QUANTITY
MAGAZINE

Good afternoon Princeton Music graduates! I graduated from Princeton ten years ago with a major in music and a certificate in creative writing… obviously, I did it for the money. I’m assuming you all also majored in music for the money. Honestly though, parents, I promise that I really have managed to build a fulfilling career using my music degree. It can absolutely be done.

In any case, I’m incredibly honored to be here to help usher you into this next big chapter of your lives. If you’re anything like me on this day ten years ago, you’ve spent the last three days squeezing the few remaining drops out of your life here -- spending meaningful time with friends and watching guys who fought in World War II shotgun a beer like they’re 22.

You’ve spent the last four years under the auspices of Princeton’s exceptional, very singular music department. To study somewhere with such a rich history of groundbreaking music experimentation, with professors who are not only world-renowned in their fields but want to share their knowledge with young music students -- we are very lucky people.

I’ve been a musician all my life, but it was here at Princeton that I really learned how to listen to music. Not just how to identify chords by ear or tell the difference between serialism and twelve-tone row. What I mean is, I learned how to receive music with the reverence and open heart it deserves.

I’ll never forget being in a lecture class with Paul Lansky, where he put on the first forty seconds of Mariah Carey’s “All I Want for Christmas Is You” and we listened to it together, blasting through the classroom speakers in Woolworth. When he turned it off, he said, with true adoration in his voice, “Isn’t that wonderful?”

I’d heard that song a million times before, but in that room it was like I heard it for the first time. And it was perfect.

Music is divine, it’s magic. It’s a way of life. As forever music students, it’s our duty to stay curious and keep a varied and voracious musical diet. There’s something to be learned from every single piece of music in the universe -- listen to it all without pretension.

I can talk forever about music, but we’re here today because you’re saying goodbye to the safe cocoon of Princeton, with its leafy courtyards and free food listservs… and taking your first steps into a much, much bigger place. This is all new, mostly unknown territory for you. But the good news is that you’ve spent the last four years learning how to do life’s most important thing: listen.

In writing this speech, I thought about what I wish someone had told me at 22. I polled friends and consulted my favorite media for answers, and realized that everything I found could be boiled down to paying attention to the right things, to listening.

So as you set forth into your new world, here are my listening recommendations.

First, LISTEN TO YOURSELF.

The most important relationship you have in this life is the one you have with yourself. In Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way, she writes, “treating yourself like a precious object will make you strong.” It’s a lifelong pursuit, but I’m finding this to be remarkably true.

Listen to your body, and learn how to take excellent care of yourself. As an adult, no one can or will do that better than you. Learn to cook. Drink so much water. Get a 32oz water bottle and drink like four of that per day. If you’re feeling frisky, put some lemon in it. If you don’t already, start flossing. Get one of those long flossers with the disposable heads -- it’s so much easier than regular floss. Invest in some good earplugs and wear them to every show. Your ears are precious. Take care of your skin. Moisturize everywhere, and use sunscreen on your face every single day, no matter the weather. Move your body every day—even if it’s just a stroll around the block—and always, always stretch.

One day in a few years you’re going to look in the mirror and think, “huh, I look different.” You’re supposed to. Our bodies are not fixed -- they get bigger and smaller and change shape and content. Don’t fret -- a stronger and clearer you is emerging.

Make your home a sanctuary -- I like to think of my home as a reflection of the inside of my mind. I’ve learned to view household chores like doing the dishes as acts of love to my future self.

Spend quality time alone. I have no doubt that you’re all bright, wonderful people. Learn to enjoy your own company. Take yourself on dates. Go to the movies alone.

Sometimes, many times, things will be hard. You cannot outrun heartache. It’s an important part of life. Let yourself feel the whole spectrum of your feelings, honor them, and then keep it moving. Find the frequency that allows you to tune into what you need. And finally, never say anything really mean about yourself out loud.

Second, LISTEN TO THE WORLD AROUND YOU.

We live in a society, on a planet of 8 billion people, most of whom are just doing their best. Be kind. Be a good friend, and you’ll have good friends. Quality time with your friends is vital, a top priority.

Be honest. With yourself, with others. So much unnecessary strife can be avoided by communicating kindly and truthfully.

Always go to the party. If you get there and it sucks, hit the bricks. Life is too long not to explore every universe, but it’s too short to spend time with anyone who doesn’t give you life.

Become a part of your community, wherever you live. Know your neighbors. Volunteer. Marvel at trees. Be present in your environment. Take headphone-free walks around your neighborhood -- there is so much to hear in this world.

Third, LISTEN TO YOUR INSTINCTS.

The universe is mostly chaos and luck. We control so much less than we think. Figure out what your true north is, i.e. what you really really love, and just follow that. Every once in a while, check in with yourself to see if you’re still going that way. Focus on the next right thing, which can be something as small as putting new strings on your guitar. Your compass will take you where you need to go. All you can do is relax and enjoy the ride.

