Shared Universe, Levent Configurizon

Hello and welcome to The Popcorn Isn't Real. I'm Leif Eric and I'm here with my brother Torvald. Hello again. We're going to be talking about an awesome 90s horror called Event Horizon and we're going to be talking about the first at least four films, possibly more, in the Hellraiser franchise. We've got such sights to show you. Dude, is this episode going to be pleasure or pain? Hopefully pleasure for our viewers. Maybe pain for us. Oh, this is going to be so fun. So we've got a lot to say about the entire Hellraiser series and also a lot to say about Event Horizon. I think your theory about Event Horizon is actually really cool. I didn't at first. I was just like, what? But having looked into it, I actually like it a lot. Maybe you could tell us a bit about that theory. Yeah. So the originator of this theory is a Reddit user named Steve Rudinsky. He hypothesized that Event Horizon is actually a film in the Hellraiser universe. So a little bit of background on just both of them real quick.

Event Horizon is a story about these people going into space to find a lost ship called the Event Horizon. And when they get to it, they find out that its weird black hole gravity drive has actually punched a hole into another hell-like dimension. And the Hellraiser franchise is all about a box that opens a portal to a hell-like dimension. Right. And there's a guy named Pinhead inside. Yeah. He's the, uh, iconic, uh, bad guy from that franchise. Yeah. I mean, just a little more information, Event Horizon, a 1997 film written and directed by Paul W.S. Anderson, who went on to do such great franchises as the entire Resident Evil series, the film series, of course, and also Alien vs. Predator. Dude, dude, you're leaving out his magnum opus, Mortal Kombat, widely considered to be the first good video game movie adaptation yeah and still probably the best i think it is the best i think both of us would agree on that and he did the remake of

death race 2000 which was really good too got to watch that so he's he's made good movies i mean well some might say you know pleasure for some pain for others right so clive barker wrote and directed the first Hellraiser. He wrote an original story called The Hellbound Heart, which was adapted by him into Hellraiser. And the studio didn't like the name The Hellbound Heart because they thought it sounded like a romance. Yeah, okay. I mean, it kind of does. They eventually settled on Hellraiser. Yeah, it kind of does. Hellraiser 2, Hellbound, which I think was originally just going to be called Hellbound, was written by, like the screenplay was written by Peter Atkins, directed by Tony Randall, but Clive Barker had a big hand in the story and he was also a producer on Hellraiser 2, Hellbound. I mean, one thing I will say about Hellraiser 1, it is very strange, but it's definitely a horror film, right?

Dude, Hellraiser 1, it was good. I liked it. I mean, it was weird, dude. No. I've never seen a movie quite like that. And, uh, two is, I think in many ways more strange and rather than just a straight horror, it's a, like a bizarre horror fantasy kind of thing. Yeah. Um, it kind of reminds me of like other eighties films, like the labyrinth. Yeah. Return to Oz kind of things. Reminded me of Return to Oz. Yeah. Cause there's two girls like running away. Yeah. Run around in like an insane asylum. Um, and three is, uh, Hellraiser three is in the hood. So interestingly enough, Hellraiser quickly went the route of many other long running horror series where you have them go to the hood or some sort of urban setting like Leprechaun goes to the hood and then Jason takes Manhattan. And Predator 2 in the hood. Right, exactly. And then the next logical step is to go to space like Leprechaun goes to space, Jason goes to space.

Predators always go to space. Predators from space. And Hellraiser 4 Bloodlines also goes to space. We'll get to that. Well, one thing I do think is interesting about the original Hellraiser is like it caught on in the mainstream, right? Like it was successful. And I think watching it now, I don't quite understand why, even though I like it. But a lot of the movies I like from the 80s aren't successful or don't have mainstream appeal, you know? I, as long as I can remember, I've known Hellraiser, but I've never seen it until literally, you know, just a few days ago. while I was researching for this, but I know the word Hellraiser. I know Pinhead. I know what he looks like. I know he's got a puzzle box. Until I watched it, I assumed that this movie was about people solve this puzzle box and then Pinhead comes and like kills them, right? Like that was it. I thought it was like a simple slasher thing.

Like Pinhead's basically Jason and what triggers his appearance is the puzzle box. That's what I thought. But that is definitely not what the first movie was. Absolutely not. oh so i wanted to drop a few vocabulary words here um we're gonna talk about cenobites uh a cenobite is a demon right like pinhead he is a cenobite sure they're demons that live in hell they're sadomasochistic people who were have been turned into demons that are usually they usually look like they were tortured in some way and their torture implements are part of their body now and they can be sown by the puzzle box which leads me to my next vocabulary word the puzzle boxes in hellraiser are known as it's called a lament configuration the terms are used interchangeably but i'm gonna go with the one that we see in the series and interact with most often is called the lament configuration all the other ones are generically referred to as le marchand's boxes

because le marchand was the guy who created them created the model and created the first box um i I was just going to say there's even another kind of puzzle box in this universe, which is called an Elysium configuration. Yes. And that is the perfected puzzle box, which gets rid of demons instead of bringing them to you, I guess. It's interesting because now that we have these vocabulary words, Hellraiser 1 on its surface seems to be a movie that has Cenobites, evil demons that come when you call them using this lament configuration. It has both of those things in it. It's not about those things. No. It's not a movie about Cenobites or puzzle boxes. This is a movie about Uncle Frank. Yeah. It's all about Uncle Frank coming back from the dead. I guess he committed suicide? Like, did he know that the lament configuration would kill him? I don't believe he knew it would kill him. He certainly enjoyed it.

I mean, I think it's what he wanted. like i don't think he was surprised by it yeah like he when he went to solve it he did sit down like in an empty room on a cold stone floor surrounded by candles yeah well one i'm glad you brought up the question of who is the main character it relates to what i was talking about about mainstream appeal like this movie to me seems like it would be a cult classic but like the reason you know pinhead and i know pinhead even though we never watched the movie is because he was like like Robocop he was marketed to kids right like there were pinhead lunchboxes and stuff right yeah his face was all over the place right similar like even Freddy and Jason were kind of marketed to kids too um and like after Freddy and Jason he is the most successful horror icon I believe the most recognizable at least interestingly enough he was going to be in Freddy versus Jason

but they cut him out of the last minute that would have been so awesome instead of the ending they had which i actually liked the ending they had it was gonna have freddy and jason charging at each other for like one last battle and then hooks just come out of nowhere and pull them apart and finhead shows up and it's like well what do we have here or something like that that would have been great that would have been so fun that would have been awesome but they didn't solve a puzzle box no but anyway unlike those other horror franchises you can't point to any one movie in the series that is like unarguably good and I hate to use that word because I like the first and even the second one but like they all have some pretty big flaws like their stories are just kind of all over the place and they don't make a lot of sense I think part of the reason that it got this iconic appeal was we talked about Pinhead is really iconic

but second of all I think it's because the movie it's because the movie is sort of flawed in its story you cannot predict where it's going like when i first watched hellraiser like i i have no idea like you you had said uh it is it's a little bit like the mummy in some ways you know like yeah so the stepmother julia is like you know trying to bring her boyfriend frank back to life by killing people and feeding their blood to him like why establish all this backstory behind the lament configuration and the cenobites and their hell world if the movie's not even gonna be about that It's literally just about Frank coming back to life and killing people using Julia, right? Right, and some Cenobites appear every once in a while. No, not even, they never appear until the very, very, very end. Well, I think this has to do with Clive Barker himself because before Hellraiser, a story of his was adapted into a film

and I think it was Rawhead Rex, which I've seen, but I just barely remember it and I don't think it was very good. Anyway, Clive Barker hated it. It sure sounds horrible. Raw head wrecks. Clive Barker hated it. And so he wanted to direct so that that wouldn't happen again. And I think one of the things that really annoyed him was just like in films, a lot of this extra stuff that are in stories gets removed. And I think that's a way to explain just sort of the seemingly randomness of Hellraiser is that he was taking all the random extra stuff like the backstory and all these different characters who have their own little stuff. stories which kind of works in a little novella but like when you put it in a film it starts to feel like random and in this case work to its favor because you're like i have no idea where this is going but it's horrifying i actually read an article where they did an interview with clive

