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occult
1987 · R · 1h 33m
He'll tear your soul apart.
An original and twisted tale with practical effects galore. Not for the faint of heart.
Frank Cotton solves an ancient puzzle box that promises pleasures beyond imagination — and delivers, pulling him into a dimension ruled by beings called the Cenobites, for whom pain and pleasure are indistinguishable. When blood falls on the floorboards of the family home, something starts to reconstitute itself. Hellraiser is the original body horror classic, a film that imagines hell not as fire and brimstone but as something far more visceral and strange.
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Frank Cotton, a thrill-seeking hedonist, purchases a mysterious puzzle box in Morocco said to open the door to pleasures beyond imagination. He solves it alone in the attic of his family home and is immediately claimed by the Cenobites — extradimensional beings who abandoned the distinction between pain and pleasure long ago. They take him apart.
Months later, Frank's brother Larry moves into the same house with his wife Julia — who, before the marriage, had an intense affair with Frank. While moving furniture, Larry gashes his hand on a nail and bleeds onto the attic floor. Beneath the boards, something stirs. Frank's skinless, barely-formed body has begun to reconstitute itself, drawn by the blood.
Frank reveals himself to Julia and pulls her back into his orbit. He needs more blood — living blood — to fully regenerate. Julia begins luring men back from bars, bringing them upstairs on the pretense of seduction, where Frank feeds on them. She kills for him. She was always half in love with him.
Kirsty, Larry's daughter from a previous relationship, grows suspicious of Julia. Investigating the house, she finds Frank — regenerating, recognizable, grotesque — and barely escapes, taking the puzzle box with her. Alone later, she accidentally triggers it. The Cenobites appear. She bargains: bring them Frank, who escaped their dimension without permission, and they let her go.
She returns to the house and discovers that Frank has killed Larry and is wearing his skin — literally wearing it, passing himself off as his brother. The Cenobites arrive and drag Frank back, hook by hook. But they turn on Kirsty anyway; a deal with Cenobites was never going to hold. She solves the box in reverse and sends them back. The house burns. She and her boyfriend Steve escape into the street, where a mysterious vagrant takes the box from Steve's hands and vanishes.
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