatient - and obsessed
with power and control. …I have a LOT more to say on that subject, but let’s
digress for a moment

The Cenobites claim to punish those who seek out too much pleasure - that’s
what the Lament Con guration Box is all about. But the way they “punish” people
is by giving them exactly what they ask for: the ultimate sensory experience.
They give them ultimate pleasure and ultimate pain at the same time. Do pain
and pleasure have anything in common? Could there possibly be a connection
between the two? Let’s talk about that for a minute

You’ve probably heard the expression “runner’s high” before: it’s the sensation of
euphoria that one experiences after running a whole bunch. I personally don’t
recommend it, I don’t nd the pain worth the pleasure and jogging is boring as
fuck, but it’s apparently very popular. But the biology of it is actually kind of
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interesting. When you run - or exercise - muscles produce lactic acid, which
burns and is uncomfortable. Your muscles send little messages to your brain
saying, “Hey please stop, this sucks.” And sometimes your brain listens, but
sometimes, the hippocampus kicks in instead. It’s like your brain’s pharmacy, and
it is not only capable of blocking those pain receptors, it can also release
endorphins, which are the “feel good” chemicals. “Meanwhile, the pain of intense
exercise also causes a spike in another of the body’s painkillers, anandamide.
Known as the ‘bliss chemical’, it binds to receptors in the brain to block pain
signals and induce the warm, fuzzy pleasure emulated by marijuana. Adrenaline,
also produced in response to pain, adds to the excitement by raising the athlete’s
heart rate.6



So why does our body do this? And more to the point, why do humans subject
themselves to this? I think it’s pretty much the same logic behind, “Why do you
keep hitting yourself with a hammer?” “Because it feels so good when I stop.”
The more it hurts, the better it feels when it’s over. Or like Frank tells Kirsty:
“Some things have to be endured. And that’s what makes the pleasures so
sweet.” 



What I nd really fascinating - and low key kind of precious - is that we are the
only creatures on the planet to do this, something scientists call benign
masochism: “the process of seeking out pain while maintaining the awareness
that it won’t cause serious damage.”7 For example, humans are the only animals

6 Gorvett, Zaria.
7 Gorvett, Zaria.

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who can both taste spiciness and choose to eat it anyway. “Pain is a uniquely
human indulgence.”8

Humans are also the only ones who have categorized “good pain” from “bad
pain.” We choose to go on roller coasters or watch horror movies or eat spicy
food… but WHY? Maybe it’s because the biological pathways in our bodies
between pleasure and pain are two-way streets. “One study, in which
researchers used fMRI to visualize the brains of women as they stimulated
themselves to climax, found that more than 30 areas of the brain were active,
including those involved in pain. Another found that cancer survivors, who had
nerves in their spinal cord cut to relieve chronic abdominal pain, lost the ability to
have orgasms. If their pain returned, so did the orgasms.”9 How much do you
think the women in that research study got paid though?



So it should come as no surprise that according to Barker, the original script for
Hellraiser included a LOT more kink between Julia and Frank - spanking, some
light sodomy, etc - but they were forced to take out to keep from getting an X-
rating. I understand why the choice was made, but honestly, I wish they’d
included a bit more indication that this was a consensual SM relationship,
because it would’ve helped me understand Julia SO much better. A little behind
the scenes Fun Fact: “The lm was originally supposed to be called The
Hellbound Heart, after the novella upon which it was based. The studio decided
the title sounded too much like a romance and asked Clive Barker to change it.
Barker offered Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave, which was rejected for
the overtly sexual content. He ultimately opened the oor to the production team

8 Gorvett, Zaria.
9 Gorvett, Zaria.



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to offer up their own suggestions, prompting a 60-year-old female crew member

to offer up What a Woman Will do for a Good Fuck.”10



Tbh I’m not hating the name proposition, because about 20 minutes into the lm I
found myself shouting at Julia, “IS HIS DICK MAGIC?” Like the power he has
over her is so bewildering to me… until you add the missing puzzle piece of their
SM dynamic. Yes, she was desperate for a good fuck, but she also had another
particular need - to be dominated. I could honestly talk for hours and hours and
hours about my deep fascination with BDSM, but if there’s one thing I would want
someone who knows literally nothing about the lifestyle to take away from it is
that when done correctly, when done respectfully and consensually and safely, it
can be a powerful tool for emotional and sexual healing. Obviously Frank and
Julia’s relationship dynamic takes a turn for the worst - a good Dom shouldn’t
make you murder people - but there is something kind of scene-like about the
men that Julia brings over for Frank to devour. In the same way that a Dom might
make their Sub perform a series of acts as part of their foreplay, Frank makes
Julia commit these atrocities. What’s really interesting is how much the lm is
truly dominated by what could arguably be described as a female gaze. “It’s
Frank’s body that becomes the focus of the lm, both as a sexual object and a
monster. He lounges on a chair, legs spread, in a ashback; and then later it’s his
naked body we see full frontal, not Julia’s, whose back is towards the camera.”11
It also bears mentioning that she’s the one who commits the murders before
feeding Frank, and they’re all done with undeniably phallic objects: a hammer, a
knife. There’s lots of thrusting. “After her second kill, [Julia] appears so

10 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093177/trivia?ref_=tt_ql_2
11 Welsh, Kaite.