barker and he had said specifically that with hell razor one what he wanted to do was to make the villains into characters he wanted them to be monsters but also to be characters yeah right like he said in too many movies especially horror movies you've got the villain who is a monster that's it and they never explore that character he said he wanted to explore the monsters of this movie and that's why he went in so depth you know exploring not only uncle frank but also julia and also the xenobites right it wasn't just they show up to kill you it was they show up to kill you because they love it and it like they think you love it and like and it worked like it added layers to the movie that made it feel so complex and like real even though it was so absurd so with uncle frank in mind one note i have about this movie is the the phrase come to daddy is used no less than six times in this movie and it is always a threat

i mean getting back to who the main character is of this movie like eventually we find out it's kirstie sort of right except you could say it's frank but also clive barker i think he even had this plan in the first one but definitely by the time he got to the second movie he thought julia was going to be yeah i was gonna say you could say she's the main right he she was going to be the main character the first one and then she would be the main antagonist of the whole franchise he was trying to create the first female horror icon he wanted her to be like the female freddy krueger and so that's why they bring her back he accidentally created pinheaded freddy krueger right and it's just crazy that by the second movie they knew pinhead was popular enough that they wrote him a backstory because they're like well we need to include more of pinhead and yet they didn't know that like you don't kill him off with another cenobite like

this was pre-Indominus rex like jurassic world you might want to explain that a bit for right so the indominus rex theory is something that it's taken the entertainment world a long time to figure out people like the classic bad guy and if you introduce a new cool bad guy who is just the old bad guy but newer and cooler people hate that new bad guy and they just want to see the old bad guy kill that new bad guy which is the one thing that jurassic world really got right is that the t-rex kills the indominus rex or i mean it fights it and wins you know the indominus rex actually got eaten by that right yeah but like water the t-rex fought it and won and the velociraptors together you know and that's what and those are the guys we love exactly that's what velociraptors and we love t-rexes we don't care about this stupid new indominus rex every jurassic park fan just wants to see the t-rex take out another lame rex you know but anyway it's interesting that it

took the entertainment world such a long time to figure this out because in like i mean just one example is like shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer the new villain always comes in and beats up Spike even though he's the fan favorite and all we want to see is Spike beating up villains right part of the reason we liked Spike is because he's always getting beat up he's like Angel but he's a failure we love that yeah that's true but in Smallville they would do it too with like the new bad guy comes in and like beats Lex Luthor or something like that you know no it's like yeah Yeah, no one beats Lex Luthor.

That just makes my blood boil. Exactly. Smallville Lex Luthor was perfection. He was the perfect Lex Luthor. Yeah, he was great. Possibly the perfect villain. Do you believe a man can fly? People don't fly, Lex. I did. Wow. So they did not know this back in the 80s and it took them a long time to figure it out. So for whatever reason, even though they knew Pinhead was popular, they're like let's bring in cheese grater head and he'll kill pinhead just to give some some context to our listeners what happened in this movie is there was a evil dude like a was he a surgeon dr chenard i don't know exactly what he was he worked with crazy people doing surgery but he seemed to be a psychologist like a psychiatrist he was doing brain surgery hannibal lexter was a surgeon who became a psychiatrist so i don't know maybe it's something like that i kind of think he wasn't supposed to be doing that surgery because later in the movie when the leviathan so the

leviathan is the god of the cenobites he's the god of that hell world yes and it's always shining out these dark rays of light they're not light because they're dark but if one of those dark rays shines on you you remember all your past sins and when that happened to this doctor he remembered specifically operating on that lady and doing the brain operation so i thought maybe wasn't even supposed to be there right he just picked up the tool was like let me take over guys i don't know right but um so this doctor he brought julia back to life julia had died in the first movie um he brought her back to life you know with a ritual by spilling blood where she died and then not even a ritual like you can do it by accident i know i know yeah i mean they did do it by accident the first one and then they they worked together to put skin back on her body and then she took him with her to hell and then in hell he came in contact with the god of the

Cenobites which was the Leviathan and the Leviathan turned him into a Cenobite. He turned into like a super Cenobite and the Leviathan actually put this tentacle in his head and was either controlling him or giving him its power or something. Yeah. And I think that's why he was able to kill all the other Cenobites. But with all that apparently Clive Barker's goal was to build up Julia as the villain but like if you watch that movie when did they do that well i've got a question about that so does she have magical sexual attraction powers she seems to she uses her sexual powers to lure guy after guy after guy to this house to get killed right like it's it the movie doesn't work if she doesn't have this sexual power your theory is that julia was magical before she ever even encountered like the box yeah i think she was magical before she encountered frank i think that's why frank fell in love with her at first sight right yeah like it doesn't make sense

otherwise because every guy she meets falls madly in love with her at first sight it is true well and with that in mind why wasn't she turned into a super xenobite but also it's confusing as to why julia was taken by the xenobites at least in the first movie yeah in later movies we find out the xenobites once they're released can kind of just take whoever they want they just do whatever they want they're not really as bound by the box right the first two movies you kind of feel like they have rules but they they don't really have rules no the the entire protocol for who becomes a cenobite and who doesn't and how to become a cenobite is really confusing to me i don't understand it the cenobites come and take you to hell you are either tortured there in one of those rooms in the labyrinth or you are taken into the leviathan itself like dr chouinard is and turned into a cenobite julia seems to have free access to the leviathan yes so something as special is

going on with julia maybe it's because she already had magical powers that's yeah that's my only way of justifying it is that she was some other kind of demon right like she was there already she didn't need to become a xenobite but hold on i have another question specifically about julia that i think is pertinent here so you say this movie the purpose was to establish julia as like the new bad guy but like two-thirds of the way into this movie julia just randomly gets vacuumed up for no reason and leaves her skin behind and we never see her again yeah so what was going on with that i was like that was the most unceremonious end to what i thought was a really cool villain lady yeah i don't even know why she got vacuumed up what the heck was happening there yeah and so i know it was clive barker's goal to make her into the next freddy krueger but apparently since he was just a producer on that movie it wasn't necessarily everyone else's

top priority that's my only explanation for for as to why they did that i would have loved for the stupid doctor seen a bite to like just trip and fall off a cliff and then her be the main bad guy yeah so i did a lot of research watching nine of the ten movies and i even read hellraiser omnibus volumes one and two the comic book dang nice were they any good i mean okay they're okay all right but they are at least the ones i read i believe were written by clive barker or at least informed by clive barker like he was involved let's let's just define a few terms so cenobites are creatures that clive barker imagined them originally as they do not know the difference between pleasure and pain like they have gotten to a certain point where any sensual experience to them is pleasurable including pain and so okay that's why they're like angels to some demons to others because it's from their point of view they are maybe angel yeah they think this is great

absolutely 100 demons to everyone they are not angels at all their point of view they're going around handing out lollipops and some people don't like those lollipops and they're just like that's weird and then they keep handing out lollipops eat it anyway until you like it anything wrong with what they're doing in fact they think they're doing a service and so clive barker was actually in the 70s he was what's called a hustler which hey torvald What's a hustler? A hustler is somebody who socially engineers you to make decisions that you otherwise wouldn't have made, which benefit the hustler. And see, that is exactly what I would have said a hustler is. Turns out in England in the 70s, a hustler was a male prostitute. Oh, dear. Oh, no. You got me. I didn't see that coming. I mean, it got me, too. Clive Barker. My man. wow and so like living it up right so he had this experience when he was younger and he became a

