Hellraiser: The Paradox of Desire

Hellraiser Hellbound: Where Does Desire Come From?

If you caught part one of Sweet Sweet Suffering, you know that Hellraiser is about the paradox of desire. Frank Cotton doesn’t just want pleasure — after finding the ultimate experience, he wants to want again. Hellbound: Hellraiser II expands the world of the first film in a way that’s easy to miss if you’re watching it as a typical horror sequel. Of course, it dials up the content of the original to even more outrageous, absurd levels. But viewed through the right lens, it’s doing something much more ambitious — it’s attempting to visualize the system that produced Frank’s conundrum in the first place. Thus, where the first film asked what happens when desire reaches its annihilating endpoint, Hellbound asks the even bigger question: where does desire actually come from? Why do we feel it? To answer that, we descend into the labyrinth of Leviathan. It’s a place easily mistaken for Hell, but it’s something quite different. We again encounter Julia, who returns from the Cenobites’ realm transformed — no longer an object of someone else’s desire, but a desiring subject in her own right. And we follow Dr. Channard, a man who believes he can study and master the system, who discovers too late what folly that is. The key concept this time is Lacan’s notion of the Real — the dimension of experience that resists language, meaning, and understanding. The labyrinth of Hellbound, I’ll argue, is one of horror cinema’s most interesting and entertaining attempts to give that ineffable concept, and its impact on the human condition, a visual representation. Part three, concluding with a reading of Bloodline, drops in two weeks. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe [https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Hellraiser: The Paradox of Desire

Welcome to Sweet Sweet Suffering: A Three-Part Video Essay on Hellraiser! In part one, I argue Hellraiser is not about demons. It's about desire, and best understood as mapping to a specific theory of desire from Jacques Lacan, one of the twentieth century’s most provocative and influential thinkers. Over three video essays, I'll go deep into the Hellraiser franchise — not just as horror films, but as a surprisingly coherent philosophical argument about what it means to be a human being. Each part focuses on a different entry (parts 1, 2, and 4). (I skip Hell on Earth because I don’t have anything interesting to say about that one.) In my reading, Hellraiser, Hellbound, and Bloodline each elaborates its own Lacanian concept. Hellraiser is about desire.Hellbound is about the Real.Bloodline is about the role of fantasy. The first talks about desire as a certain paradox: what happens when you actually get what you want? The second descends into the psychological system that produces desire. The third reveals the fragile illusion that allows us to live with desire at all. The framework is Lacanian psychoanalysis — one of the twentieth century's most challenging and rewarding bodies of thought. But no prior knowledge required. If you love Hellraiser and want to go deeper, this is for you. And if you've always been curious about Lacan but didn't know where to start, it turns out Hellraiser is a fantastic entry point. 🧠 Takes this as an opportunity to revisit one of the most interesting horror films of all time. Part two, covering Hellbound, drops in two weeks. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe [https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

She Wants REVENGE

This one took a while. This is part Three of my continuing series on Carol Clover’s Men, Women, and Chainsaws. And while it follows naturally from the first two installments, it stands completely on its own — you don’t need to have watched the first two videos to watch and understand this one. The subject is rape-revenge cinema. It’s a controversial and challenging genre, to say the least—dismissed as garbage, celebrated as radical feminism, and analyzed as some of the most ideologically complex filmmaking in American cinema history. As we’ll see, it’s all three at once. To get here, I watched and revisited around twenty films. The full canon, more or less, plus the films that shaped and surrounded it. What looks like vile garbage on the surface turns out to be a revenge myth in the most political sense — a story that American culture tells itself to process guilt, justify winners, and make peace with losers. And its roots run from frontier westerns all the way through to #MeToo. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe [https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

Every Jason Kill RANKED

This is one of the last videos I’ve had in the vault from my Youtube days. It started as a silly idea for a kind of audacious clickbait project. I didn’t realize how wildly time-consuming it’d end up being. And it was kind of a maddening project too. Many times along the way, I felt uncomfortably deranged for even attempting such an obscene exercise. But it ended up being good practice for me as a video editor, since it involved wrangling and sequencing a huge number of clips in specific order. I can’t say I’m necessarily proud of making this. But I did make it, so here it is for your sick enjoyment. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe [https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]

GUTTER TALK #3 - Best of Horror 2025

In this audio-only episode, I’m joined again by Cynthia to count down the best horror movies of 2025. The conversation is 100% spoiler free—and I think also free of pretentious jargon! WDYT - was 2024 or 2025 a better year for horror? Many are asking. Get full access to GUTTER STUDIES at gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe [https://gutterstudies.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_4]