The Hellbound Heart was filmed, with Barker as scriptwriter and director, as Hellraiser. The film itself, which succeeded in establishing the Cenobite “Pinhead” (anonymous in the book) as a horror icon to rival Freddy Krueger, deserves its own commentary, which I will not attempt here. It is worth noting, however, that “Pinhead” is not the monster in Hellraiser (unlike Krueger’s razor-glove, his pins are not meant for slashing and maiming). The eponymous villain of the piece is Frank, and the film’s title, in referring to him, has a deliberate double meaning.

Frank’s brother, Rory, recalls his wayward sibling’s passage through life as follows:

The brothers’ paths had diverged considerably once they’d passed through adolescence, and Rory regretted it. Regretted still more the pain Frank’s wild life-style had brought to their parents. It seemed that when Frank appeared, once in a blue moon, from whichever corner of the globe he was presently laying waste, he only brought grief. His tales of adventures in the shallows of criminality, his talk of whores and petty theft, all appalled the family. But there had been worse…In his wilder moments Frank had talked of life lived in delirium; of an appetite for experience that conceded no moral imperative.

It is this hell-raising desperado who is driven by his own appetites to a literal raising of hell, the summoning of the Cenobites. A common reading of the film is that it works as a kind of cautionary tale, with “Pinhead” in the role of Shock-Headed Peter, warning of the dangers of excess. According to this reading, the moral of the tale is that if one cannot curb one’s enthusiasm for turpitude one risks unleashing something unpleasant, some avatar of the “dark side” of sexuality by whom one will be punished accordingly. But these are not at all the moral co-ordinates of the story. The Cenobites are not monsters from the Id, but “hopelessly, flawlessly ambiguous” minds devoted to techniques of sensory extremity: they are not primal devourers, but sensual sophisticates of the highest order. What they represent does not lie within human sexuality but beyond it.

Whereas Lovecraft’s Carter desires the fantastic, and seeks dominion over the “realms of dream”, Frank is apparently a materialist of bodies and pleasures, “laying waste” to the world for his enjoyment. At the same time, what he believes he is seeking is beyond what the world has to offer, beyond the exhaustion of its reserves of sensation. This “materialism” thus involves, at the height of its delirium, a forgetting of the world, a desire for purification. What Frank imagines, when he imagines pleasure beyond imagination, is an ecstatic exaltation:

He had thought they would come with women, at least; oiled women, milked women, women shaved and muscled for the act of love: their lips perfumed, their thighs trembling to spread, their buttocks weighty, the way he liked them. He had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread amongst the flowers underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice was his for the asking and whose skills would press him - upward, upward - to undreamt-of ecstasies. The world would be forgotten in their arms. He would be exalted by his lust, instead of despised for it.

- which, after all, sounds very pleasant, if possibly a little wearisome in the long run. What it represents is, however, a necessary failure of the imagination. Frank hopes and believes that the eldritch pleasures of the Cenobites will be like the sensations he has experienced in his scandalous career as a rake and womanizer, only amplified and purified of obstructions and distractions. But to dream of “undreamt-of ecstasies”, and yet insist on a continuous supply of buttocks the way one likes them, is to be mesmerised by a bad infinity.

It is very clear that the Cenobites understand this, and that Frank does not. His interrogation by them draws its particular cruelty and menace from this fact:

He was still searching for words when one of them said: “This world…it disappoints you?”

“Pretty much,” he replied.

“You’re not the first to tire of its trivialities,” came the response. “There have been others.”

“Not many,” the gridded face put in.

“True. A handful at best. But a few have dared to use Lemarchand’s Configuration. Men like yourself, hungry for new possibilities, who’ve heard that we have skills unknown in your region.”

“I’d expected -” Frank began.

“We know what you expected,” the Cenobite replied. “We understand to its breadth and depth the nature of your frenzy. It is utterly familiar to us.”

Frank grunted. “So,” he said, “you know what I’ve dreamt about. You can supply the pleasure.”

The thing’s face broke open, its lip curling back in a baboon’s smile. “Not as you understand it,” came the reply.

The asymmetry of understanding between the two worlds is absolute. The realm of the senses known to the Cenobites completely and exhaustively comprehends that of Frank’s inarticulate libido, even as the latter tries to outbid itself in fantasy. The hell-raiser’s frenzy remains, precisely, comprehensible, rooted in a nature that is measured “to its breadth and depth” by the beyond-measure, “utterly familiar” to these adepts of the utterly unfamiliar. The “schism” separating the realm of the Cenobites from the “region” inhabitated by Frank cannot be traversed by mere augmentation or intensification of sensation. The Cenobites, “theologians of the Order of the Gash”, are - so to speak - practitioners of the infinite cardinal sins.