writer and it helped him come up with the idea for cenobites like these strange creatures that do pleasure and pain and don't know the difference it's interesting because for seemingly sensual creatures they actually don't come off as sensual they are very intellectual they're serious they're like erudite they're more like these erudite demons than they are like sensual succubi i i wouldn't call them all intellectual like that big one the big fat stupid one that one's not right sure but like the most iconic one pinhead himself he's like he looks a little sadomasochistic but when he talks he seems like a very educated you know reasonable guy yeah reasonable i don't know in his own way in my opinion the best parts of the movies are when pinhead is getting horny when he starts talking and he's talking in like you said kind of an educated respectable way but he just throws phrases in there like you're looking ripe yeah like just these weird things

that yeah and we got to give kudos to doug bradley is the actor who plays pinhead and he's he's really good as an actor he's so good good pinhead he's so good so a few more little just terms leviathan as torvald has already said is the god of hell clive barker originally imagined him to be more lovecraftian like a tentacle monster but tony randall and peter atkins decided that they wanted it to be something that we'd never seen before so they made leviathan into a geometric shape now i actually think that was a great idea because the scene doesn't look that great just because you can see that the labyrinth is like painted in but it's super like iconic and imposing like just to see this giant shape hovering above a creepy labyrinth like it's really good yeah i thought i thought it was a very cool like god for this world to just be something that incomprehensible no like it was at that point while watching that i was like oh i'm not meant

to understand this series i get it yeah i'm just along for the ride here i can just relax as long as we're talking about it it shines you know rays of blackness that make you remember all your sins and it floats above the labyrinth and it also continually calls out the morse code for god in deep foghorn blasts so if you watch that section listen to it whenever the uh whenever the leviathan is in the picture it's going like it's making these deep foghorn blasts and they're morse code for god so i thought that's really sinister like something super cool and sinister that they included that no one will ever know right like no one's gonna think oh this is morse code let me decode it that's very cool and it adds to that character that it's constantly calling out god over and over like what is it why is it doing that yeah no it's very cool i like leviathan you got some more demon terms for us yeah so a group of cenobites is called a gash and oh oh wow

who decided that was that uh must be that clive yeah it must be clive barker and uh pinhead's gash in the first movie consists of the iconic chatterer the butterball and the imaginatively named female cenobite oh wow that's a great name for her it's so descriptive yeah uh the chatterer is the only one that really comes back a lot uh because i think chatterer was pretty iconic too like he kind of looks like one of those um silent hill type creatures you know yeah i mean he looked like nemesis dude he went and shoved his fingers in christy's mouth never before have i seen like a slasher villain and just like go up to the main character and just start like poking fingers into their mouth what a great thing and then rubbing his teeth all over her cheek the actor who played the chatterer could not see or hear oh that explains it he's probably just trying to grab her throat he missed and got fingers in her mouth because the actress looked like oh jesus

No, I think he actually ended up like scraping the top of her mouth or something because he couldn't see. So he ended up like hurting her a little bit. Oh, man. A gash is ruled over first by a head Cenobite, which in Pinhead's gash is Pinhead. And his gash always changes. And in the first movie, he was just called Head Cenobite. He did not have a name. Okay, so he was always written as the head of his gash. Yeah. And in the first movie, originally all the Cenobites were going to talk a lot more, but the Chatterer couldn't talk and Butterball couldn't talk either. So only Pinhead talked and the female Cenobite talks too. Yeah, she talked a little bit. They got most of the lines. But then that gash is also ruled over by an engineer. And the engineer is this strange puppet monster. Yeah, dude. That was the best part of the movie. I never expected that thing to come out and start chasing her down the hall.

Chases Kirstie down the hall when she solves the box and briefly goes in. Very clear, obvious wheels with very clear, obvious people behind it. You can see the people pushing it. Which I just, in my mind, in my head canon, they became, you know, Cenobite servants that were pushing it around. So the engineer is really the head of their gash. But I guess Pinhead is kind of the field commander. Although in later movies, it really kind of more seems like Pinhead's the one in charge and they kind of drop the engineer thing. Is there ever another appearance of an engineer in any of the Hellraiser movies? No, you never see that specific puppet again. In Hellraiser 5 Inferno, which is actually probably the best one after two, it is about a detective looking for a guy named The Engineer who's supposedly murdering a bunch of people. So they're at least referencing The Engineer. I assume in their hierarchy, after Engineer comes Leviathan.

So let's talk a little bit about The Bum, because I think The Bum is pretty cool. So The Bum is from the first movie. So there's a guy who sells Uncle Frank this box, because Uncle Frank was actually on a quest to find sensual experiences. And he learned about this box. He finds this guy who says, what is your pleasure? and sells him the box. And then later we see this bum at the pet store where Kirstie works, just eating crickets. He just starts eating crickets, and she's like, hey, put those back. But I think that she hasn't seen him eating them at that point. Once he starts eating your crickets, just let him have the crickets. Because then she watches him eat them, and she's pretty horrified. So I don't think she knew he was eating them. One of the best scenes in the movie is just that rant. And that's what I'm talking about when I say you can't predict this movie. You could never predict this bum's just going to wander into this pet shop and start eating crickets.

No, that was so weird. It was great. Fall in at the end. You couldn't have predicted the bum was going to wander back to that bonfire and just jump into the bonfire. Yeah, so like, let's talk about the ending scene. Catch on fire. So the ending scene for Hellraiser 1, Kirstie tries to burn the box. Then this bum shows up. He walks into the fire, catches on fire, grabs the box, walks away, turns into a giant dragon that has horns instead of eyes a giant bone dragon like he's made of bones and flies away and like you could never predict that was going to happen and like how important does that scene seem to you torvald for the overall not at all right they filmed that scene after they had like run out of budget with at least the part with the dragon like they had no budget they couldn't do that dragon they managed to scrape together like 700 bucks to pay like a vfx guy to make the dragon like it was that important needed that dragon they needed the

dragon it was that important to clive barker like it's creepy enough that the bum shows up and takes the box no but you needed that dragon no him just walking away on fire would have still worked yeah that's a pretty creepy ending no he has to turn into a bone dragon so what what is he is he a demon yeah the bum is an angel yeah the bum is another type of demon called an eramite i don't know too much about eromites but i do know that they are born into the world as normal humans and they are guardians of the puzzle box and each one of them has a box and they say things like what is your pleasure and they give it to people and that's basically their job and their true form is a weird looking bone dragon we learn in hellraiser 4 that the original lament configuration was created by a man named Le Marchand, right? Le Marchand. I don't know. Yeah, Le Marchand. A French guy named Le Marchand.

So here's a question for you. Are there multiple limit configurations in this world? Yes. Like in Hellraiser 2, Dr. Chouinard has lots of boxes. Are the ones that the doctor has just like replicas? Because they were never used. He never used them, right? He waited till he had the actual one to start doing stuff. So that made me think maybe there is only one. Yeah. In Hellraiser 8, Hellworld, there is a guy who has a lot of boxes, which he refers to as Le Marchand boxes, and they all look fairly similar. So in the omnibus, in the comic, rogue demon hunter Kirstie, 25 years after the events of Hellraiser 1, she goes around with her group finding and destroying Le Marchand boxes. And I'm not sure if all of them are created by La Marchand. They destroy a carousel, a music box, like a doll, a snow globe. And all of these were gateways to hell. But in another one of the comics, there is a puzzle called the Tunnel of Love.

And it's a maze of underground tunnels in Vietnam. And when navigated correctly, they lead to hell. Oh, that's cool. I like that. That one's actually an important little evidence because it shows that there can be puzzle boxes that that one wasn't created by La Marchand. right it's in vietnam right and it's also not a right it's not a box it's huge so in this world there are puzzles sometimes boxes sometimes created by le marchand but not always that can lead to hell that can open up a uh a gateway to hell basically and i mean even if they didn't show other puzzle boxes in the fourth movie i think that it's supported by the fourth movie because Le Marchant did not design this box. Le Hila, the magician, designed it and commissioned it. Like, they're very clear. Le Marchant tells his wife, he's like, I built this box to specifications by Le Hila when she's not impressed by it, right? Like, he kind of blames it on Le Hila.

