Headscratchers / Hellbound: Hellraiser II

• What do the blue lights released when Kirsty and Tiffany flee the Hellworld represent?
  • Widely interpreted as the souls of the Cennobite's victims escaping, now free to pass to the afterlife.

• When Kirsty first runs into the Cenobites and asks about her father, Pinhead tells her that her father is “in his own Hell, quite unreachable.” However, later we find out that Larry wasn't the one leaving messages for her, it was Frank trying to trick her into joining him in Hell. So what was Pinhead talking about? Was he implying that Larry was somewhere else in Hell and Kirsty just never got around to finding him? Talk about They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot! For that matter, what would a generally nice guy like Larry, who never had any dealings with the Cenobites himself, be doing in Hell?
  • In the Boom comics series Hellraiser: The Dark Watch (Written in part by Barker) we learn that Larry Cotton actually IS in his own hell. He's not even in the Labyrinth, he's in the Oubliette, the hell of Fury which is run by Abaddon. Turns out the old man had a temper.
  • Alternately, it could be Fridge Brilliance: to the torture-savoring Cenobites, Heaven would be as terrible as Hell is for ordinary mortals. So if you don't accept the above comic as canon, you could conclude that Larry didn't go to Hell at all, Pinhead just thinks of Heaven as another, inaccessible Hell.
  • Larry is not that great a guy, though certainly not in his brother's league. Be that as it may, he does come very near to committing marital rape in the first film: note the scene in which Julia is, ironically, trying to save his life by pleading with Frank to spare him, while from Larry's perspective she seems to be pleading with him to stop making love to her ... and it takes far more pleading than it ought to (and he complains about it afterwards - not his proudest moment). He also shows his misogynist streak when he sneers at Julia's reluctance to play barmaid for the leering removal men. Larry does have a dark and nasty side, though he is certainly more reticent about expressing it than Frank.
  • Kirsty did mistake Frank for her father in the first film when he was wearing Larry's skin. Pinhead was probably confused and assumed Frank was Kirsty's father. Alternatively, Pinhead could have been mocking Kirsty and was lying all along.
  • The second movie was made when they hadn't yet retconned the Cenobite's home dimension into the Christian Hell. It was just another dimension ruled by a malevolent god-thing and inhabited by S&M cultists. Presumably Pinhead was just using "his own Hell" to refer to what he believed the afterlife to be.

• "It's not words that call us, it's desire" Pinhead says this. How does that make any sense? No one desires to be tortured by the cenobites. Kirsty didn't even know what it did when she opened it in the first movie.
  • Pinhead meant that the girl didn't have the capacity for desire as she was in a borderline catatonic state. So taking her back wouldn't do anything for them or her.
  • That being said he says "it's not hands that summon us, it was desire". It was Tiffany's hands that physically solved the puzzle but Channard's desire that put it in her hands. His desire was the cause for their arrival quite factually.
  • Possibly the embarrassment of having come to claim the wrong person from the first film has got to Pinhead enough that he is more careful not to judge from appearances, so on this occasion he reads the signs and quickly deduces that Tiffany is not the type (perverse, evil, morbidly insatiable etc) to use a Lament Configuration with conscious intent. We already know from the first film that Lament boxes tend to be sold to their owners with some degree of false advertising concerning the untold pleasures they will bestow ... Since Pinhead still has residual memories of having been such an owner, he knows the type he is looking for, and Tiffany is not it (Kirsty, at all events, is a more plausible seeker of forbidden knowledge).
  • Also, the Lament Box (as Kirsty reveals in the video recordings Joey views in the third film) actively assists those whom it has chosen to claim / torture / Cenobite-ify, etc. Evidently, it had set its sights on Kirsty. Tiffany is surplus: she was just able to solve it without help because of her own genius at puzzle-solving.
  • It's not about wanting torture specifically, it's about wanting something outre, beyond their normal life. Be that a distraction from PTSD, new forms of pleasure, knowledge of the occult, an explanation for why your uncle is a skinless creep... all of these are desires the Cenobites heed. It's just they only recognise one way to fulfil these desires.
  • Certain other materials have pretty much played up the idea Kirsty always was Cenobite material, and is a major reason they want her so bad. Hellseeker turning her into a multiple murderer totally helped fuel that idea.
• How many Lament Configurations are there, and are all of them real? Channard had three puzzle boxes in his office, but would all of them have worked for the summoning ritual? Did Channard even end up with the puzzle box seen in the first film?