We have such sights to show you - a teen wolf meta - the hellraiser meta pt 1
We have such sights to show you - a teen wolf meta
Or the Hellraiser one
In reaction to a meta by @itsalwayslydia I noticed a link between Teen Wolf and Hellraiser in regards to Peter’s death and resurrection and I mentioned it then, but I took out the box-set and the fascinating documentary I’ve been meaning to watch for years, which turned out to be nearly five hours long. It was good but it wasn’t THAT good.
The next time people say we don’t suffer for our meta I wanna point out a five hour documentary and Hellraiser 3. I couldn’t watch Hellraiser 4, 3 was so bad. I had blotted it out for a reason, people. And to make matters worse it cast absolutely no shadow over Beacon Hills. I had to split this into three parts because it’s so big.
Right back to Teen Wolf.
Teen Wolf has always tipped it’s hat to Clive Barker and I haven’t been quiet about that, but mostly the comparison has been to Cabal/Nightbreed. I LOVE Cabal/Nightbreed, it’s one of my all time favourite movies so I’m quite happy to wax lyrical about it at a moment’s notice so the parallel with the outsiders, fighting the religious right of middle america (Canada in the movie) and centuries of persecution and it being a thinly veiled analogy for othering. Derek is costumed to look like Boone, it’s really obvious.
There were even, with Jennifer, Weaveworld images, and flashes of other works but I didn’t make the Hellraiser analogy in which case we go bad Athena because once I made it it was really obvious. I adore Barker and I have the Hellbound Heart and the fancy box-set that looks like puzzle box. There really is no excuse, the only thing I can think of is that i repressed too much after Hellraiser 3. [There was a cenobite who shot out cds and used them to kill people]
First of let’s do some background. Barker was reasonably well respected in the genre by the time Hellraiser (first called S&M zombies from beyond the grave) for the Books of Blood, two of which were made into movies (Rawhead Rex and Underworld) horrified [and rightly so] by what they had done Barker went f*ck it I’m doing the next one myself but after pitching a movie they were stuck with a house for a set and he threw together the Hellbound Heart to fit it.
The Hellbound Heart and the Hellraiser movie were written at the same time but do feature some differences. The studio wanted it set in America (the house was in London) and so cast American actors, and overdubbed the english actors (with the exception of the amazing Clare Higgins who played Julia] and this film still went nuclear on it’s release.
It’s a haunted house story.
An unhappy couple move into what had been his mother’s house years after her death to discover his brother, Frank, had been using it as a flop house, but he’s been missing for at least a year. It is revealed Julia is not only desperately unhappy in her marriage to Larry, she had a brief and passionate affair with Frank that consumes her. Larry has a daughter by a previous marriage, Kirsty (in the novella she’s a close friend but the studio wanted an ingenue to torture, it is horror after all) who resents Julia. So far so normal.
Except the house is haunted. Frank isn’t missing he found an eldritch item called the Le Marchand Configuration or the Lament Configuration, a puzzle box that apparently can open the doorways between worlds, specifically to heaven or hell. A sybaritic manipulator Frank believes he’s tried everything the world has to offer [he’s barely 30, i doubt it] and finds the box, when he opens it it tears him apart, we are led to believe over a long period. The creatures of the box, the Cenobites, have long since lost the ability to tell pain from pleasure and consider torture to be the delights of the flesh. In their mutilation of Frank a part of him fell into the floorboards and when Larry and Julia move into the house Larry cuts himself and his blood starts the resurrection of Frank.
Frank first appears as a gooey skeleton and confronts Julia, desperate to escape the Cenobites, and charms her into drawing men back to the house for him to drain of blood so that they can be together forever. Frank is, of course, a liar.
Julia does, she lures men back to the attic and kills them with a claw hammer for Frank to consume. Kirsty, thinking that Julia is having an affair, follows her and finds Frank who is fascinated by her beauty. Kirsty escapes but takes the box with her. She collapses.
