The Hellbound Web – News

Interview: Christopher Monfette speaks to The Hellbound Web

Christopher Monfette, Clive Barker’s co-writer for the new BOOM! Studios Hellraiser comic series has kindly agreed to an online interview with The Hellbound Web. Conducted shortly before the release of the fourth issue of the new series, he discusses his thoughts on the Hellraiser franchise, the remake, and maybe a hint or two as to where “Pursuit of the Flesh” will take Kirsty and Pinhead.

The Hellbound Web’s Christopher Monfette Interview – August 2011.

(The Hellbound Web): Hi Christopher. First off, congratulations on the success of the new Hellraiser comic and thanks for offering to answer some questions for the site. To start with, could you tell us a bit about yourself? How did you come to be a professional writer?

(Christopher): I grew up in Masschusetts in a very sleepy, suburban setting, the kind that
inspires a kid to pick up a book instead of a basketball. Consequently, my
adult life began rather early with Clive Barker and Stephen King…I went to
college in New York and moved out to LA a few years later. Chasing the
dragon’s tail of paid writing was an accidental adventure, at best, having
written a TV pilot about my experience in the PR industry – I was an account
executive at the time for a major PR film – that somehow got noticed by a
screenwriter whose work I respect. Several scripts later, I met Clive when I
was working as entertainment journalist and that relationship blossomed into
a creative endeavor that’s continued for the last six years. I’ve adapted
two of his Books of Blood – Down, Satan and Son of Celluloid – as well as
Seduth and Hellraiser, and an unpublished Nightbreed story from a collection
that never got off the ground. So we’ve been through the fire together a few
times now, and his is a friendship and a mentorship that I hold very, very
dear.

(THW): Can you recall your first experience of seeing Hellraiser and what attracted you to the film?

(C): I think I recall having seen the third film first. The actual substance of
that universe, I discovered in the novella, and eventually within the
original film. The idea of taboo, of pleasure and pain indivisible, was
something that I came to appreciate more and more the deeper into Clive’s
work I descended. But mostly it was this notion of a portable Hell, because
in some sense, all Hells are portable. We carry our individual damnations
around with us each day. Our sins, our fears, our dark curiosities. And I
think horror always works best when you unearth some striking visual
metaphor for an innately human experience.

(THW): What are your views on the sequels and could you give some brief thoughts on the series as a whole?

(C): Hellraiser first appeared in the Full Moon era of horror, when pulp
franchises like Puppetmaster or Phantasm or the late-80’s Stuart Gordon
classics were incredibly popular on video shelves. They were low-budget,
dime-store genre entertainment, and it was amongst those films that I first
saw Hellraiser III. Had I not gone back to the first two chapters, had I
only gone forward, certainly the Hellraiser sequels would feel far less
offensive and hackneyed simply for having come from relatively average
mainstream stock. There are some great moments and good ideas in Hellraiser
III, and falling from the middle is always less impactful than falling from
greater heights. So if you look at the sequels as the fruit of the most
commercial Hellraiser venture that was still, in some sense, good, then
they’re just derivative, midnight distractions. But when you look at them as
the legacy of Hellraiser and Hellbound, they’re god-awful offenses to
first-rate horror filmmaking.

When you start with the raw material that Clive provided, there’s no excuse
to end up with the utter dredge that fans have been offered. And even today,
there’s no reason that Hollywood seemingly cannot, from the protoplasm of
images and ideas that constitute the core of the Hellraiser mythology,
manage to create something simultaneously compelling and commercial. Doug
was right not to have done the last film, and were it not for my
understanding that an actor needs to eat occasionally, he probably shouldn’t
have done anything after four – a failure, yes, but at least a worthwhile
experiment.

(THW): Recently we’ve seen a lot of new Hellraiser material, notably the Hellbound Hearts short stories collection, but where did the idea of a new comic series come from, and how did Clive Barker get involved?

(C): Clive came to me with the notion of doing a Hellraiser series based in large
part on our comic-book collaboration the year before, IDW’s Seduth. I can
only speculate that his desire was fueled in some fashion by growing
frustrations concerning the languishing remake, and certainly his experience
writing the Scarlet Gospels. Clearly, there’s an appetite out there for
quality Hellraiser stories, and few franchises lend themselves as openly to
being re-envisioned, but Hollywood has been tremendously short-sighted in
its treatment of the brand.