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glamorously androgynous that she’s positively Bowie-esque, stepping further and

further away not only from traditional femininity but heteronormativity. …It’s
notable that Julia’s behavior throughout the lm - she frequently complains of
feeling sick and tired, and vomits at least once - is also consistent with
pregnancy. The attic room where Frank hides, dark, dank, and bloody, is a
symbolic womb where Julia is growing something monstrous, a parasite she has
to feed.”12



Like weren’t we just talking about how the horror genre has a hard time letting
women be powerful and villainous and feminine all at the same time? Well Julia
Cotton fucking does it! And that’s why I am absolutely zero percent surprised that
Pinhead is the one we all ended up remembering. Like I get it, he’s very fucking
cool, but honestly I think the world just was not ready for the story of a decadent
1980’s Power-Bottom on her journey to discovering she’s a Switch. And spoiler
alert, I was so bewildered after watching the rst movie that I immediately
watched the second one hoping it would make more sense - it absolutely did not,
it is somehow even MORE bizarre - but if you’re at all invested in Julia’s
emotional journey it is absolutely worth watching because she becomes such a
grotesquely magni cent vision of a true Top. 



Also just some real quick Fun Facts about Claire Higgins, who plays Julia:

- She was expelled from her Catholic convent school at 17, and ran away
from hom

- At 19, she had a son, but gave him for adoption at her social worker’s
insistenc

12 Welsh, Kaite.

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- By 23, she achieved her dream of becoming an actress, and graduated

from the London Academy of Dramatic Art

- In the mid-1990s she trained to become a professional psychotherapist

- And today she is still acting, going to conventions, and is a self-described

witch. I’m in love with her.



The nal point I want to touch on will segue nicely into my brief autobiography,
because it’s about all this goddamn religious symbolism! For starters, The
Cenobites are literal Priests, named after an ancient order of monks who valued
community above all else; we covered that, as well as how that correlates to the
general themes of queerness and self-acceptance and “found family.” But to
circle back to the Frank of it all, he is, essentially, like the anti-martyr. I know I’ve
talked a lot in past episodes about just how devastating, global violence that
came with the spread of Christianity throughout history, but in all fairness, there
was a pretty aggressive amount of violence committed against Christians as well.
Before Emperor Constantine placated that civil war, the ancient Romans used to
gather up Christians by the hundreds and torture them in the most obscenely
imaginative ways, with the intent of pushing them to recant their beliefs. What’s
really fucked up is that this inadvertently set a precedent amongst the early
Christians, who began to associate their own persecution as bringing them closer
to God, because they were suffering like their Christ suffered. The arrogance is
honestly staggering. I’m obviously salty towards toxic Christianity, and I realize
that there is some nugget of pureness in there somewhere, you know, trying to
make the best of a literally torturous situation, but like at the end of the day,
history ended up with an entire generation of Christians who were almost actively
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seeking martyrdom. 



I will never forget one day in high school when this particularly brainwashed and
unkind girl in my class proudly confessed to me that she prayed she would die a
martyr. When I asked why the fuck, she said “Don’t swear Sarah,” and then she
said, “Because martyrs get more treasure in Heaven.” I laughed in that dumb
bitch’s face, but then I felt sick to my stomach, because I realized she was not
alone in this world view. 



1 Peter 4:1 says: “Therefore, since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves
also with the same attitude, because whoever suffers in the body is done with
sin.” 



2 Timothy 3:12 says: “In fact, everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ
Jesus will be persecuted.” The obvious takeaway there is that if you are not
persecuted, if you do not suffer, that means you’re doing something wrong, and
not living a Godly life. 



And nally (although I could seriously fucking go on about this for HOURS), 2
Corinthians 4:17: “For our light and momentary troubles are achieving for us an
eternal glory that far outweighs them all.” Basically teaching young Christians to
disassociate from your body completely anytime something bad happens - which
if you’re leading a pure and God-like life, should be all the fucking time - and put
your eyes on Heaven, because after all this suffering that you better be enduring
(and low key enjoying?), you will be rewarded with eternal paradise. 



I am amusingly reminded of the episode on Dracula when I made the delicious
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discovery about how Judas is believed by some to be the Father of Vampires and
vampirism in general is just a naughty little perversion of the Last Supper.
Because if I learned fucking anything from Hellraiser, it was the visceral reminder
that Christianity is SO FUCKING KINKY, and now I am FINALLY GOING TO
EXPLAIN WHY I AM THE WAY THAT I AM. 