In the hospital Kirsty plays with the box and opens it to reveal a single endless corridor, and when she goes down it she is confronted with a really bad animatronic, and runs back to the hospital room and tries to close the box, opening the gate to the cenobites. She makes a deal with them offering them Frank in exchange for her escape, the cenobites tell her maybe but they want a confession.
Returning to the house Frank has murdered his brother and is now wearing his skin (literally) and tells Kirsty that they’ve sorted the Frank thing, that he, as Larry, has killed Frank. Frank however botches the illusion and tries to kill Kirsty, and in the ruckus stabs Julia. Gaining her confession the Cenobites appear and splatter Frank all over the attic again, killing Julia, but then go after Kirsty who barely escapes by closing the box.
Okay that’s the first synopsis.
The second film is just as important for this, but it was not written by Barker, so the subtle details of one are broad strokes and heavy handed in the sequel but unlike most of the sequels it actually fits.
Picking up just after the first movie Kirsty is in a mental institute being investigated by the police for the bodies Julia stashed in the box room. She talks about how the mattress where Julia died has to be destroyed completely or she’ll come back, although one doctor thinks this her delusion the other buys the mattress. It turns out that the head of the institute, Dr Channard, has been trying to find the box for years to the point he is obsessed with it, and has a hidden floor of patients associated with the supernatural, and he enjoys trepanation and brain surgery as a way to “cure” his patients.
Except one, a girl called Tiffany, who had a fascination with puzzles. It is implied that Channard murdered her mother to get control of her. Kirsty gets a vision from a skinless man she believes to be her father which urges her to open the box to rescue him.
Channard buys the mattress that Julia died on and takes one of his patients, one who believes himself covered in bugs, sits him on the mattress and gives him a razor. This causes a skinless Julia to manifest and consume him. Channard then starts bringing the violently insane to her to feed from, until she forms her own skin. She does this by slipping her fingers into the back of his skull.
She then lures him into getting Tiffany to open the box, and when the cenobites appear they refuse to touch Tiffany, although Kirsty confronts them and they alter the shape of the box, they leave closing one of the doors behind him but by that point Julia and Channard are deep within the endless labyrinth, Kirsty seeing the door is open goes into look for her father.
Julia lures Channard to the centre of the labyrinth where there is a giant manifestation of the puzzle box, turned into a diamond shape by the Cenobites when Kirsty finds what she believes is her father’s hell but it’s Frank, trying again to escape. Kirsty sets him on fire and Julia shows up, she has fed Channard to the box and he has been turned into a Cenobite, fixed to the dark god - Leviathan - by an umbilicus to his head. He goes into the asylum and slaughters all of the patients to which he has given copies of the box. The Cenobites face off against him for breaking the rules of the box but he kills them. He chases Tiffany and Kirsty to the centre of the labyrinth and is killed by a bizarre accident and Kirsty saves Tiffany by wearing Julia’s skin, Tiffany solves the box closing the portals, they escape and walk into the sunlight.
Of course the two important things about this is Frank, and Julia’s fascination with him, and Channard and his asylum.
But I had to explain the story or these things would make no sense.
There are obvious links for example when Pinhead (he’s technically called Priest but everyone knows him as Pinhead) appears he describes the Cenobites as “explorers in the furthest reaches of experience, demons to some, angels to others” which definitely fits with Teen Wolf’s Bardo imagery, but the same imagery was used in Jacob’s Ladder which was very clearly influenced by Hellraiser, and Teen Wolf and Jacob’s Ladder are like brothers they have so much in common.
There is the link between Frank/Julia’s feeding and the memory manipulation, also the pain drain/power leeching.
But the resurrection of Frank by familial blood matches that of Peter, the big difference is Peter was buried in the cellar, and Frank was splattered across the attic. The manipulation of a woman by flattering her beauty and using his own sexualised charisma and appearing as a version of him to manipulate her - that’s the same. It’s suggested in the first film that Julia started dreaming of Frank only when they appeared at the house, making it likely he was influencing her mentally.