And he's like, I built this to his specifications. It doesn't do anything. I love that scene. He's like, am I the greatest toymaker at all of France? And she's like, oh, let me see how it works. And then it just slides up and slides down, which is what it always does in the movies. And she's like, oh, it doesn't do anything. And then he just looks at her with the saddest eyes and says, this is my masterpiece.

Oh, my gosh. That was so good. But no, so Delilah, we don't know too much about him, but he was the greatest magician in all of France. And he did real magic and also summoned demons. And he knew a demon summoning technique that involved a puzzle box. So he had Le Merchant make it for him. Yeah. So if that technique existed and could be assigned to some random toy maker, then of course someone else could do it too, right? Like there was nothing special about Le Merchant. My question for you then is if there are multiple boxes, does that mean that just random members of Le Merchant family just kept making them and just losing them or giving them to people? I mean, it seems that way. like in hellraiser for john merchant yeah accidentally created a lament configuration building exactly which is another important thing uh that we're going to discuss is that accidentally john merchant created an entire building that is a lament configuration kind of

weird here's an interesting question of the i don't know three movies that were in hellraiser four the one that's set in space the one that's set in like 1800s or whatever and the one that's set in the modern day which one do you like the best dude the space one yeah obviously just been this obviously and that is a really good segue into event horizon let's talk because that's the space one right that is the space one i agree re-watching it with open eyes you know like believing that it's a hellraiser movie made it just so much more enjoyable i loved it and i think it's already a fun movie you know there are some people who really love this movie and like really remember it you know as like being like a really scary horror movie um and yeah maybe it's because they saw it when they were young but that's not really the feel i got from it people are like i will never forget this movie right they're like this i when i watch this movie the images in this

movie will stay with me until I die and I was like oh this must be like a really really frightening movie yeah I watched it it's not it's not and I think it could be because we've seen lots of movies since then that were like you know really gory like in the Saw franchise or something like that but maybe at the time in 1997 you've never seen a man claw his eyes out you didn't even see him claw his eyes out that was my problem with it like if they had shown him pulling his eyeballs out of his sockets i would have remembered that right like even if it looked cheap and cheesy i would have at least but that's fine i like cheesy horror some people don't i can dig it i just i don't get it felt like they were pulling their punches but that actually factors into a theory that i want to deliver after your theory which has to do with the original cut of event horizon well and i was also thinking maybe it could be the scene where justin goes out into space and starts bleeding

you know from everywhere because he's getting depressurized like maybe that's what no traumatized for me when i watch that scene i'm just like oh cool a space movie that actually you know does a semi-realistic portrayal of decompressurization in space right captain miller does yell to justin he says now release all the air from your lungs blow out and that i've heard and that's true that's completely true now the other part is that his eyes start bleeding and they say shut your eyes hold your hand over your eyes and curl up into a ball i've also read that this is what you should do if you randomly get thrown out into space which is like curl into a ball why is it hold your hands over your eyes and why is it that both you and i know this like i know this too i don't know this is not something that happened this isn't a survival skill right i'm not sure we're never getting thrown out into space we've got privatized space companies now yeah the event

horizon is a really cool ship right and it looks really weird like not how anyone in their right mind would ever design a ship right it's designed to look scary right in order to get so the gravity drive is a ball with three rotating rings around it in a room that is full of sharp points over a sea of like shimmering blood water and to get in there and to get in there you have to walk through giant pencil sharpener yeah it's pretty cool the architecture within the ship is like straight like gothic architecture like you know kind of like the Notre Dame Cathedral everything in the ship is like arches right like gothic arches usually you know these arches were around to like be huge load-bearing structures like for these big gothic churches that were just piles and piles of you know tons of stone they'd need arches to hold all that up but a spaceship doesn't necessarily need all that load-bearing structure and architecture is a good key word because uh lemarchand uh while

he was a toy maker it's also canonical that he was an architect too in the comics especially he was an architect but like john merchant we know was also an architect right like he built this building right a person can be influenced to create some sort of large structure architecturally that is maybe a gateway to something right like john merchant or possibly dr weir who is the main character in in event horizon the lament configuration like it's got symbols on it it's golden it's cool looking and if you look at the gravity drive itself in the event horizon like the whole thing is kind of gilded engraved yeah and it has random engravings on it like it got sigils similar in creepy as heck right it's very similar to how the lament configuration looks everything about that room looks nothing like scientific anything no like that room is not a scientific room it's not an engine it's not a machine it is a ritual that room is a giant

ritual with a big spinning puzzle in the middle of it. A puzzle which must solve itself to open a gateway. Does that sound familiar? No, I mean, I totally buy this theory. I'm not going to spend much time, you know, trying to contradict you here. I love it. I think it fits just perfectly. Yeah. And like I said, in later films, sometimes people just touch the box and it solves itself. Well, in this movie, when the kid Justin goes in, he just like touches that thing and like the gravity drive comes on and it kind of just solves itself and sucks him in. Right. And they end up pulling him out and he's like, you know, weird and traumatized for the rest of the movie. I just want to talk about Dr. Weir a bit more just to give some more credence to your theory that he was kind of, I don't know, like visited by demonic influences in his life. The very first scene with him in the movie, he wakes up and he was dreaming about floating and screaming on an abandoned spaceship, right?

He was dreaming about being on the event horizon before he even goes there, right? So I think this is interesting because he wasn't even in contact with the ship after it had been in hell. So why is he being haunted, right? Like there's no reason for that unless, like you said, he's already having demonic influences in his life. Now, for some reason, waking up from this immediately makes him think of his dead wife. And he grabs a picture of her. And then he takes this picture of her and puts it in a shrine with all the other pictures of her. It's interesting to know. The very first thing we learn about Dr. Weir is that he always travels with 50 pictures of his wife. Something is off with this guy. Like, he is not right in the head. Yeah, no. Like, something's going on with him. For sure. And then on the way to the event horizon, once again, he has a premonition of the event horizon having been in hell. He sees his dead wife, Claire, naked and wet in the captain's chair.

And then she turns to him and she's eyeless. And she says, I'm waiting. Like we know that you start to become influenced by the box after being in contact with the box or in close proximity to the box. Yeah, the dude created it. Right. This guy created it. So I think it makes sense that he would already be suffering from these things but like in event horizon once they get to the event horizon other people start having these issues that dr weir is having where they see flashbacks to past like traumatic events that happened in their lives at first glance maybe it doesn't seem like this is a super hellraiser thing um but i do think there's precedence for the cenobites using past memories to torture you um in hellraiser 3 pinhead becomes the main character her name is joey i think he becomes her father um and he takes her to the past and i don't think joey even opened the box in this movie

but um she is in possession of the box though anyway so there's precedence in hellraiser 3 for cenobites being able to become your loved ones and also give you flashbacks and give you hallucinations and things like that well that fits into this movie pretty well yeah and also in the later films which i won't talk about much five and six people do experience a lot of flashbacks and hallucinations after being in close proximity to the box or touching the box and opening the box obviously but it doesn't always seem to be a requirement that you open the box sometimes the Cenobites kill indiscriminately to people who were never really all that related to the box which is kind of what happens in Event Horizon right like people are dying and they weren't the ones also kind of exactly what happens in Hellraiser 4 right like they open the box on a spaceship and then a bunch of people show up after the box gets opened and they all get killed right

they had nothing to do with it this is part of my theory I kind of think Event Horizon should be hellraiser for but it would have been a great hellraiser for one important thing that pinhead says in hellraiser 2 he says hands don't call us desire calls us because tiffany opens the box and they don't kill tiffany but they do get chanard now chanard thought he'd be safe because he was having other people open the box for him that's the doctor yeah dr chanard they do not get him he goes with uh with julia and gets the honor of becoming the chosen cenobite for the leviathan yeah he got everything he wanted yeah and to think he faulted but once released the cenobites do seem to kill people who have some sort of desire usually for pleasure or pain or power or something like that i think the reason they sometimes they kill people who have no desire well i'm not like killing yeah i'm not 100 sure about that like they don't kill tiffany in hellraiser 2 i think