In the beginning… Hellraiser was the rst on my list for this podcast because of a
stupid fucking movie I had to watch in high school. I was raised in a very cult-like
Evangelical environment, and part of that included going to a teeny, tiny private
Christian school from grades 8-12 on the Big Island of Hawaii. Literally it was
grades 8-12 on one campus and there were about 120 students TOTAL.




The school was run by a tiny little southern woman who on the rst day of 8th

grade took me out of class and made me miss 2 periods to lecture me in her
of ce about how my shnet socks – that’s right, just below the knee socks that
happened to be made of a kind of oral, shnet-like material – were only
something “women of the night” wore, and I was guilty of making the young men
on campus potentially “stumble” in their journey towards a sexually pure life. I
also overheard her once tell a 15 year old girl with long legs wearing perfectly
reasonable shorts that “girls like her were the reason men were addicted to
porn.” Kind of a weird thing to say to a CHILD, don’t you think?



I hate myself for admitting this, but like a tiny part of me feels shitty for shitting on
these people. Like no one was intentionally sitting there thinking, “You know what
would really fuck these kids up? Gaslighting them into believing that they were
born inherently sinful and dirty creatures, then right at the height of puberty, throw
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them all in a room and make them watch propaganda about how sex and
violence in the media will brainwash them into becoming prostitutes, drug
addicts, and school shooters, and the only way to save themselves is to beg for
forgiveness from an invisible, patriarchal white man in the sky who never actually
talks to them.” 



But the fact of the matter is, even though I fully believe in my heart that no one
thought that would fuck us up – it did. At least it fucked me up. So this movie:
once a semester – in our HEALTH AND GUIDANCE CLASS – we watched these
“documentaries” by a “child psychiatrist” named Phil Chalmers who literally just
compiled like all of the most violent and upsetting random clips from movies and
television and smashed them all together, out of context, and inter-spliced them
with interviews he’d conducted with convicted school shooters and brutal rape
survivors, and essentially blamed all this horri c violence and death on bands like
Insane Clown Posse and movies like Natural Born Killers. And one of the clips
that I remember the MOST vividly from this outrageous excuse for a
documentary was the 10 second vision of Pinhead from Hellraiser saying, “Oh no
tears, please, it’s a waste of good suffering.” (The movie, by the way, was called
True Lies, which makes it damn near impossible to Google, but you can still nd
a VHS copy on Amazon for a mere $25, just in case you were wondering).



So like I said at the beginning, I was really expecting this movie to scare the shit
out of me, and was positively bewildered to nd out that it is the delightfully
absurd, campy, and kinky little romp that it is. But I also found it oddly unsettling,
because it made me realize something about myself that I’ve never really been
able to articulate. I’m pretty good at talking about myself and don’t have a lot of
insecurity discussing my weird past, but I found myself watching Frank on screen


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and feeling so… disassociated. This character is the ultimate hedonist, he lives
for fucking, and it’s never enough, and he has crawled to all corners of the planet
seeking anything that will come close to giving him pure satisfaction - “the
ultimate sensory experience.” And as soon as those words were said in the lm, I
think I actually said aloud, “Ew, gross.” Because the “ultimate sensory
experience” sounds like my literal nightmare. And there’s a few reasons for this. 



The rst is that I am Autistic. It’s something I have self-diagnosed in just the last
year, and I often skirt around saying that directly out loud because of the part
where I diagnosed myself. It makes me feel incredibly anxious that people will
hunt me down and yell at me about how I’m “making it all up” and “it’s all in my
head” and “I don’t look Autistic” or “everyone’s A LITTLE Autistic.” Just for the
sake of my own peace of mind, I would love to be formally diagnosed, just to
have some validation, but the fact of the matter is I know… I know. Just trust me,
I know myself. And honestly discovering this has been probably more powerful
than admitting to myself some ten odd years ago that I’m queer. Like I actually
felt more of a relief from identifying that one of the things that has made my life
so fucking hard, that made my childhood and adolescence at times unbearable,
that has affected my jobs, my friendships, my relationships - IT HAS A FUCKING
NAME. And now I can look back at all these little parts of my life that used to
make me feel so fucking confused and dirty and broken, and I realize now that
there’s nothing wrong with me. I’m just fucking Autistic. 



ALL THIS TO SAY, part of my Autism is that I have lots of weird sensory issues.
Legitimately, if you are ever around me and I seem cranky or pissed off for some
reason and you can’t identify why, there is a 90% chance that it’s because there
is some kind of sensory stimulus that is bothering me and even I don’t realize it
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yet.



So back to Frank. The ultimate sensory experience sounds absolutely awful to
me. I am constantly trying to AVOID sensations. On a daily basis, sensations are
the bane of my existence. Everywhere I go there are ticking clocks, bright
uorescent lights, itchy tags in shirts, people chewing, weird underwear that felt
ne last week but today for some reason it feels like two sheets of sandpaper,
and I have a really hard time ever knowing if I’m hungry or thirsty or have to pee
or am tired or have been subconsciously clenching my jaw or shoulders for the
last 8 hours. 



