Headscratchers / Hellraiser

• How do the Butterball Cenobite's glasses stay on? He has no ears!
  • They're probably a part of his face.
    • Pretty much. We are talking about sadomasochistic demons after all. They enjoy anything that causes severe pain, and fusing one's eye wear to their head would be pretty damn painful.
    • From the original novella: " Its clothes...were sewn to and through its skin..." The glasses are likely artificial but attached.
    • Actually, Butterball takes the glasses off, so we can see the sewn-up eyes.
  • We get a look at them in Hell bound Hellraiser, and it seems that they go into his earholes.
• At the end of the first film, all the Cenobites get sent back to hell. Except the Butterball, he gets crushed by some falling masonry. But he's a demon, it'll take more that a falling rock to kill him. Sure, it'll be painful but he can obviously deal with that. IDK, it just bugs me.
  • He's fine in the second movie, so getting "crushed" probably just resulted in him getting immediately de-summoned. Alternately, getting crushed kept him pinned him down while Kirsty kept going through each step of reversing the puzzle-box, and one of those steps teleported him back offscreen.
• Why did the Cenobites try to welch on Kristy's deal in the first movie, when they were perfectly fine with sparing her in Hellseeker?
  • Because as the movies went on the Cenobites suffered an awful lot of character and motive decay, that's why.
  • Also, remember when Kirsty offered the Cenobites Frank instead of her, Pinhead's Exact Words were "maybe". He didn't swear an oath to let her go or make any kind of explicit deal, he just told her that if she led them to Frank, they might consider letting her go. Once they had Frank back, he probably figured "Eh, screw it, we're taking you anyway."
  • There's a note on one of the pages that this does not happen in the novella (which I haven't read, so take this with a grain of salt). It's entirely possible it was changed for the movie because simply ending after Frank is taken care of with one last evil look from Pinhead would feel more anticlimactic to a movie audience. As the above point notes, Pinhead made no promises. It's later made more explicit that he's took a liking to her beyond "haha you opened the box time for hooked chains now." Hell, in the comics, she becomes a Cenobite herself.
    • I would wonder if the movie's ending was studio-imposed. It seems to fit the demands for an action climax, which was the increasing convention for horror movies at the time. (I think if the film had been made just a decade earlier, it would have been more open to an ending like the one in the novella.) I'm not saying the ending is a flaw in the movie per se, though speaking personally, I find the idea that the Cenobites would honor their side of the deal a bit more interesting. For what it's worth, the scene in the second film where they refuse to take Tiffany does show that they still have rules they operate by. But the Hellseeker segment where they make a deal with Kristy made no sense and was definitely a sign of series decay.
  • My guess is that it is because SHE welched first when she said they could not take the person she thought was her father.
  • Their demeanor to her, if hardly friendly, is markedly different to the ruthless, no-nonsense efficiency of their first manifestation, especially Pinhead's. "We have such sights to show you," conveys the impression that he feels, in some twisted way, that he is now rewarding Kirsty for her service-under-duress, and by inference with Hellraiser II (where Julia uses the same line with Dr. Channard) one could well suppose he now intends to induct Kirsty into his happy little family of undead sadists, rather than simply "tear[ing] her soul apart". He may not consider this reneging on his (admittedly very vague) deal with her.
  • As the above point says, comparing Pinhead's interactions with Kirsty when she initially summons them and at the end of the film, it's likely that Pinhead wasn't actually expecting her to successfully return Frank to them, and was pleasantly surprised when she actually managed it, and due to his weird Cenobite logic and Blue-and-Orange Morality, thought he was "rewarding" her for her efforts, and much like the above point, he was likely going to initially do to her what he had done to Frank and countless others who had opened the box and simply torture her, before being so impressed with her efforts in recovering Frank that he changes his mind and decides to make her a Cenobite. She did solve the box after all.
  • Also, bear in mind that in order to escape in Hellseeker, Kirsty bargains for 5 souls in exchange for hers, including at least one mistress who didn't seem to know Trevor was married. It's possible that she'll be damned for that and Pinhead knows it, so he's content with playing the waiting game to make her a Cenobite.
  • Speaking as a book reader, there's a subtle difference in the way the Cenobites in the book set the terms of the deal, so to speak. The Lead Cenobite tells her that if they hear Frank confess, then "maybe we won't tear your soul apart." Here it isn't phrased as a threat: they're simply saying that tearing her soul apart is what they were planning to do to her anyway, but they're willing to reconsider if she's able to give them Frank. In the film, though, there's an implication that they'd do something even worse to her than what they normally do to their victims, as a punishment for (supposedly) leading them on a false trail. This condition is made explicit in the second film when Pinhead tells her, "Trick us again, child, and your suffering will be legendary, even in Hell."
• Frank's relationship with the cenobites, at least in the first movie. He opened the puzzle box because he WANTED to experience extreme pain/pleasure. Yet he tries to escape. OK, maybe he got more than he bargained for. But if that's the case then how come when he is captured at the end, he doesn't look too fussed about going back? He just grins and laughs.