Personally, as both a writer and a fan, I’ve had my own ideas about how I
might approach that universe for years. So when Clive first mentioned the
possibility, my mind had already spun a lot of that fan-fic purely of its
own accord. I believed very deeply in finding a way to recreate the world
and evolve the mythos, but I also felt that it couldn’t be done without
bringing the story that Clive had begun to a proper conclusion. We needed to
tie off that trilogy in such a way that allowed us tremendous freedom to
expand the narrative into something creative and compelling for a new
generation, a new millennium, of readers.

To me, that involved incorporating the actual decades, the real-seeming
weariness of the series, and showing how that had descended upon Kirsty and
Pinhead. To Clive, it was about finding a way to realize the Harrowers in
their capacity as characters, as real people with genuine emotional bonds to
our heroine. In the end, it’s always about starting from a place of
character. If you’re serving the characters, you’re serving the story, and
if you’re serving the story, you’re serving the readers.

(THW): Did any of the previous spin-off media, and the old EPIC Hellraiser comic series have much or any influence on the new series?

(C): To be completely honest, those projects held virtually no influence on the
development of the series. We didn’t want to bind the narrative, or
mythologize ourselves into a corner. We allowed ourselves the luxury of a
very minimal canon, sticking most directly to the iterations of Hellraiser
that best represented Clive’s original vision. Certainly, I enjoyed the EPIC
run immensely, but having read them a long, long while ago, I tried my best
to avoid refreshing my memory or inadvertently co-opting ideas. The material
felt best served by a relatively blank slate, and many of those other
stories took place in a particular vision of Hell, or utilized a particular
tone, that ultimately felt outside the spirit of the original.

(THW): The new comic, as you mentioned, sees the return of the Harrowers concept, albeit re-imagined into something arguably much more believable. Did they come from Clive, and was there any discussion of how they would be reinvented?

(C): The idea of the Harrowers was there from the very first notes exchanged with
Clive, as was the philosophy of grounding the material as much as possible
in the look and feel of the original film. Clive’s film, like all good
horror, injects a certain madness into an otherwise ordinary world, the same
world in which we live. It’s a juxtaposition that accentuates the strange
and makes the horror all the more plausible, palpable. Because if everything
is weird, nothing is…So it only made sense to envision the Harrowers in that
mold. Survivors, like Kirsty, rounded up and recruited into this battle
against Hell. You’ll find out much, much more about them in issue #3 and
subsequently discover their place in Kirsty’s journey throughout these eight
issues.

(THW): You mentioned Seduth, your previous comic experience with Clive. How did doing a 3D comic come about and can you tell us a little more about the process of adapting his ideas?

(C): Seduth was my first comic gig and it was, to some extent, the equivalent of
pushing a man out of an airplane and saying simply, “Fly.” Clive had very
large, incredibly surreal, utterly metaphysical ideas with that story, and
where Hellraiser has allowed me to craft this sprawling narrative under
Clive’s supervision, Seduth was truly about finding a way to highlight this
very ambitious, pre-existing vision. Consequently, I was playing around with
visuals, layouts, dialog, narration, time-jumps, etc. with the kind of
insane disregard for the rules that most people have to earn over an entire
career. So in some sense, I’m glad that it was my first book. I probably
didn’t know that what I was doing absolutely wasn’t supposed to work, and
yet somehow, it did, and the fans of that book – that grand visual
experiment – have been hugely supportive and wonderfully vocal.

As for the specific process of adapting those ideas, with Clive, it’s almost
always about editing. Clive’s mind is a spigot, a spout, and the wheel is
broken on the tap; it’s perpetually stuck in the “on” position. In
literature, Clive has the freedom to take those ideas and arrange them like
puzzle pieces over as many pages as he pleases. In comics, you have to fit
them into a pre-determined box; in film, you’ve got about 30 minutes to play
around with between the 90-minute finish and the too-long two-hour mark.
With Seduth, since the timeline was so sprawling and the ideas were so
expansive, it was about using the visuals to create some sense of a record
skipping from major beat to major beat. Telling a story in fragmented
pieces, which was apt, given the motif of the shattered diamond and the
insanity of our main character.