This delay in sensory awareness is partly an Autistic thing, but to be honest it just
scratches the surface. Because the bigger piece of the puzzle here is that I still
suffer from a massive disconnect between my body and my brain. Like they don’t
know each other. They don’t talk to each other. They’ve met once or twice, but it
was hella weird. And this is entirely to blame on my Religious Trauma Syndrome. 



I didn’t even begin to realize how deeply entrenched I still am in unlearning all of
this trauma until I read the book You Are Your Own by Jamie Lee Finch. I have
mentioned it before and I’m sure I’ll mention it again, because I cannot stress
enough how much it changed my life. I don’t have the book with me here right
now but I want to read an excerpt from a podcast that Finch guested on called
“God is Grey;” I highly recommend just looking up any podcast that she’s
featured on, she doesn’t have her own yet but she guests on a bunch, and if
anything I am talking about right now resonates with you, please please please
go check her stuff out. So on this particular episode she’s re ecting on how she
stayed in these toxic environments for so long, and says:
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“I couldn’t reconcile how I could treat myself kindly if everything that was in me –
everything that was me – is supposed to be wretched and evil and bad. ....The
trauma response that I had – ght, ight, freeze, fawn – I responded to things
that were legitimately abusive with these survival tactics, and then further told
myself that I was the problem and I had brought this on myself and it was my
fault. Because unfortunately, those ideas from the theology that I’d been given –
that you deserve nothing, that your esh is bad, and that the only good things
about you are the things that God has redeemed; that you are bound for hell if
nothing intervenes and nothing xes you, particularly as it related to my sexuality
– it’s not necessarily that I had the ability to not give permission for harmful things
to happen to me; but what I didn’t do is tell the truth to my own self about the fact
that I was being abused or harmed. What I did instead – which is why I believe
Religious Trauma needs to be taken very seriously, and that these harmful
religious ideologies need to be taken seriously – so what I did was further harm
myself in my own mind, by telling myself that “oh well this pain (or abuse) that I’m
experiencing is just punishment. And punishment – from whomever I believed to
be my authority – well that’s just discipline. And discipline – which my Bible tells
me – is just the way that my God loves me.” So pain was punishment,
punishment was discipline, and discipline was love. So all pain... was love. And
that is what I think is the most harmful aspect of all of this. When you start from
this foundation of “you are bad, you are wretched, you are sinful, you are dirty,
you deserve nothing,” then anything that happens to you that IS harmful, that IS
painful, that IS punishment, you tell yourself “well that’s what I deserve.” And then
anything that attempts to come your way that is beauty, goodness, love – also
you get a really warped view of what love is in the rst place – but anything good
that comes to you... I can’t speak for everyone, but for me, it took some really
good therapy for a number of years to actually even be able to feel love and joy


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in my body, at all, because I was so disassociated. It didn’t feel safe to feel good
feelings in my body. ...Because my only framework for God’s love was discipline,
so for years I felt that if I wasn’t in pain and I wasn’t being actively punished, then
I must not be safe.”



So again, we have Frank seeking the ultimate sensory experience - and even
though he’s the bad guy, I couldn’t help nding myself at least wanting to
understand him and his motivations and I was so fucking uncomfortable with the
realization that if I was offered the ultimate sensory experience, my gut instinct
was to say “Ew, no.” And more than that, like even if I could be guaranteed that
the experience would be pleasurable, I think I’d still be like, “Mmmm…. nah.” It’s
not that I don’t like pleasure, it’s just that… Well here’s the kind of epiphany I had,
and what’s fucked up is that I think it makes Frank and I kind of similar, but we’re
like opposite sides of the same coin: it’s not that I’m averse to pleasure, it’s that
pleasure - or any bodily experience, really - has been inextricably connected in
my mind with powerlessness, and it’s the aversion to feeling powerless that turns
me off the most. There is a part of pleasure that includes a kind of “giving into it,”
and “losing yourself,” and those are sensations that I fundamentally have a hard
time with. The difference between Frank and I is that pleasure GIVES him power,
and for me, pleasure has often felt like it’s taking my power away. Like pleasure -
and all bodily experiences - costs me something, and it seems to always feel
more expensive for me more than it does for other people.


Again, this is partly an Autistic thing, but it’s also partly because of my experience
with chronic pain. When I was about 12 years old I developed a crippling chronic
pain disorder called Endometriosis. Basically instead of making eggs and babies,
my uterus makes scar tissue, and it’s an enormous bummer. It’s made worse by


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the fact that doctors still know shockingly little about it, and to this day, it
statistically takes women 7-10 YEARS to get diagnosed. Why? For two reasons:
one, women and people with uteruses have been conditioned to not speak
honestly about their pain (especially when it involves their reproductive organs),
and two, because historically, fucking doctors don’t fucking believe us when we
do fucking speak about it. I am extremely lucky to have my pain under control
now, but I suffered for over a decade to get here. 