it's because she has no desire at all period right like she's she's just she misses her mom well she misses her mom but like she doesn't seem to want anything she just solved the box because it was in her hands she's doing it compulsively and that's it so i think that victims of the box people who summon the box even sometimes people who make the boxes are people who are obsessed And similarly, Weir is like 100% obsessed with the event horizon and the drive from the very beginning of this movie. The first time he stares at it, it like reflects in his eye and he's just constantly sitting around like thinking about it. Yeah, it's his baby. He created it. Yeah. I just think that's important to note that Dr. Weir is driven by obsession, which many of the other victims of the box were as well. And specifically people like Dr. Chouinard who became Cenobites. this takes place in 2047 that's like uh 27 years from now so not so far away also they still use

cds in 2047 just so you know cds are so useful so that ship was built seven years before it was built in 2040 so maybe they've come a long way in those seven years i'm just saying hold on to your cds because you know they could come back in 27 years i also thought that like sam neill and Laurence Fishburne are great actors and even in this yeah I think they're pretty good but I also felt like in this movie I've never seen them act quite this bad even though they're not bad but I'm just saying some of the lines they deliver just here and there are really like oh that wasn't the best line and maybe it was just the writing but but anyway I love Laurence Fishburne. I'll get into that with my theory um there's there's some some issues with the filming of this movie that I want to talk about but we'll do that later just wanted to mention so we're he built the gravity drive that produces uh well so he says it allows the ship to go faster than light by creating a

dimensional gateway that allows the ship to instantly jump from one point in the universe to another so like he specifically says it creates a dimensional gateway gateway is the term that they always use for the lament configuration they say that it's a gateway to hell and then i i just want to say he he says that the way it does it is the using whale tensor dynamics it folds the space time until the curvature becomes infinitely large and you produce a singularity and then later everyone gets mad at him because his drive creates a black hole they're like what you create a black he literally told him that he said you produce a singularity i'm like guys you're on a spaceship you should know what a term like singularity means in an astronomical context like they should know what it does he was very clear about it well and also they tell him to explain things in english and then he proceeds to explain in english and then they get mad at him for like being too

complicated when he really wasn't being that complicated no he was just explaining it no i mean i think they were trying to paint this crew as kind of like an alien kind of crew like these are blue collar people they're not here for the science they're here to you know do scrap and rescue missions that's all right yeah so the limit configuration has no known source of power but it does seem to have a lot of lightning in it for some reason yeah that's true it does have a lot of lightning now in event horizon after the kid opens the drive just by touching it weir argues that the gravity drive couldn't open because the power wasn't on which is a good argument yeah that's a great argument no i mean i actually loved his argument for that like everything he was saying he made perfect sense he was like this ship cannot be turning on its gravity drive and everyone's like you're wrong stupid scientists go away right and that is something i like about

this movie is perhaps to some extent it's told from weir's perspective but like i was thinking that while i watched it but like everything he says is just very very reasonable and rational and he's like and they treat him like yeah and they're just constantly like hey hey you you know and he's like guys we were sitting here to do a mission we can't leave and lawrence fisher was like we're leaving we just spent like i actually have to i gotta contest you on that so when captain miller at that point in the movie he says we're done we can't save the crew they're dead let's go back and abort this mission and we're refuses what on earth does he think they're gonna do there they can't fly the event horizon back it's out of oxygen does he just want them to sit there and die like what is we're expecting at that point they have to go back uh so because we were talking about how they were getting mad at him because of the black hole just

so around that part in the movie captain miller asks what's in the core doctor and weir says it's complicated and then he deliberately avoids saying what's in there in the next scene they're like a black hole like it seems like the core contains a black hole yeah it does and so that's important because in hellraiser 4 bloodline john merchant is trying to invent a box that has perpetual light and he wants to do it by capturing light within it what else captures light black holes a black hole wow but he wants the light to like stay right to be sucked into blackness but like i'm just saying like there are similarities with what these two men definitely were trying to accomplish i agree and you could say the um elysium configuration generates light and the lament configuration eats light yes and what eats light a black hole right right yeah so you could say maybe all the Marchand boxes contain some form of black hole and maybe the Elysium

configuration contained a sun. I don't know. Sure. Why not? The space station that they're in, in Hellraiser 4 is a giant lament configuration. Yeah. Hey Torvald, which movie do you think this quote is from? There's something in this station right now that wants our souls and whether you believe in hell or not, it's going to take us there. Oh dude, that sounds like a quote from event horizon but it's not it's from hellraiser 4 what oh my gosh dude you just proved your theory but yeah that's pretty good i mean that quote could it would not be out of place in either movie it would fit perfectly in either movie but yeah at the end of hellraiser 4 the space station literally folds up into a box element configuration yes and uh the entire premise of event horizon is that they keep saying the ship is alive, the ship, you know, like it wants us here, that kind of thing. Like the whole ship has become

some sort of gateway to hell. You're establishing the precedent that ships can be limit configurations. Yes, large things can be limit configurations, even buildings as we also saw in Hellraiser 4. So in Hellraiser 4, we've got the Minos, which is a space station limit, or it's a Elysium configuration. It was built in 2127. Event Horizon, they built in 2040. Yeah. That's like a hundred years before. So you're telling me that Lament Configuration spaceships have been being constructed for like a hundred years? Well, at least two. Everybody seems pretty surprised and unnerved by everything Mr. Merchant is doing in Hellraiser 4. Like whatever he's doing seems very out of the ordinary. But the Event Horizon was never recovered, right? Right. But if they had the ability to make a ship that can open up a gateway and travel light years in an instant, they would keep doing it. Like nothing would stop them from doing it again, right?

I don't know. I mean, like if the only people who came back were Stark and Cooper being like, no, don't do it again. Maybe not. You know, like they've had nothing but failures. Like they lost everyone on that ship and they lost almost everyone they sent out to get that ship. So you're saying these survivors came back and convinced everyone it didn't work. Ship didn't go anywhere. Yeah. Like that's what you're saying. Yeah. Well, also they lost Dr. Weir too, who seemed to be like the driving force, like, cause he's so obsessed with this. All right. All right. Because of what happened with the Event Horizon, that creating spaceships, space stations with drives that harness and capture light or black holes was outlawed. And maybe that's why those commandos come in and attack the guy on the Minos space station, because that's what he's trying to do. Yeah, I mean, that could be part of it, but I'm pretty sure they made it pretty clear that they were there because he commandeered the spaceship.

But I mean, they could be part of it. That's interesting. That movie ends with them killing Pinhead and all the Cenobites and sealing the gateway to hell. Yeah. And that's canonically the end. Right. Like, that's it. That's the last of Pinhead. That's true. Nothing else ever happens. I thought that was kind of cool that like now we know how he started and how he ended and we can have hundreds of years of stories in between. Lamar Sean wins in the end. He does. He wins. And also that was a weird ending for a horror movie. Like usually there's something like I expected them to be flying away and then hooks to come out from the ceiling and then cut to credits. Yeah. And they really missed their opportunity to have like a spaceship chasing another spaceship and hooks come out of the spaceship behind and pull the other spaceship toward it. Oh my gosh. Dude, they did miss that up too. I didn't even, man, you should have, you should have written this movie. That would have been great.

So Cenobites vary greatly, but all have generally been tortured. And in Event Horizon, most of the crew is taken and tortured. And some of them are turned into Cenobites and some of them are not. And this is something that happens in Hellraiser. Sometimes you get turned into a Cenobite. Sometimes you just get tortured and killed. So the original crew, it seems that Captain Killpack became one of the Cenobites, or at least he looks kind of like one. And then later on, Dr. Weir becomes a Cenobite. So first he claws out his eyes, but that's not when he becomes a Cenobite. Later he comes back, he's got his eyes back, and he's just got these very Cenobite-like scars lining his body in like a grid pattern all over kind of thing. Weir, he was sucked out the window, which means that he ended up on Neptune, right? Like he's gone. There's no possible way he could have come back. And then he comes back.