The Doctor will see you now - The Teen Wolf-Hellraiser meta pt 3
Part 1 - We have such sights to show you
Part 2 - What big teeth you have
Part 3: The Doctor will see you now - Gabriel Valack and Dr Channard.
This comparison is both easier to see and more complex than the Julia-Frank/Peter Lydia one. The character Channard (unlike Frank and Julia) exists only in the second film which was not written by Barker, and it shows. However it is the least worst sequel by some measure, and the last one to understand the Cenobites were A horror not THE horror of the film, and certainly not some sadomasochistic murderers in leather dresses.
So if you were planning a serious marathon as opposed to a non-heckling one I’d stop here and go straight to Candyman [also by Barker]
Back to Dr Channard. In many ways I think early movie Channard is possibly one of the greatest horror villains ever put on paper. Where Frank wanted to know and experience Channard wants to observe and understand, and to do this he acts exclusively on others, or worse, lets them act out their dangerous delusions upon themselves for his benefit, sometimes cultivating these dangerous behaviours for that. Where Frank, and by extension the Cenobites, offer a seduction into the dangerous, and it is often a knowing descent -as Pinhead says “it is not fingers that call us, it is desire” - Channard cultivates his subjects unknowingly. Let me clarify that. He knows what will come of it - they do not.
The comparison between Channard’s basement of “lost” patients and Valack’s secure ward is explicit.
It is in examining that explicit comparison we find out a lot about both characters.
Both the Channard institute and Eichen House on the surface are up to date modern establishments. They are clean, well attended and no one seems in threat. It is hard to tell with Eichen because we have two images of it, Stiles view as a possessed patient who is therefore unreliable, and Lydia’s view of the secure ward.
When Stiles is in group of people Eichen is about what we would expect for a modern mental institute. It is open, airy, with access to the outside, and although the orderlies are present they are not restrictive. Brunski only reacts to Stiles when he steals his keys for example, and we know he’s an “Angel of Death” and has been for around ten years. In Teen Wolf parlance that goes back to 2004, because everything in Teen Wolf, it feels, goes back to 2004, this also gives us a timeline for Fenris’ appearance. We knew, from the webisodes, that he appeared just in time for Talia to vanish - the fire in Jan 2005 - so his appearance coincided with Valack’s relegation to the basement.
Now whether Fenris came in to take over after they found Valack was drilling holes in his patient’s heads, or Fenris took over because Valack drilled a hole in his own head is unknown, but either way it gives us a rough timeline.
The line drawn between the Dread Doctors and the Cenobites is obvious when you know how to look, the only thing that doesn’t correlate is that there are four Cenobites, to use their colloquial names, Pinhead, Deep Throat, Butterball and Chatterer, of which only Deep Throat [so called because she has her oesophagus held open with pins that go through her cheeks and form a halo around her neck] is female. The three doctors, the Surgeon, Pathologist and Geneticist also only have one female, the Geneticist. But there are hints that there was, or was meant to be, a fourth doctor, as there is a fourth mask.
Valack’s determination I had grouped in my head with the Taxidermist in Nightbreed [the character probably has a name but I don’t know it despite being in love with the film since it came out]. The Taxidermist is a man who lives adjacent to the Necropolis and is aware of it, to the point that he tried to join the breed but they rejected him. There appears to be no bad feelings between them about this and he keeps their secret until Decker [the antagonist] tortures him, and he assumes that Decker is like him, and wants to join the Breed, where Decker wants to destroy them. He is called the Taxidermist because he keeps several stuffed animals including one that he treats like a pet, talking to and petting. It clearly freaks Decker out because he announces himself as the Mask by cutting it’s head off.
In doing this I had Valack pegged but Channard came through and went nope - it’s him.
Channard is the perfectly presented calm doctor who has everyone conned into think he’s exactly as he appears. He lives in the ultra modern -still- house of clean edges and bright lights. There is nothing out of place until we go into his locked room which is an office dedicated to the occult, not just the box but the script of several dead languages is over the walls, pickled medical curios, rubbings of the puzzle box, mock ups of it, an altar to what appears to be Horus.