I distinctly recall passing out from pain in the bathroom at Church when I was 13
years old and my mother saying, “I’m so sorry, bad cramps run in the family.” For
the record, Endometriosis is fucking genetic, and my mom also passed out in a
public bathroom from cramps once when she was a teenager. That’s not normal.
She also said, “Don’t you just hate Eve sometimes? You know, because if Eve
hadn’t sinned, women wouldn’t have pain during childbirth which probably means
we wouldn’t have bad cramps.” …I would like to just add here that my mother is
an incredibly smart, educated woman. But THIS is what fucking religion does to
people - even the incredibly smart and educated ones. At age 13, I was being
taught that the reason why I suffered excruciating physical pain once a month -
the kind of pain you can’t speak through, that makes you vomit and feverish and
miss classes and curl up in a ball on the oor of a public restroom - was because
of my “inherently sinful nature as a woman.” 



It was around this time that my sister was in and out of the psych ward for her
depression and eating disorders (it’s almost as if being raised to believe that
you’re born dirty and sinful can have devastating affects on the minds of
adolescents??), and I will never forget the day that she lamented to my mom in
the living room, some time between her stints at the hospital, that she hadn’t


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started her period again yet. I had just been cursed with mine - and the
debilitating pain that came with it - and was like “Wait, there’s a way you can get
rid of this thing?” And that’s when I learned that severe anorexia causes the loss
of menstruation. It was like a fucking lightbulb went off in my head. There was
nally a way I could control this uncontrollable pain - a pain made worse by the
fact that no one seemed to believe me. 



It also bears mentioning that this pain was inextricably connected to my
femaleness, which was something I already deeply resented. Thanks to Christina
Ricci in The Way We Were, I learned that wrapping an Ace bandage around your
chest would give the illusion that you weren’t growing tits, which was another
uncontrollable aspect of my body that I deeply despised. While other 6th grade
girls were starting to bring sexier clothes in their backpacks and changing once
they got to school, I was doing the exact opposite: except I was forced to wear
sequined girly shirts from The Gap, and then snuck my brother’s baggy clothes in
my backpack. Ahh, it’s one of those fun memories you look back on as a non-
binary adult and you’re like “WOW HOW DID IT TAKE ME THIS LONG TO
FIGURE IT OUT?” 



So there was obviously some dysphoria happening there, but it’s important that I
make clear how much of my gender identity confusion and self-hatred was being
actively manipulated by what the church was teaching me, what the Bible was
teaching me: It was all Eve’s fault. Women were sinful and evil. Men de nitely
were too - ALL humankind was born dirty, broken, and sinful - but women were
always somehow much, much worse. I desperately wanted to avoid becoming a
woman. It’s not that I wanted to be a man, and it’s not that I wanted to stay a
child forever either… I just knew that becoming a woman was not a fucking
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option for me. Everything about the idea repulsed me. So I did what any logical
13 year old would do, and I started starving myself. Again, in retrospect, the
bleak logic of my line of thinking is so stupidly Autistic it can’t help but make me
laugh at least a little. But the point is, I wanted this whole womanhood thing to
fucking stop. It did NOT have my permission, it did NOT have my consent, and if
there was a way I could control it, I was fucking gonna. 



The only problem was that eating food is delicious and being hungry is a huge
bummer. But I was determined, so I made another really darkly logical decision:
I’d heard of Pavlov, I knew he was kinda onto something there, so I decided that
every time I wanted to eat, I would cut myself, to deter the hunger pains. And the
fucked up thing is - it worked. The problem is that I got really addicted to cutting.
And not to be graphic, but it really makes sense why: it was blood I could control.
It was pain I could control. It wasn’t menstruation and it wasn’t the blood of Jesus
Christ, it was mine. And it became an addiction because it felt like it was the
ONLY thing that was mine. 



One of our rst family trips to the Vineyard Church in Northern California that we
would end up attending for several years had an event called “Maranatha.” It’s an
old Aramic word that I think roughly translates to something like “God is coming,”
which is low key super threatening, but the term has been used by charismatic
churches for years to describe a large “prayer service.” Not the bow your heads
and close your eyes kind of prayer, the falling over, writhing in the spirit, dancing
and screaming and hysterical weeping kind of prayer. I think I was about 10 or
11, and after the worship service the pastor had all the kids leave their parents to
go to another auditorium at the back of the building - there’s your rst red ag, by
the way. So I went with the kids and we all stood in this big, empty room, and one


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of the leaders of the church stood up on the stage and told us to close our eyes
and put our hands to “receive the Spirit,” and then he started praying. Slowly, all
the kids started crying. I was incredibly confused, because I had nothing to cry
about, and I felt like I was doing something wrong. Then the man - and there
were a few other church leaders there too, including women, like the Sunday
School teachers or whatever - he started walking around the room, and would
touch each kid on the forehead… And as soon as he did, these children - who
were ages 8-12! - would fucking pass out. Hit the ground, hard. And the Sunday
School teachers were like going around and catching these kids as they fell. I
was fucking TERRIFIED when he came by me. I held my hands out like I was
supposed to, but I kept my fucking eyes open. He walked by me, looked me dead
in the eye, and touched my forehead… and there was nothing. Nothing
happened. I did not fall. He touched my forehead again, pressing it with about
three of his ngers, this time much harder. And… NOTHING. So then he moved
on to the next kid, who went whizzing past me to the oor. 