What is for you will not pass you by, and rejections are the universe reserving you for something else. Having it all figured out is literally impossible. Stay loose. Trust yourself and your perceptions. Everyone’s timeline is different. Make yourself a five-year plan, and then throw it in the garbage, because as they say, man plans and God laughs. And you should too, because things are not that serious, and a lot of this business of living is very funny.

Fourth, LISTEN TO INSPIRATION.

Keep your creative practice alive -- this is a lifelong commitment that will serve you well and provide your center. If you nourish your inner artist, you’ll never stop making stuff.

Give yourself time to do nothing, to play, to lie on the floor and listen to music. Make bad art. Make tons of it. Make mistakes. Just keep the channel to your creativity open.

And finally, LISTEN TO DELIGHT.

Our friend Julia Cameron also writes, “The quality of life is in proportion, always, to the capacity for delight. The capacity for delight is the gift of paying attention.”

In order to survive, you have to stay listening for shimmers of delight. Because sometimes, life really sucks. Being alive is expensive and tiring and wholly unpredictable. But you keep going because there’s music and summer tomatoes and the way the light filters through the trees in spring.

Joy is simple, elemental, often easily accessed. It’s about getting a chair you really love. It’s about fresh air coming through the window. It’s about eating the best Thai food of your life with good friends in a strip mall (sorry, I live in Los Angeles). Figure out the simplest things that bring you joy and acquire or do them regularly. Life is complicated, but delight is not.

So now you have my listening recommendations. And that’s all they are—recommendations.

In about three years your brains will finish developing and then you’ll start to even out a bit in your late twenties and then you’ll turn thirty and start formulating your own ideas about how to live. And maybe you’ll give me a call and tell me all about them.

Today, though, I am so excited for you to go off into the wild and make all the noise you want (while of course being mindful of your neighbors).

I wish you all the luck and courage and delight. Just keep your ear to the ground.

Thank you.

Welcome to the final installment of Devin's exhaustive dive into the Hellraiser franchise. In parts one and two, we covered Clive Barker's originating novella (The Hellbound Heart, 1986); the four theatrically-released films (Hellraiser, Hellbound, Hell on Earth, and Bloodline, 1987–1996); the first four direct-to-video entries (Inferno, Hellseeker, Deader, and Hellworld, 200-2005); Barker's 2005 follow-up novel The Scarlet Gospels; and the comics from Epic, Boom! Studios, and Seraphim (1989–2017). Today, we’ll cover the shameful tail-end of the direct-to-video era Revelations and Judgement, discuss the robust and long-suffering (pun intended) fan community, and end on a high note with the legitimately excellent 2022 reboot.

Between the previous installment and this one, after a lengthy diagnostic process, at the age of 40 I found myself officially diagnosed as Autistic (DSM-5 lv. 1; née Asperger's Syndrome). Still newly-digesting this information, like many people diagnosed midlife, I'm simultaneously experiencing relief in seeing detailed depictions of my past-and-current struggles, and a certain existential dislocation about the seat of the self. Far loftier thinkers than I have teased apart the puzzle box of the mind-body problem and have yet to firmly pin down how consciousness, like, actually works. Who or what exactly is in the driver's seat here? How, and to what extent, should I be continually checking, resisting, or embracing impulses from my "systemizing" brain, physically skewed toward semi-obsessive completionist tendencies?

One excellent observation from Frith's Enigma is that language and communication are two separate skills. Here, in the written word, I can get my thinking across with freedom and precision; I experience none of the processing delays, missed-or-mixed-up nonverbal cues, and sensory oddities that render me various shades of politely blank, awkwardly obtuse, or unintentionally hurtful in social situations. Workplace-oriented Autism material sometimes discusses the pros & cons of diagnosis disclosure, and the limitations on upward potential one may experience as a result. But here at Quantity Mag, among friends and fellow art weirdos, there's no ladder to climb, no promotions to chase -- certainly no paycheques to inflate! Quantity Mag is literally a safe space for writing 3,000-word pieces about low-budget horror movies starring a guy with nails in his head. If I can't be myself here, where can I be?

Revelations & Judgement

Beginning in the 2000s, with the surprise success of new horror franchises like Saw and Hostel, the horror world began aggressively rebooting its iconic slashers: Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003), Dawn of the Dead (2004), Halloween (2007), Friday the 13th (2009), Last House of the Left (2009), Nightmare on Elm Street (2010), Halloween (again! 2017), Child's Play (2019), and Candyman (2021). Hoping for a piece of the action, Dimension Films began gameplanning a Hellraiser reboot in 2006, with Clive Barker back on board. But the project was back-burnered, and began churning through dozens of screenwriters, directors, concepts, and treatments. Eventually, in in 2011, contractual obligation mandated Dimensions release a Hellraiser movie or they’d lose the rights to the IP.