At the heart of the altar is a two way mirror shaped like a sunburst.
It is clear from the walls of books, and the folder of collected documents he’s been doing it for years.
We learn, from Deaton, that the same is true of Valack, and it is brought up as early as 3b that Eichen had a history of trepanation. We don’t know how long it went on, but unlike Channard’s experiments Valack’s often ended in the death of the subject. Channard experiments almost exclusively on the film with Tiffany who, when she is introduced to Channard, appears to be slightly on the autistic spectrum in a way that manifests in puzzle solving. To keep her Channard murders her mother, then operates on her brain, claiming it as a necessary medical procedure, to force her further into the manifestation so she will inevitably solve the puzzle box.
We do not know what Valack’s original outcome was intended as, however it is likely that Brunski’s victims were those that had been trepanned by Valack, we know that Lorraine Martin was trepanned in 2004 and she was one of Brunski’s victims. The link between Valack and Brunski is certainly one to explore and whether Meredith - last seen in a comatose state something we know Valack can initiate - was Valack’s puppet or acted on the Deadpool on her own.
But having watched Hellraiser - Hellbound I’m sure where I was flirting with the idea before, Valack controlled Meredith, she was his Tiffany. That unfortunately would take another meta because this one is already huge, and nowhere near done. [do not be surprised if parts 4 and 5 appear]
There is a difference between Channard and Valack, Channard wants to watch, to observe, to record, to understand. He approaches it like an academic where Valack is much closer to the doctor in Fatal Frame 4 in the respect he has a goal that he is working for and willing to do whatever he needs to to achieve that goal. Dr Haibara wants to cure his sister who is afflicted with the Luna Sedata illness, Valack wants to coax the doctors to him. He wants to prove them real so that he can justify what he did.
It is interesting however that Fenris in the webisodes says that he lost all credibility by researching werewolves, which is clearly proven a lie when we learn he is the head of Eichen House. It is likely he was invited to take over from Valack, or to work with Valack because of it. However he wants to discourage the boys because he does not know, at that point, that Scott is a werewolf. It is hard to tell if this was before or after he treated Jackson.
However Fenris did search for aconite poisoning with Jackson despite him showing none of the symptoms, and Jackson’s later transformation was suspect. After all where else would a kanima go but the secure ward, and we see at one point that there is a kanima there, but we don’t know if it is Jackson.
So is Fenris working with, or for, Valack or not? I can’t say, we simply, at this point, don’t have enough information.
But back to the comparison I’m supposed to be exploring. Valack seeks the same eldritch truth that Channard does and like Channard he does awful things to do it, but at some point, probably 2004, Valack is questioned to the point that he personally ends up in the secure ward, and Valack’s persuasiveness is closer to that of Pinhead than Channard.
Channard learning of the Julia-Mattress takes it into his office and feeds it one of his patients. This causes Julia to manifest and in a long sequence, a rather uncomfortably long sequence, Julia loses control of the victim and the two of them crawl across the floor, until she wraps herself around him and consumes him. Channard watches horrified, as does the assistant doctor Kyle hiding behind a curtain, terrified that the victim might grab the curtain and reveal him, meaning Julia will eat him too - which she later does.
The scene lasts over three minutes with very few cuts.
After she has consumed her victim Channard then helps Julia back to her mattress. When she has consumed others and she is walking around the house like a flaying victim he wraps her in crepe bandages and gives her a gown, and when she kisses him - wrapped in bandages - he allows this and gropes her. He is surprised- once she has consumed enough- that Julia is beautiful.
It is when Julia has skin and wears a dress that is very “goddess” in it’s style. This is deliberate. However Hellbound Julia is very different from Hellraiser Julia and I want to make this clear, but it would explain Valack’s obsession with Lydia to an extent. As Julia leads Channard into the corridors towards the giant manifestation of the box that she calls Leviathan, Valack wants Lydia to bring him to the doctors.