After he had gone around the whole room, I’d say about 2/3 of the kids were lying
at on their backs. Then the Sunday School teachers came around and the few
of us who were standing gather around in little clusters around all the kids who
were passed out. Most of the kids seemed to know what to do already, and
gently reached out and touched the hands and arms of the kid lying on their
back, but I didn’t know what the fuck to do. And I distinctly remember having this
one woman physically grab my hands and place one of them on this passed out
girl’s stomach, and the other on her chest. To be clear - it wasn’t some weird
sexual thing, this wasn’t a giant child orgy - but the stomach and the chest, like
the collarbone area, are undeniably intimate parts of a body. And I did NOT know
this girl passed out on the ground. I didn’t even know her name. I didn’t know the
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name of the adult woman forcing my hands on her, either. As soon as she placed
my hands on this girl’s body, I immediately recoiled. I was too uncomfortable to
say aloud, “I don’t want to do that.” I had been taught to be polite. I was afraid of
getting in trouble. But EVERYTHING in my body was screaming for this to stop.
The woman did it again, and I just let her. “Can you feel the heat?” She said to
me. “If your hands get hot, that means you’re capable of healing. That’s one of
the signs of the gift of healing.”



OF COURSE MY HANDS WERE FUCKING HOT, I WAS SWEATING AND
HAVING A PANIC ATTACK. Actually now that I think about it, I probably was
having an actual panic attack. Which probably helped make it look like I was
praying more realistically, because I was trembling in fear and disgust and
confusion. All I could think was: I am so, so fucking glad I am not the girl passed
out on the ground right now. Who was, by the way, younger than me. 



So yeah, that’s the kind of church experience I had growing up, in my very
formative years. Totally normal kid stuff, right? HAHA NOPE IT’S SUPER
TRAUMATIC. You know the reason Jamie Lee Finch’s book is called You Are
Your Own is because of a verse from the Bible, 1 Corinthians 6:20: “You are not
your own, you were bought at a price. So you must honor God with your body.”
That was the message being taught to me from my earliest years of
consciousness: I was not my own. This body wasn’t mine. It belonged to God. It
belonged to my assigned gender. It belonged to pain. And, apparently, to any
adult in a remotely churchlike setting with a semblance of authority. 



It was around this age that another, slightly more subtle traumatic event
happened. I had gotten into a huge ght with my mom over something stupid,


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and like most moody 11 year olds at the time, I wrote about it in my diary. I’m
pretty sure I called her a “bitch,” and I said something like “what, has she not
gotten laid in a while?” I 100% did NOT know what that phrase meant, I am
certain I had heard it in a movie or at school or something, I just knew it was a
mean thing to say to a woman and I was 11 and pissed at my mom and pissed at
God and the world, and it was my fucking diary so I could write whatever I want. I
also wrote a bunch about how I was disgusting and hated myself and wanted to
die but was afraid of going to Hell - which, I cannot stress enough, was taught to
me as being a literal, real, physical place. 



Actually I have to interrupt myself for a second here, because I can’t stress with
enough severity how very fucking real Hell was for me as a child. Honestly, much
like the Rapture, I don’t think I fully stopped believing in Hell until I was like 17 or
18. We grew up reading Children’s Bibles with vivid illustrations of deep,
cavernous pits lled with scorching re, and all these tiny little black dots
representing the bodies of the damned - of the “non-believers.” I shared a room
with my sister when we were little and I remember both of us having extremely
traumatic nightmares about our loved ones getting sucked into Hell. We listened
to Focus on the Family’s “Adventures in Odyssey” - if you know, you know - and I
remember multiple episodes that included grotesquely detailed story arcs with
characters getting swallowed up into the rey, sulfuric pits of hell. And we listened
to these! As children! Like, on road trips!!! And before bed!!! 



I distinctly recall walking around the grocery store and having panic attacks
because I was so afraid that all the people inside were going to go to hell when
they died. What about my best friend Megan, her family was Jewish, did that
count? And what about Grandma and Grandpa? Were they “real Christians?”


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Would they go to Hell? My older brother came out as gay when I was 8 years old,
and even though my parents never said the exact words aloud, I knew they
believed he would burn in hell forever. The only words of comfort they could give
me were: “God knows your heart. He judges people by their heart.” 