And like you said, his eyes are back and also his skin's all carved up. He looks like Pinhead, but without the pins, right? He says, the ship brought me back. I told you she won't let me leave. She won't let anyone leave. Right. Now, I think there's two options here. Either Miller is just hallucinating, right? The ship's making him hallucinate that Weir came back or the ship turned Weir into a Cenobite. Which I think fits because his skin also looks a little gray or bluish, right? Yeah. Also, most, but not all, Cenobites lose their hair in the process of becoming a Cenobite. Yeah, he lost his hair. He definitely loses his hair. After becoming a Cenobite, what you seek to do is take more souls, which, of course, is exactly what Weir does trying to kill the rest of the crew. Before becoming a Cenobite, Weir hallucinates his wife one more time, the last time he enters the core. And she says, you never have to be alone again.

You're with me. I have such wonderful things to show you. Which sounds a lot like Pinhead saying, we have such sights to show you. And then Weird digs out his own eyes. So I guess he didn't want to see those things. But when his wife says that, she also has no eyes. Right, right. Maybe he thinks you can only see them with no eyes. Also, after Justin is pulled into the portal, right when they get to the event horizon, he says, it shows you things. horrible things oh yeah dude that's what that's what xenobites love to do pinhead just wants to show you things i mean of course from justin's point of view they're horrible things but you know to like dr weir or any other xenobite to pinhead he thinks they're great they're lollipops these are what he likes he's handing out torture and lollipops and i'm all out of torture but the torture is lollipops well yeah to him the torture is a good thing but you said that weir is not a

xenobite until he comes back from neptune and i kind of felt like from the moment where his wife says she's going to show him wonderful wonderful things i thought he was started transitioning into being a xenobite at that point because then he goes and finds the doctor mr trauma and he vivisects him and hangs him up by hooks on wires which is very very xenobite like behavior right like that's exactly what a xenobite would do yeah i think that dr weir is a good example of probably one of the only people in the whole hellraiser series if we take this to be part of the hellraiser series who actually does see them as angels you know this is pleasure yeah and paradise to him so you know this is a happy end to the story i mean for him when he's showing miller they're in the core and he's a xenobite now he like touches miller and gives him some visions of hell their visions consist almost entirely of the crew strapped to things with

barbed wires which also is very xenobitish yeah so stark at the very end she gets back with cooper she did not ever see weir in his final four i was gonna say this too so her hallucination at the end can't just be a hallucination right something came with them right like yeah and that's kind of what happens when you're close proximity to the box sometimes it continues haunting you even after you've sort of left it yes the gateway opened meaning there was a black hole in that ship and then miller just blew it up like would this not just put a black hole in the middle of our solar system i think miller could have just killed everybody right possibly everyone in the universe depending on how populated other solar systems are right so this is kind of getting into my theory that i'm gonna lay on you in a minute but um every member of the crew was tortured in ways specific to their deepest fears and failings miller needed to lose his crew because that was

his biggest fear and failing right okay it had to happen yeah um and then other crew members you don't really get into this because a lot of it was cut um but like the the one lady whose name i can't remember her biggest fear and failing was that she she wasn't there for her son who had he like his legs didn't work right so she kept seeing him running away from her or having his legs messed up cooper his biggest fear was also kind of like the captain's fear it was just losing somebody he cared about and that was supposed to really get to him when he lost justin um even though the captain saved justin but he really didn't like that that he couldn't get justin out of the black hole before justin fell into a coma i guess i didn't remember cooper being particularly bothered by what happened he wasn't that's that got cut out so now i'm talking about stuff that got cut out of the movie um and then uh the the doctor dude um you actually see this in the movie but

you don't know why he as a child was had some really really bad traumatizing surgery where they had to open up his chest dj trauma and bad trauma yes yes dj trauma had big big trauma and now he is deathly afraid of getting cut he's afraid of knives which is why he picks up a scalpel and holds it to the other guy's throat and this is that's his greatest fear and this is why dj trauma is my favorite character because like dj trauma is intense oh my gosh i mean he just grabs smith and just puts a scalpel right up to his throat like and this is when they're all the same team everyone else in the room was kind of like yeah okay with it but like they're all in the same team and like they're all kind of against dr weir but no he goes for smith and holds a scalpel to his throat so that was kind of his sin was that he was super afraid of knives but then he went ahead and held a knife to someone else's throat and then he paid for it by getting cut up

like he got vivisected which is what he was most afraid of yeah i have a few more questions related more to your theory but not really like these are just random musings okay one thing the rules of magic which we learned in hellraiser four number one a summoned demon is yours to command okay number two unless you stand in hell's way those are the rules of magic seems like there's some room to bend there yes so um the assistant he kills mr leila then the assistant and angelique they live together for 200 years until finally she's able to break free just by asking if they can go to i think it's san francisco and then he says no and then he's standing in hell's way so she just kills him and i'm like does this mean that a summoned demon could just ask can i kill you and then always be able to kill their master because no matter what if you say yes they kill you if you say no they kill you because you're standing in their way

seems like i've figured out the trick to how a summoned demon is not always yours to command well if so you're far smarter than angelique was took her 200 years to figure that she didn't even figure it out she just happened to finally ask something that he said no to okay at the end of hellraiser 2 when the leviathan is shut down after they solve the lament configuration uh shoots out bursts of energy i don't know if you remember this but there's like light balls that start shooting out of it and they don't just shoot out of it into the labyrinth they shoot out into the real world do you think this could be and i actually have to credit a guy called mr h from mr h reviews for this his theory is that the leviathan was getting shut down and this was it kind of calling out to try and create a new leviathan or to reactivate itself and he thought that perhaps these bursts of energy could have somehow either traveled to dr weir or to the

event horizon to turn it into a new leviathan and that the event horizon was becoming the next leviathan throughout the event horizon movie do you think there's any credence to any of that because we know that the leviathan is an inanimate object that is alive yeah that's what the event horizon is right there's a lot of weird stuff in hellraiser 2 yeah so it's hard to necessarily ascribe a lot of meaning to many of the bizarre things that happen there but sure i mean anything is possible uh i do think it's interesting though i just thought of this that like the leviathan has black light maybe it's a black hole except black holes don't emit they don't emit black light well they do emit invisible light waves right that we can't see with the human eye maybe it's carl or They also emit visible light waves in some cases. I just thought it was an interesting idea that the event horizon was becoming the next Leviathan.

I thought that was cool. I mean, it could be a big giant shape that goes and says God over and over. I mean, what do ships communicate in? Morse code. Yeah, well, Morse code, dude. I mean, maybe the original Leviathan was a ship, like an ocean liner. It could be. And it had a foghorn. Hey, maybe there's something to that. That's interesting. Another thought I had while watching this, a lament configuration, it can be a puzzle or it could be an actual maze. I'm wondering, could a lament configuration be digital? Could we have like a program or a virus or maybe a phishing email that when you read it solves the puzzle? So you could like maliciously send a lament configuration to someone. This is going to be the next Hellraiser movie in Hellraiser 8, Hellworld. Yeah, I was hoping you'd bring that up because I haven't seen this one. I don't know how it worked in that one. Interestingly enough, even though Pinhead is often grouped together with a lot of the iconic slashers, he's not really much of a slasher, at least for his first several movies.