(THW): Of course, even some of the later sequels do have their fans, paticualry Hellseeker, which again featured Kirsty Cotton. The first issue seems to have a veiled reference to this; how aware were you of the fan base and the interest in the various spin-off media?

(C): I’m consistently reminded of a quote from – of all places – Aaron Sorkin’s
script for The American President. About people so thirsty for something
genuine that they’ll crawl through the desert toward a mirage, and when they
discover there’s no water, they’ll drink the sand. Saying that you’re a
“fan” of Hellseeker is like swallowing a mouthful of sand; it’s faint praise
at best. Simply because it’s the most attentive of the sequels to the
original mythology hardly means that it’s good. Don’t get me wrong, some of
the sequels are enjoyable as aesthetic diversions, but I would hope that
Hellraiser fans wouldn’t flock to these books simply because we’ve included
some chains, a few gallons of blood and a handful of familiar faces. We want
the story to be compelling, the characters to be honest, the mythology to be
respectful of the iconography, and vice versa. And if we fail at that, let
the audience march us to the gallows. Fortunately, it seems like the story
is resonating thusfar, which we’re HUGELY thankful for…But I fall into the
same trap alongside most horror fans of accepting the best of what I’m given
and mistaking it for quality by comparison, but as creators, we have to
serve the material.

(THW): There’s been talk of a Hellraiser remake for years now, with various names attached to the project. Why do you think Hollywood is struggling to remake Hellraiser?

(C): Hellraiser in Hollywood is first and foremost a brand. It’s a name that
people know; it’s the image of a man with pins in his head. It’s basically,
in the minds of those would remake it, the perfect poster. It’s a twenty or
thirty million-dollar investment; it’s a potential franchise. It’s something
to be protected against the vaguest notions of anything that might offend or
alienate or limit the box-office gross. Hellraiser, at its heart, however,
is a statement about taboo, it’s about testing the limits of human
experience, and like most horror, it’s about those things which offend and
alienate and limit…There’s no great joke the punchline of which didn’t
offend *somebody*. And at that budget, and with that level of embedded
iconography, I just don’t think that they know what to do with it that feels
remotely like Hellraiser…It’s been in the hands of some incredible people
who’ve done incredible work, so I can’t imagine it hasn’t been made for lack
of creative locomotion. It has to be about finding the balance between
making it broad enough and commercial enough to work with a larger audience,
but still violent and disturbing and true enough to the spirit to be a
Hellraiser film. I don’t think that’s impossible, but it’s certainly not
easy…

(THW): The first issue showcases Pinhead and the Cenobites, before Kirsty and the Harrowers are explored further in the second. How important was it to feature Pinhead as the focus of that first issue, as well as the prologue?

(C): You come to Jaws for the shark, but Jaws doesn’t work if the shark is in
every scene, vamping every frame…So we’ve tried to be very careful about
pacing out Pinhead’s exposure in this series, treating him like an actual,
substantive character with real motivations, but withholding enough so that
there’s still some horror, some mystery whenever he appears. We put him
upfront to jumpstart the series, and we followed up with Kirsty to show
exactly what he’s up against…I can say that the first issue is likely the
most that he appears in any issue until issue #5, but that when you see him
in #3 or #4, it’s incredibly impactful…It’s a big, important moment; an
exclamation point. He’s a constant presence; the whole story, in fact, is
driven by his desire to be something greater. And if we’re making the tale
of Kirsty, Edgar, Samuel and the Harrowers powerful enough, hopefully the
audience will never be asking, “Where’s Pinhead?” Because when he’s not
directly on the page, they’ll sense him moving around the pieces, waiting
for that flip of the panels that’ll reveal him there, waiting.

(THW): The third issue focuses much more on the backstory of the Harrowers. Each storyline in a sense, feels like they could have potentially been a whole comic from the old EPIC series. Do you think the Hellraiser mythology works particualry well in these short narratives?

