Early in horror game Clive Barker’s Hellraiser: Revival, the character you play, Aidan, and his partner Sunny, are pushing the bounds of the sex they enjoy together. Already into BDSM, they discover a puzzle box that, when solved, will allow them to explore a new extreme of their fetish play. However, when they unlock the box it summons a set of torture demons called Cenobites and Sunny is torn to fleshy pieces and sent to hell. From that violent beginning, Aidan bargains with one of the demons of torture to find a way to bring Sunny back fo life and made whole.
Not your average walk in the park – or, if it is, I am deeply sorry for you. My park is great. There is a duck pond – but a good starting point for a horror game vased on Clive Barker’s horror series.
Still, when I spoke to Hellraiser: Revival’s developers I wanted to know if Sunny was being punished for enjoying her fetish.
There’s a trope in horror, particularly of slasher movies in the 70s, that characters who have sex die. Whether a conscious decision by the creators or not, killing characters off immediately after they have casual, unmarried, or untraditional sex can suggest they are being punished for a transgression. While life is messy, plots in stories are often neater, constructed as simple cause and effect. Sunny explores her sexuality, then she dies. So what is the reason behind it?
“She did not die as a punishment,” game director Emil Esov tells me. “There’s method to what Cenobites offer and what they do [and] she sort of willingly did it.”
“They’re fucking around and finding out,” narrative director Antony de Fault adds, “But their finding out isn’t a value judgement on our part where we’re trying to say ‘They did this bad thing’. It’s not puritanical where this character is into BDSM and so therefore must die.” Instead, he explains, Sunny’s death and interest in BDSM are expressions of an impulse that she and Aidan share: “They simply pursue their own annihilation because that’s the type of people they are.”
“Sunny and Aiden both come from this place of seeking something more to fill their inner voids, Esov says. “They have a troubled relationship. Their sex play is probably the result of their past behaviours and past lives and then they found each other – a kindred spirits type of thing – and inevitably when two people with voids they are desperate to fill… it spirals.”
“Hellraiser is very important to a lot of people,” de Fault elaborates. “It expresses something essentially true about the neediness that we all experience deep down, the desire for more, the desire for greater experiences, or to explore. It’s the same reason that people have midlife crises.”
It sounds as though the developers are differentiating it as the manner in which Sunny and Aidan indulge in their fetish play is self-destructive, as opposed to BDSM itself being self-destructive. Elsewhere in my demo I see flashbacks of the characters drinking and drug use. What I don’t see, but I’m told is in the game, are interactive BDSM sequences with other characters and, de Fault says, “they’re healthy and they’re fine – those characters are pretty self-assured”. At another point in our interview he’s clear that “We didn’t want to demonise fetish or BDSM. What is depicted as ‘bad’ in the game are unhealthy ways of engaging with BDSM, not fetish or BDSM themselves.”
That distinction of the motivation for the sexplay being punished rather than the sexplay itself is one that goes back to the origins of Clive Barker’s original short story, The Hellbound Heart, de Fault says. “Those [stories] are largely attributed to his experiences as a gay man in BDSM and other nightclubs in New York in the ’80s. He certainly wasn’t judging people for engaging in that behaviour, but he was pointing at the dangers of excess and irresponsible engagement with that. That was an important line for us to tow.”
However, it has been 40 years since Clive Barker’s first Hellraiser story, and the context in which he wrote it isn’t the same for contemporary storytellers. After all, when Barker wrote The Hellbound Heart in 1986, the AIDS crisis was fast becoming a known – if not understood – problem. There were already groups blaming gay men who had contracted the disease, claiming the sufferers were responsible due to their lifestyle.
While nothing can change that history, writing a story now four decades on, Hellraiser: Revival’s makers can’t access that same anxiety. Instead, the team say that while the history may have moved on, the themes haven’t. “It’s all about this endless pursuit of filling voids through BDSM, or body transformation – the sense of identity [that brings],” Esov explains. “They’re still as relevant now as they were back then.”
Other cultural changes are bringing a new context and inflection to the themes of a Hellraiser story, though, Esov argues. “I don’t personally know how it was in the ’80s – I was born in ’84 – but when I grew up in the Balkans and I was exposed to Hellraiser at a very young age because […] in Serbia, It was like ‘Go into the world and experience everything. Everything is on TV and nothing is censored.’ I got desensitised to it in a way.” It’s in working on this project that he’s reassessed what he saw when he was younger. “My upbringing in a patriarchal society, the whole setup [was] male centric. Talking to Tony who grew up in a more liberal environment, it opened my eyes to think about these things more.”
One aspect Esov says that reappraisal led them to was in the depiction of male and female bodies. De Fault picks up the thread, saying “We show female pain, male pain, female pleasure, male pleasure. We linger on female bodies and male bodies as equally as we could in the game. That was something we thought about and wanted to do.” He points out that there is a clip in the demo I play where Sunny sexualises Aidan, piercing his nipple and causing him sexual pain. There are scenes where he is submissive and she is dominant and others where their roles are reversed, and there is full-frontal male nudity in the demo, as well as female.
De Fault also says they “had to go further with the BDSM and fetish stuff because there’s been so much sexual liberation since the ’80s. This is being made after 50 Shades of Grey, after the mainstreaming of Pride and queer culture which overlaps fetish culture and neurodivergent culture, and those kinds of things.” He also teased some topics in the game “that are probably too spicy” to talk about in our interview and that he would rather “let the game speak for itself”.
As is often the case with a demo at an event like Gamescom, I don’t think I saw Hellraiser: Revival in its best light. I was dropped into the game in its middle act, at a point where I had little context for what I was seeing and also no familiarity with its weapons or combat. So, as I explored a level set in a fetish club, hamfistedly fighting off BDSM gear-clad cultists, I didn’t really sense the themes Esov and de Fault described in our interview but I don’t want to say they weren’t there.
Certainly, if I had left my time slot without talking to the developers I would have written it off as a game capturing something of the first-person horror in Condemned: Criminal Origins. But, having spoken to the developers I’m much more intrigued, as they’re certainly alive to the complicated history of fetish play within the horror genre. Hopefully they do something interesting with that awareness.
Travel and accommodation to Gamescom was provided by the conference organisers.