But Hellworld is just a slasher. The bunch of kids play a game called Hell World. And unfortunately, this movie was made by people who had never played and didn't know what video games were. I've never seen a video game. So like you only get like two shots of the game they're playing. And it's just like this 2D image of just like a box. And they just kind of like click on it and rotate it. And like you don't really even see what they're doing. It shows their faces so you can't even see the screen anymore. and they're like no you gotta finesse it you you know you like some guy's giving this this lady like advice as she's playing the game dude i can't tell you how many times i've been coaching someone at a game and i told them to finesse it right one of the main characters in hell world is is it henry cavill yeah henry cavill what i guessed it yes oh my god the new superman i can't believe it that's ridiculous dude he's also a total nerd no like he actually plays video

games he really should have told them that their movie sucked but anyway or at least wasn't accurate he was probably not much of an actor back then so i doubt he wanted to he didn't really have any clout so i went and watched hell world kind of before i watched any others because like from the synopsis it's like whoa this is like people get like spy kids 3d like they get pulled into a video game but it's like pinheads hell world video game i'm like wow but unfortunately that's not what happens you solve this dumb puzzle on what looks like just a 2d game that might even be a web page but they act like it's a game they all play and it's so fun but i don't understand how it could be and then it gives you an invitation to this house that's having a party called hell world and then they go to this house and they end up you know getting killed so did playing that game did that bring the cenobites it's like did they physically solve a puzzle in that movie because if

not yes so they do physically solve a puzzle in that movie because the guy they go to has a lot of puzzle boxes at at his house the guy who owns this house is this really creepy weird guy but he's played by uh bishop from the alien aliens you know lance henrickson is the actor who plays bishop and this guy anyway it's revealed that he had like a vendetta against these kids and when they arrived he drugged all of them and then he buried them alive underground and um like well that was the girl who who who died because like drills were going into her neck she actually died because while she was hallucinating she clawed her neck so bad that she bled to death right okay and the guy who died because he was decapitated actually he died because while he was underground he had an asthma attack and he suffocated and henry cavill's death is the best because their only explanation for him is and that guy well he died just because of straight up fear or something

like that like he just died because he was scared so when they interacted after going to this party they were somehow like psychically communicating with each other i don't know the movie doesn't make any sense and it's not good this is weird and then there were actually no xenobites in this movie it was all a hallucination right so pinhead does appear from time to time but apparently it was all hallucination except that when bishop lance henrickson leaves after having buried all these kids alive he has his puzzle box with him and i think for some reason he solves it and then the xenobites come and take him i don't know i i wasn't watching this movie that closely because i didn't really like it that much um what a weird movie yeah no it was very odd all right well i mean i think if lament configuration can be a physical puzzle i think it can be a digital puzzle yeah no i think you're right like and that's what we're saying here right with the event horizon

like you can be inspired to create these doorways to hell and they might not be boxes always you know so yeah i think they can be digital so next time you get a fishy email or text message you be careful well i mean if the subject line is we have such sights to show you don't click oh no don't do it don't do it okay last thing i'll ask you is just about hellraiser in general so we're saying that event horizon can be in the hellraiser universe as far as we're concerned right just because it shares some similarities what about ripoffs and parodies like cabin in the woods right has a guy named fornicus lord of bondage and pain and he's got blades in his head and a puzzle ball yeah he's clearly supposed to be pinhead right but i'm just wondering does that make cabin in the woods and everything else that's ever parodied it in the hellraiser universe like was fornicus a cenobite because he's got to be by that logic right yeah and i'm glad you asked

that question because uh well in the case of cabin in the woods i think you can explain it away with like oh it's just a parody you know it's it's like a post-modern kind of deconstruction of horror films but it's a good question because like where's the real evidence that connects these two movies like we've pointed out a lot of similarities between them but like you could say there's lots of similarities in tons of different horror movies like even you could say freddy krueger's a cenobite right like as he burned to death it was because he solved element configuration and became a xenobite right you know yeah you could say that or even in a movie like the avengers you could say the tesseract is a puzzle box right no loki is a xenobite or in a game like the evil within you could say that the brain device that takes your main character to another world that's actually someone created you know a digital lament configuration

and that's why all the people in there look like xenobites right so there are countless movies inspired by hellraiser and why does event horizon get this special treatment like what's the smoking gun yeah the why should we include it in the franchise evidence yeah that can really connects it so here it is and it's not huge or anything like that but i have read from multiple sources clive barker consulted on event horizons in the early stages of the movie and so if saying like clive barker like clive barker wasn't even necessarily the writer of hellraiser 2 right like he was a producer he consulted on it right there are many things in this franchise that are part of it because clive barker was part of it but not even in necessarily a direct way so i think that like clive barker didn't consult on cabin in the woods right he didn't consult on the evil within or the avengers right but he consulted on event horizon i think that's the clear connection

the cement you know that that uh makes this part of the hellraiser franchise okay so we're saying if clive barker had a hand in it then it can be official then it can be canon yeah i think that that compared with all the other similarities that we've already discussed kind of creates this uh cohesive theory that connects it all together i i i think i've got to give it to you there because uh if he actually did consult on event horizon because i don't think he was credited but if he did then that does set it apart from any other thing that could possibly be linked to hellraiser so yeah that's cool so and just sort of uh like wrapping up my theory the reason i like this theory is because it elevates event horizon from a high budget b-movie to possibly the best hellraiser sequel in the series you know oh yeah and definitely the best in space sequel of any horror franchise right um and so it elevates event horizon by making it part of a greater lore

rather than just a random space horror and it elevates hellraiser by adding a better sequel than most of the sequels have been right it's just really interesting to me that hellraiser 4 came out in 1996 event horizon came out in 1997 they're one year apart and event horizon the quality compared to hellraiser 4 is just off the charts like i felt like i entered a different universe watching hellraiser 4 followed by event horizon like oh man and it's i really i don't mean disparage hellraiser but um yeah their props and sets and stuff are are not the most convincing sometimes but event horizons are just top notch like you that spaceship looks real it looks like a real ship while they're on it yeah so i don't know i just i wonder how this movie that came out of nowhere versus this other movie from an established franchise the movie that came out of nowhere could have been so much more of a worthy sequel yeah like how'd that happen

but no i love this theory i think uh i think it really makes event horizon into a great movie it turns it from just oh that's a fun space horror to this is a fantastic hellraiser sequel um it fixes all the things that i didn't like about event horizon and it takes the things i did like and it enhances them right like it gives reason to dr weir going insane it gives reason to him coming back it gives reason to like one of the things i was wondering while i was watching it the first time is okay say the ship did become sentient and it did go to hell what's it trying to do now like what does it want why does it care if these people die or not it wants to do that because you know cenobites like to torture people they think it's pleasure right this ship is getting off on this right no i i think like i said it just it straight up enhances the movie it makes it better it makes it more fun and it makes me wish that pinhead had showed up at the end that

would have been cool yeah real quick i want to i want to throw at you my own theory about event horizon okay a lot of people who love event horizon will actually know about this originally there was a version of the movie known only as the hell cut okay it was event horizon the hell cut it included just massive amounts of stomach churning blood guts violence it was so unsettling that the studio had them axe over 30 minutes off of the movie and bury the original cut far away sealed in a transylvanian salt mine they're like get rid of this put it underground why transylvania i don't know so and this is true that's what happened to the original cut of this movie the studios they said take it all away bury it get rid of it when they went back later to retrieve the hell cut for like special editions and stuff only one of them came back i mean i wish no it was it was nowhere to be found like they couldn't retrieve it reports differ on this

either it had deteriorated too much or it had somehow been misplaced or thrown away but my theory is that the canister containing the film was a lament configuration yes no i mean that my theory is that the original hell cut was demonic it was actually filmed in hell and the cave that they buried it in became a portal to hell and reclaimed its own footage that's my theory so um I actually have a substantial amount of evidence for this, so don't brush it off too quick. I love this theory. Jeremy Bolt, he was the producer of this movie, so he worked very closely with Anderson. He says that the original cut included a literal orgy of sex and violence. In the movie, they see some footage of the original crew of the Event Horizon going crazy and killing each other. This is the sequence that added the most time to the movie. okay this that sequence that scene was i counted it like 12 seconds 10 seconds in the final cut