Which is honestly fucked up on a whole other level, because then you become
terri ed of your own thoughts, your secret thoughts, and have to start policing
those too… God knows ALL of those? He’s just listening in on me all the time,
spying? What a fucking CREEP! So then I had to start lying to myself in my own
internal monologue, because what if God heard my heart and judged it and it
wasn’t good enough? 



Well all of that deeply internalized fear really began to set its roots after I got into
this dumb ght with my mom and wrote something mean in my diary. I was in the
middle of Mrs. Manoogian’s 5th grade math class when she got a call and told
me to go down to the principal’s of ce because my dad was there to pick me up.
I thought someone had DIED. I thought my entire family had died in a FIRE (huh,
I wonder where the fear of re came from!?!?!?). He refused to speak to me the
entire drive home, we just drove in silence. I thought he was taking me to an
orphanage or something, I seriously thought that something fucking devastating
had happened. My body was COLD. I felt DEAD inside. And then we walked into
the house, and my mother was standing in the living room crying, holding MY
FUCKING DIARY. And we sat down, and they read the whole thing aloud, even
all the swear words. (And there were a lot of swear words, so if you’ve ever
wondered about my penchant for profanity, rest assured it’s been there since I
was eleven.) 



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They were obviously concerned about the language, and how mean it was, but
they seemed weirdly less concerned with my suicidal ideation and obvious fear of
Hell, and were far more concerned about my expressions of hatred towards
God… and what followed in my diary, which happened to be several pages
featuring dozens of little cartoon women with giant breasts. Just about 40-50 little
cartoon boobies. And you know what they said? They said - not asked, said - that
I had been sexually molested as a child, but that I didn’t remember it because I
had blocked it out. And then they prayed to God with me that I would remember
being sexually abused as a child. And we prayed - and once again, nothing
fucking happened. But like… what a mind fuck?! That was the only possible
explanation for their 11 year old daughter - who hated wearing girly clothes and
loved Tarzan and Xena the Warrior Princess and only had one close female best
friend - they could not gure out why I would have a xation on boobies. Like…
WHAT?! YOUR KID IS GAY! YOUR KID IS VERY FUCKING GAY! SORRY BUT
TWO OUT OF FOUR OF YOUR CHILDREN ARE GAY! 



And what’s troubling is not just the automatic association between queerness
and sexual abuse - and by the way, this is an EXTREMELY COMMON THING
THAT CHRISTIAN PARENTS ASSUME - I know literally DOZENS of queer
people who were raised Christian and were antagonized and interrogated about
whether or not they were sexually abused as children, because that was like “the
only possible reason why your kid could be gay.” And yet people wonder why
even liberated queer artists are still struggling with the separation of their
queerness and metaphorical monsters? Like this is fucking why. I am 0%
bothered by queer artitst re-appropriating their identities by nding solace in the
allegories of monsters, freaks, and weirdos, because for many of us, that’s how


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we were raised to identify. The association between queerness and deviancy was
made FOR us, and this freaky art is what we’ve made FROM it

What actually fucked me up about all that wasn’t even the possibility that “I may
have been sexually abused,” it was being told that I didn’t remember it. I was told
that my body and my memories and my feelings couldn’t be trusted. My little
baby sexuality was just peeking its head out of the closet and got slammed in the
face, and told that it was dirty and rotten and was bad enough that I had to be
taken out of school to talk about it. I had no idea what to believe after that.
Because I was still inclined to trust my parents - who, I would like to stress, really
aren’t monsters. They’re very good people. They’re incredibly kind,
compassionate, generous, misguided people. And they were doing the best they
could with the tools that they had. They are awed and have their own baggage
and trauma and I honestly don’t hold any of this against them. Like most of it is
actually kind of funny to me now - like come on, it’s a little bit funny - but that
doesn’t mean I can’t unpack some of these little chapters of my life and realize
“Oh, there’s a pattern here. That’s where a root started to grow.” And in this
particular case, the root was that my body was not my own. My thoughts were
not even my own. And the only way I could protect myself was to separate them
completely. 



There’s a name for all this by the way, one of the strongest and longest lasting
effects of Religious Trauma Syndrome, and it’s called disassociation. It’s a
survival tactic, and it makes existing in a physical world authentically and fully
really dif cult. Some days I barely feel like I’m even here. I’m grateful that I’m not
one of the statistically many survivors with Religious Trauma who struggles with
feeling guilty about pleasure - like that’s not my personal baggage, I don’t feel

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guilty or dirty for enjoying things or for being a sexual human. But there does
seem to still be a kind of delay, like I’m lagging. It takes me a while sometimes to
know what I’m feeling, because that disconnect is still so prominent. It’s like I’m
on auto-pilot all the time, and the gear I naturally drive in is suppressing and
ignoring all of the stimuli in the world. So to pause and actually think about what
I’m feeling - emotionally or physically or sexually or spiritually - it’s like trying to
wake up a foot that fell asleep, and it feels like a hundred thousand pins and
needles, and you suddenly realize that you’re not actually numb at all, you’re the
opposite - you’re achingly, cripplingly, devastatingly sensitive. You’re just still
giving yourself permission to feel any of it.