Channard uses Tiffany to open the box, this film suggests the idea of more than one box, the patients later all have one, in a piece of cinematic hand-waving as the first film saw the box returned to the original vendor. This is literally interpreted in Teen Wolf because Valack uses Lydia to escape his own box, but not in time to prevent the doctors taking his third eye.
What is interesting and not explained is that Valack uses glamour to change his appearance only after the loss of the third eye, previously looking into the eye not only gave visions but induced catatonia [certainly in Deaton and others mentioned by Fenris, suggested to be done to Peter and then Meredith] This matches Channard’s transformation into the Cenobite-Channard - if he has another name I don’t know it. Like pre-transformation Channard Valack is eloquent, perfectly turned out. It is almost like the transformations are inverted.
It would be easy to put in a diagram here but I’m resisting.
Valack goes from dirty bandages and scrubs, with a sort of sleazy and manic phraseology, he is still manipulative but seems more frantic, like he might attack the glass - that he needs to be restrained. After his escape he is shown wearing a vest and immaculate white shirt, the previously open wound of his trepanation is gone and he is charming, frankly honest - often detrimentally so - and manipulative. He takes control of Eichen quickly and like Kyle Fenris is gone, although we do not see his end it is heavily implied he’s either dead or in the secure ward.
Channard goes from the perfectly turned out doctor, in a three piece suit like Valack’s, to a Cenobite upon whom the experiments that Channard performed are done. So because Channard is obsessed with trepanation and brain surgery he is attached to the eldritch by a giant umbilicus that constantly drills into his brain.
That Valack himself is undone by his curiosity is not surprising, it’s simple hubris.
Channard wants to observe and this is an academic dissonance between the two. I find it hard to say if Valack wanted to be one of the doctors, or he wanted to understand them, because he had the fourth mask and he did seem to summon them, certainly the Deadpool didn’t feature anyone in Eichen so it’s likely it’s purpose was to limit the amount of latent supernaturals and actual supernaturals so they would have to hunt where he was, knowing they couldn’t get in except through a kitsune. Except it had to be a lightning kitsune, we know that but did Valack know about the specificity I can’t be sure.
Had Julia shown up to offer the eldritch delights of the box to Valack I do not doubt he would have gone.
Instead he manipulates Lydia, using her like Channard uses Tiffany. This is interesting as it maintains Lydia as ingenue, despite her own character growth. He uses Lydia not because he cannot do it himself but because he maintains that academic distance. We don’t know whether or not Valack taught Meredith to hone Lydia’s abilities but it definitely helped his goals.
We don’t know what would happen if Lydia had put on the mask, would she have become a doctor, or would it have worked like Malia’s goggles, allowing her to see the location of the Desert Wolf. Although I wonder now who has all that stuff, and do I really want Deaton to have it.
There’s so much we can learn about Valack from Channard, the parallels are really obvious.
The psychiatric doctor fascinated by the supernatural.
The neat turned out exterior that is either transformation or transformed.
The academic distance kept in his obsessive study - both use others to do their experiments so they don’t get hurt by them.
The experiments - primarily brain surgery related
The secret floor of experimental patients.
Undone by hubris that results in their death.
Both of them are killed by destruction of the head.
Channard is killed when his murder tentacles get caught in the floor under Tiffany, when his umbilicus pulls his away the tentacles are so fixed his head rips in two, Valack’s head is severed in two by Lydia’s scream.
Valack looks at the doctors the way Lydia looked at Peter, as someone who would open the door to truths they had not considered existing until they were encountered.
But this meta is getting longer than some fics. And there’s a lot of things that do need explored, but this one probably isn’t the one to do it. But if someone wanted to look into Valack Hellraiser 2 would be the place I’d recommend to start, and then Dr Haibara [again who died when his head popped open] but I wanted to leave this meta before we all died of old age.
Considering how much I was able to mine (and that was not really delving below the surface) there is a LOT here, for those with the stomach to explore it.