(C): Certainly the challenge with horror in the comic medium is in creating a
sense of tension that can sustain itself across multiple issues and still
deliver the scares. In the case of Hellraiser, that’s roughly 176 pages that
you have to make consistently frightening. For me, I enjoy when each issue
has its own particular stamp. I like a certain sense of, “Oh, this is the
flashback issue,” or in the case of issue four, “This is the issue that
takes place beneath the city.” But if you’re not following a compelling
group of characters, or if those individual segments don’t serve a larger
narrative as they might, for example, in a television drama, then you’ve
ultimately diminished the emotional stakes. It simply becomes an exercise in
horror aesthetics. Don’t me wrong, I love horror anthologies, but they are,
by nature, more experiential than narrative. But that format can
inadvertently dilute, confuse and overly weirden an otherwise strong
amythology. Too many voice, too many cooks, and suddenly you’ve over-salted
the dish. If you to me, “Go write 100 issues of Hellraiser, none of which
were in any way connected, “ I’d be tempted to play around so wildly in that
sandbox, it’d be damn near unrecognizable by the end. I think structure
serves story. Story serves mythology. And Hellraiser, at least to me, is
well-and-truly a mythology.

(THW:) Even with an issue dedicated to them, the other Harrowers have relativly little time to establish themselves, and lack a screen basis like Kirsty and Pinhead. How much of a challenge was it to give these characters such depth and distinct personalities within the formats restrictions on space?

(C): Ultimately, this is the story of Kirsty and Pinhead, but our individual
stories as humans, as readers, is designed and influenced by the roundabout
of people who weave into and out of our lives on a daily basis. In another
series, each of these characters – Alex especially – might have made for an
excellent Hellraiser protagonist. But their function in this arc is really
to provide insight into *Kirsty*, to motivate *Kirsty* and contribute to *
Kirty’s* journey. But also, as we’re discovering, to become unwittingly
manipulated by Pinhead. That said, you also can’t minimize them simply
because they’re not the main character – pawns are people, too – so it was
important for me to find a way to tell their stories in these quick,
emotional vignettes. You can do a lot with a little if you start from a
place of complex emotion – whether it’s avenging lost faith, revenge for the
death of a child, or doing great evil for the sake a saving a loved one.

(THW): As well as featuring the Harrowers back stories, Issue #3 sees two new Cenobites debut, both created by Clive. Can you tell us a little about them, and how you came up with their personalities and storylines?

(C): The Cenobites, to me, have always been an extension of our human nature. Our
capacity for pleasure, our penchant for pain. But that’s a very limited
scope of the total human experience. So with issue #3, I tried to create
Cenobites that were direct extensions of those behaviors that
counter-balanced the given character. For the priest, something
representative of our cold, icy disbelief; exactly the opposite of the fiery
hell in which he’d put his faith. For the prostitute, something that was
anti-passionate, sexless, a machine, but something that also spoke to the
mechanical, distant manner in which she might view servicing her clients.

(THW): Three issues have so far been released. Can you tell us both your favourite moment from the story so far, and what you are most proud of in the comics?

(C): There are things you hope will work, and things that surprise you. I’m very
proud of issue #3 largely because I feel that it strikes all the core
elements of Hellraiser simultaneously. It’s terrifying, it’s violent, it’s
poetic, it’s narratively complex, it’s strangely moving. Also, we were able
to connect it ever-so-slightly to Clive’s other mythology, the Art, which
was great fun. But we also got to take risks, such as the extreme nature of
Bethany’s story and the 20-year, multi-panel spread that told Alex’s tale.
But what I look back on most, with the widest Cheshire grin, is the organ
sequence from issue #1. The organ-organ, as we call it in my house. That’s
the blown-up, black-and-white panel I have hanging in my living room.

(THW): Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions and talk to the fans. We’re all eagerly awaiting the fourth issue. To round us off for now, is there anything you can tell us about what to expect in future issues, without obviously giving anything away!

(C): I’m always very precious about hints and spoilers, but the solicitations of
the comics industry makes it difficult to play things tremendously close to
the vest. But I can say that readers who’ve waited patiently for the first
meeting of Kirsty and Pinhead are about to be greatly rewarded. And that
there’s a character who appears in the final pages of issue five that should
have fans very excited about issue six and beyond. Do a little digging and
you might just figure out who…

The Hellbound Web would once again like to thank Christopher Monfette for his time, and for answering these questions. Follow Christopher Monfette on twitter: @cwmonfette .

Tags: BOOM! Studios, Christopher Monfette, Clive Barker, Comic, Harrowers, Hellraiser, Interview, Kirsty Cotten, Pinhead, Pursuit of the Flesh