Fight, ight, and freeze are three natural trauma responses, and I feel like my
whole life I’ve been caught somewhere between all of them: ghting to control my
body, running away from the things that feel good to my body, or shutting down
and just freezing out every stimuli altogether. 



I realize this probably isn’t the rabbit hole you thought you’d be going down with a
lm like Hellraiser, so I will leave you with one last thought, and it’s about one of
the nal and most iconic lines of the lm: Jesus wept. I read that originally, the
line - which is said by Frank, wearing Larry’s skin, being actively pierced with
hooks and chains by The Cenobites, about to be torn into a thousand pieces,
standing before Kirsty - was supposed to be “Fuck you.” Which honestly makes a
lot more sense. According to legend, Andrew Robinson, the actor who plays
Frank, hated swearing so much that he ad-libbed the line, and said “Jesus wept”
because that was a phrase he’d heard growing up as a euphemism for actual
curse words. Apparently it’s a popular expression in Ireland and Scotland, so who
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knows, maybe it really doesn’t have any more meaning than that. But let’s
pretend for a second that it does

The two sentence phrase is famous for being the shortest verse in the Bible, and
describes Jesus in the moment when he nds out that his very close friend
Lazarus has just died. If you’re not familiar with the character Lazarus, he’s the
rst man Jesus raised from the dead. This verse has caught the eyes of scholars
for centuries for a number of reasons: it proves that Jesus was a fully human
man with bodily functions like tears, and that he had the full range of human
emotions, like sorrow, bitterness and the ability to experience loss and grief. But
it’s also puzzling because Jesus raised him from the dead. So why did he cry
over his friend, if he knew he wasn’t going to stay dead? Or did he not know he
was going to do that? Did he surprise himself by raising him from the dead? And
if it was a surprise that he could raise the dead, does that mean that Jesus
doubted his abilities as the Son of God? As you can see, it’s a slippery slope.

I read one Quora comment that suggests Frank said “Jesus wept” as a ridicule.
That he was “making a comparison between the the pain Jesus experienced that
caused the Son of God to weep, and the pain Frank himself is experiencing by
being ripped apart, which he is evidently relishing. In other words, Frank is saying
that Jesus was a sissy in comparison to himself.”13

I actually don’t hate that. But the way I heard it, what I thought it meant when I
watched it the rst time, was that it was just the rst half of Frank’s sentence. I

13https://www.quora.com/In-the-horror-movie-Hellraiser-why-does-the-character-Frank-claim-
Jesus-wept-just-before-he-is-pulled-apart-by-hooks-Kind-of-random-wasnt-it-What-does-he-
mean-by-that-phrase
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was legitimately waiting for him to say, “Jesus wept… But I laugh.” When faced
with the reality of death, despair, pain, and suffering, the Son of God wept. But
when Frank - who is arguably the absolute antithesis of all things Christ-like - is
faced with the same reality, he does so with a smile. Because pain and darkness
make him smile - more than that, they give him PLEASURE!

It took me all week to really fucking pinpoint why it makes sense that Frank is
running from The Cenobites: ght, ight, and freeze. Those are trauma
responses, and maybe Frank existing in his own body with zero distraction and
zero escape is actually the worst possible torment he could imagine. I can relate

But in a really fucked up way, I feel like The Cenobites are lot more like God than
they are like the Devil, in the Biblical sense: Frank was the one lost sheep that
they were searching for, to bring back home, to bring back into the fold, you
know? But like, to a kinky pasture. A terrifying, kinky pasture that both forces you
and gives you permission to feel all of your feelings at once. 



WELL SPEAKING OF FEELINGS that’s about all I have in me for today, WOW. I
was not expecting this movie to make me think and feel the things that it did and I
bet you weren’t EITHER, but that continues to be the unexpected joy of this
genre, doesn’t it? THANK YOU for taking this journey with me, I am your host
Sarah Ruthless, and you can catch me on Instagram
@screentimewithsarahruthless, on Twitter @ruthlessscreen, or check out the
transcripts to these episodes with all the links to the articles referenced at
www.sarahruthless.com - that is, as always, Sarah with an H, spelled correctly.
Don’t waste your suffering today, friends, and go do something kinky. Or don’t! I
don’t know! That’s all folks, and I’ll see you next time.


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Sources / Works Cite

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IMDB Trivia: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0093177/trivia?ref_=tt_ql_2

Clive Barker Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clive_Barker

Claire Higgins Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clare_Higgins

Hellraiser Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hellraiser

True Lies I TOLD YOU IT WAS A REAL MOVIE: https://www.amazon.com/True-Lies-

Violence-Suicide-VHS/dp/B0000869U7/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_2?
dchild=1&keywords=true+lies+phil+chalmers&qid=1612719729&sr=8-2-fkmr0


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