  • This stems back to the original novella. Frank was hedonist, basically someone who strives to maximize net pleasure (pleasure minus pain), but is a bit nihilistic due to the pleasures that exist on Earth not giving him what he wanted. Frank was told that by opening the box, it would act as a portal to an extra dimensional realm of unfathomable carnal pleasure. After the box was opened in the novella, the Cenobites offer Frank experiences like he has never known before, Frank readily agrees, despite the Cenobites' repeated warnings that it may not be what he expects and that he cannot renege on an agreement to return to their realm with them. It wasn't until after he got pulled into the Cenobites' realm that he discovered their devotion to sadomasochism was so great that couldn't tell the difference between extreme pain and extreme pleasure. Frank is sucked into the Cenobite realm, where he realizes that he will be subjected to an eternity of torture. Though the scene that happens after he opens the box the first time is different, the same motivation is the same. He was looking for extreme pleasure, and he ended up getting extreme pain instead. So, he tried to escape it and though he was close enough to succeed in his escape. But I think he grinned and laughed because he knew he was about to go through the process again and couldn't help but laugh at the irony of it, which at that point he knew was futile to try to do anything to keep from going back.

• How did Frank escape from Cenobites?
  • This is elaborated in the original screenplay: after they got bored with tearing him to shreds, the Cenobites just abandoned Frank's spiritual essence within the fabric of the house, without form or sensations (which would be a fittingly ironic and grievous punishment for a total hedonist, as is the one they finally choose for him in Hellraiser II - eternal denial of pleasure). They just got unlucky that someone spilled blood in that same house ... or possibly not. Given that the Lead Cenobite just leaves the Lament Box in Frank's house, one could assume it was a deliberate trap to bring more interesting souls their way, as Julia's equally "haunted" mattress also proved to be.
• In the first movie, why was that doctor so hostile towards Kirsty? And why were the cops allegedly looking for her?
  • The Doctor was not being hostile. He was just concerned about his patient being out of bed. As for the cops looking for her, they wanted to talk to her about the events that led to her hospitalization.
  • His manner is somewhat offish. Perhaps he believes her collapse was self-inflicted due to drink, drug abuse, etc, and is petty enough to be judgmental. As for the police, the bloodstains rapey corpse Frank left on her clothes must have provided ample material for speculation ...
• I'm having a little trouble reconciling the Cenobites' original appearance, in which they were motivated by twisted hedonism (and reclaiming those who escaped them) with their current portrayal as beings obsessed by order. What gives? At most you could maybe make the case that they are aware of the Ironic Hell inherent in their tortures and therefore have something of a sense of justice towards those they torture, but nothing like an obsession with order.
  • It has to do with how they operate. Although it varies depending on whether you are reading the comics or watching the movies, for the most part the Cenobites follow a set of rules. For instance, they can only come to our world if someone with a desire for pleasure summons them using the Puzzle Box. Also, they are more than willing to make bargains with mortals, as shown throughout the franchise. As for the sense of justice thing, they don't care whether their "client" is good or bad, they just give them what they think they want.
  • Real world being written by various people with different definitions probably hasn't helped this issue for several decades. One thing that is also going to color people's definitions is the characters the Cenobites are written to be playing off. They themselves can be just doing what they enjoy as far as they're concerned while the audience watching is more inclined to thrust their own moral worldview onto their actions.
  • probably also depends on your definitions of order and hedonism. Barker's original intention was more of S&M religion that pushes that extreme pleasure and extreme pain is a very thin or irrelevant line. One major problem is that hedonism is far more often associated with chaos rather than order. The Cenobites are kinda a weird mixture between the traditional lines of order vs chaos.
  • Although for that matter whats the actual distinction between people who enter this place? Certain people are considered Cenobite material like Spencer and Channard. We see Frank ends up in an Ironic Hell but Julia on the other hand doesn't seem to get this treatment, as she leads Channard through the place there seems to be people freely having sex happily. Perhaps maybe what Frank got in Hellbound is actually the rare exception for people who try to escape? Later sequels like Inferno and Hellseeker run on the idea this was the norm but based only on the book and first two movies it's reasonable to consider.
• How the hell did Channard kill the Cenobites in Hellbound? And what's up with the phallic tube attached to his head?
  • General assumptions from over the years and encouraged by Atkins was that remembering their humanity weakened them and made theme easy prey to the fresh and empowered Channard. The phallic tube is believed to be a direct connection to Leviathan to probably help keep this new cenobite in line.
• A few drops suffice to reconstitute most of Frank except skin and superficial muscles. Apparently a lot more blood is required for these last few layers.
  • Going by what's shown in the first two movies, it seems that skin cannot be regrown and must be physically removed from another person and wore as if it was a bodysuit.
• Frank is initially aware that the house is a bad place for him to loiter, as the Cenobites will no doubt look for him there. His plan is to get the hell out of dodge as soon as his reconstitution is complete. Yet once complete, he forgets about this and even states that he would be very happy to stay in the house, with both women as his sex mates. His sense of urgency should be compounded by the fact that the summoning cube has disappeared from his control, and he is clearly aware ("Nooooo!") of what might happen when naive hands play with it.
  • Other than carelessness and hedonism, the most likely explanation is that they were hanging back to eliminate Kirsty: the last surviving witness to their deeds. Having put considerable effort himself into solving the Lament Configuration, Frank may be assuming Kirsty, even if she does try to open it, will not be able to do so quickly (In a sense he is right, as the box seems to give a helping hand and partially solve itself when Kirsty unthinkingly plays with it). Also, his skin disguise does, for whatever reason, seem to be an effective barrier against Cenobite detection, and he may be aware of this limitation, and thus complacent.