it was it was just a little over 10 seconds and yet somehow jeremy bolt he says that sequence took a month of prep and a week to film it included many grotesque gags and he says we used amputees and porn stars to make it happen. So Paul W.S. Anderson, he says that the hell footage was shot on weekends and that it probably wasn't closely inspected by the Paramount executives. He said, and I quote, what happened is I would shoot with the main unit on the weeks and I would shoot the weekends with what we called a reduced unit. He says, I think because it was reduced unit footage, the studio never bothered watching it because they thought, oh, it's just inserts of buttons being pressed or something like that but it was actually all of the hell footage now i think this is weird so doctor weird a month a whole month to prep for one scene this is just something that turned on on one of the view screens randomly he filmed this scene for a week he didn't include

any of the regulars in this he had a separate crew just for this scene of the movie and they worked on separate days of the week from everyone else maybe you can give me some insight like is it normal for one little scene in the movie to get a month of prep in a week of filming because that sounds overkill to me no that's not normal no that's so weird right like for 10 seconds of footage well like okay so if he was using like basically an alternate crew and alternate actors and if the studio thought that it was just inserts anyway feasibly he could get away with it with a very small budget and so then they wouldn't know that he was essentially wasting their budget on a week of footage they weren't going to use right but that sure sounds secretive right like it sure sounds shady and weird obviously shady and weird you said he got a totally different crew like that's weird yes you're either doing that because you're trying to keep you're trying to keep a

secret or you're doing that because it didn't really happen. And you're just trying to build up some sort of lore story about your movie. Exactly. Yes. Like nobody who worked on this scene can apparently be like contacted or talk about it because we don't know who they are. They're secret people. Right. I just think it's really, really strange. Most of the quotes I'm going to give you came from a 2011 Q&A with Anderson and Bolt. So he said this scene contained endless amounts of orgies blood intestines he said there was a real beauty to it even though it was very disturbing which to me sounds like something i don't know pinhead might say about a sexual bloody orgy but anyway when the studio watched the hell cut they were disgusted uh-huh and shocked at the revolting hellish monstrosity that their director had just brought them And according to both Anderson and Bolt, they both confirmed this multiple members of the audience were literally fainting during the screening, just from the sheer guttural revulsion that they felt. And it was at that point that the studio demanded that this film be recut and that they bury the original cut. They bury it literally in a salt mine.

I mean, everything about this sounds like a story you tell to, like, just hype up your cult classic. Well, I mean, I know that there are other odd stories. Like, there's a movie called, I think it's called I Know What You Did. It's like a 60s movie where, like, their viral marketing for this thing back in the day was, like, they had installed car seatbelts in the theaters because it was so scary. You would fall out of your seat. that's kind of sounds like that it also kind of sounds like there are similar kind of weird stories that sound like bs to me uh uh the exorcist people saying like that the film was literally cursed and you know like mysterious disappearances of people who saw the original film and like there are just lots of stories about the movie the exorcist and like you watch that movie it's not even scary right like but like at the time when it came out it was like people were really disturbed by it you know and they made up but the keywords here are when it

came out this is not when event horizon came out like the studio seemed to not like it and they seemed to downplay the horror of it like that's the whole reason for the new cut i will say that as someone who was a film archivist storing films in a cave is not uncommon that is actually a good place to store films in a lot of cases if it's cool and dry uh and so a lot of archives are actually in caves as an archivist is it not is it uncommon for once a film has been archived and stored purposefully in a cave for you to go back for it and not be able to find it like well that seems like the weirdest part to me is that it's either gone or deteriorated or thrown away like every time they tell the story a different thing happened to it yeah things do happen in archives and sometimes items are lost. So that's not necessarily uncommon. I would say maybe this is an exaggerated story or perhaps the two people talking about it

don't exactly know what happened. And maybe they just heard like, oh yeah, they put it in the cave, you know, when maybe this company has like an archive that is in a cave, right? But they didn't know that. So like, oh, they had to bury it in a cave, you know? Maybe it wasn't buried. Or the other explanation is if this studio for whatever reason did give the order to bury it in a cave in transylvania which would be very expensive for this studio when they could just burn it or something maybe the guy who was supposed to do that was just like i'm not doing that and so when they went to go get it it wasn't there because he never put it there because who would go and do that could be okay but i'm not i'm not done here i got more to talk all right i don't know you can't debunk this theory yet so um it wasn't like anderson and bolt were biting at the reins to talk about it they kind of had to be probed and it kind of

seemed like they were a little ashamed right like anderson seemed to have felt bad that he produced something this gutturally offensive like no it sounds like there was a literal week-long orgy so from the 2011 q a anderson said actors would often say that they didn't like coming into work and that they felt unsettled just walking on to the set and this he didn't seem to want to talk about the the most he would go into it was just that since the movie had to do with people paying for their sins and since a lot of the actors in the movie were experiencing kind of similar life situations like i guess the lady who was letting down her son by not going to the birthday party was like actually letting down her son by not going to his birthday or something in real life because he needed to film so he said that a lot of the actors were having like just emotionally not happy to be there and that could explain some of the hiccups in their performances maybe they

just really didn't want to be there right okay jolie richardson who played stark in a completely separate interview um she has made it clear that she didn't enjoy filming this movie on separate occasions and for this interview she described the experience as cursed and she literally cursed which is what i'm getting at here and she shared some horror stories the most notable one involving explosions and memory loss something that happens a lot with possessions and cursed scenarios so she says there was this one scene with sam neill and me at the console we were meant to be typing away and then on the count of three there'd be a fake explosion and we'd throw ourselves back off our chairs when sam and i did the scene for real there was the count of three and then neither of us remember what happened next okay the explosion went off and we woke up a few moments later on the floor that happened every single time those are her words well why didn't they say something

i don't know but that sounds very very that doesn't make any sense you would be like hey i think we need to go see a doctor or that explosion must have been bigger than we thought it would be i don't know but apparently i mean i don't think it was the explosion i think they were getting possessed or something i think uh i think the powers of hell were invading this set jimmy bolt said twice not once but twice during the uh q a he said we figured if you're going to hell you've really got to do it you can't tap dance around it like everything else they were saying i think he meant it literally so now i'll talk a little bit about the recovery of of this hell cut um so they went to get the original it was found that most of the footage is quote unquote gone forever. It's been thrown away or deteriorated or missing. I've seen all three of those explanations. Now, in a 2012 interview, Anderson announced that producer Lloyd Levin had found a

VHS tape with the original rough cut. Anderson said that after finishing Resident Evil Retribution, he planned to watch it for the first time since assembling the film. More recently, in a January 2017 interview anderson reiterated that a director's cut will never be released as the footage does not exist he says there is no footage and then they brought it up they asked him about the vhs tape and he said that neither he nor levin had watched it yet he says levin moved to spain and but but he's still excited about watching it at some point now i i say that this vhs tape is some sort of cursed object of power which maybe still has that you know a gateway to hell inside of it and maybe it's some kind of lament configuration or you know maybe like the ring right video right i think that they fear the hell cut but also they love the hell cut i think maybe it's pleasure for some and pain for others could be but you know when whenever whenever they

do decide to uh to release a special edition i think they'll have such sights to show us that should be what's trending who cares about the snyder cut you know release the hell cut well that's what uh that's what event horizon fans have been clamoring for they want the hell cut so anyway that's that's my favorite event horizon theory besides your hellraiser crossover theory i i fully want to believe that the uh writer director assembled an alternate crew and took them to hell and they never came back and that's why we never heard from them and the footage will never be seen again or will it uh that's a that's an interesting theory i i will be interested to see the hell cut when i hope it ever releases thank you guys for listening to the popcorn isn't real uh i hope you enjoyed uh hearing a lot about event horizon and hellraiser uh and our and this theory that we discussed either Event Horizon is a fun little 90s space horror

or it's one of the best Hellraiser sequels there is and you decide which one you want to believe or it was filmed on location in hell and the footage was sealed in a cave and returned to its master below so yeah you decide what do you want to believe and on that note we leave you I am Leif Eric and I'm here with my brother Torvald And we will see you next time. See you later. Opening music for this episode was provided by Christine. And if you like our podcast, don't forget to rate, review, subscribe on whatever platform you get your podcasts. And remember, the popcorn isn't real.