Thus, with a $300k budget, Revalations was shot in a few weeks and enjoyed exactly one theatrical screening for the cast and crew. After another season of languishing, Judgement was produced for the same reason, with a similar budget and schedule, and was released in 2018. Gary Tunnicliffe, horror makeup FX journeyman who worked on Hellraisers 3 through 8, wrote the script for both and directed the later. Judgement is, objectively, the better movie of the two; but its comparative filmic normality renders it a less interesting writing subject than the perplexing trainwreck of Revalations. Let's get into it.

Dimension Films would like you to forget about Revelations, please. It's not on Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, or Amazon; and the single torrent I found was so poorly-seeded that I didn't make it past 12% after two weeks of downloading. Just as I was debating dropping seven of my hard-earned dollars on the DVD, I found it hiding in plain sight on Hoopla! Thanks SFPL!

Revelations clocks in at 75 minutes *including* the end credits and has the lowest Rotten Tomatoes score of the Hellraiser franchise: Critic 0%, Audience 6%. The writing is terrible; The actors toggle between catatonia and histrionics; The cinematography has the low-viscosity sheen of cheap video; The soundtrack is MIDI and the SFX are royalty-free. The costumes and set dressing are how Minnesotan TJ Maxx shoppers who've never actually met the 1% might imagine they dress and decorate. In short: It's giving Daytime Soap. (As a onetime Y&R devotee, I felt right at home here! Women with floofy blowouts, men with perfectly-trimmed three-day stubble, Gigantic pillar candles everywhere for some reason -- you love to see it.)

But Revelations zigs where the others zag: It essentially inverts the elements of the first movie the other sequels typically elaborate upon. Where the movies (especially 2 through 4) iteratively one-up Hellraiser's speculative fiction elements, Revelations instead one-ups its family drama. Like Hellraiser, Revelations is structured as a parlor drama and would function without much alteration as a stageplay; It’s Tennessee Williams slopped with gore. Rather than baroque tangents into Cenobite lore, Revelations instead revisits Hellraiser's concern with the effects of repressed desire on relationships and family cohesion, and the spiraling fallout from its transgressive indulgence. Given the budget constraints, this weird (but interesting!) choice had the potential for excellent results -- but the execution is, well, awful.

Speaking of missed opportunities... Reader, I nearly lost my frickin' mind when Revelation's opening sequence suggests you're about to watch a found footage Hellraiser movie. (This, sadly, is a bait-and-switch -- but that such a thing was even teased sets the imagination atwirl.) Structurally, this videotape is the linkage between the plot's two temporal strands: Two preppy teenage boys abscond to Tijuana to sow their wild oats and "go missing" after some Cenobite trouble, and a year later, their families have a dinner party together. The two strands intertwine as the shit progressively hits the fan. True to its title, everyone's dirty laundry is aired as the violence becomes more extreme.

Where Hellraiser is a story about a languishing middle-age woman blossoming into power as she discovers how far she's willing to go to slake her unmet sexual needs; Revelations is a story about how the emptiness and moral compromises beneath suburbia's placid facade have poisoned a young man into abandoning himself to the nihilistic pursuit of sensation. But this potent idea is utterly fumbled by an immature script and lousy acting. (Funny Games, Ginger Snaps, etc. etc. explore similar territory with considerably more panache and nuance.)

I could go on. This movie is chock full of unusual Hellraiser ideas that misfire or whiff completely -- But to wrap this up briefly, here's just two examples: The Vagrant, Hellraiser’s most elusive minor character, plays an outsized role here, a rarity in the movies or comics; And Emma's oversexed explanation of how the box works should absolutely be re-worked in a future movie. To conclude: I'd recommend this one only for the truly dedicated -- or, perhaps, fans of The Room, Sharknado, etc.

Watching them back-to-back, it's surprising that Revelations and Judgement share a screenwriter, because they're polar opposite in many ways. Judgement is heavily stylized, music video-esq in its editing conventions; The soundtrack and SFX are atmospheric and professional; The plot is linear, coherent, and deeply concerned with Cenobite bureaucracy; And while the acting isn't amazing, it's serviceable and a definite improvement on Revelations. The difference is like night and day -- or perhaps, Daytime and Primetime TV. Some of this glow-up can be chalked up to advances in affordable video tech intersecting with the stylization of modern torture porn (e.g. Saw) -- But much of Judgement's improved execution is likely due to Tunnicliffe taking the director’s chair, and his enthusiasm for adding his own link to the chain.

Now, with all of that said... in inching back from Revelation's apex weirdness, we are unfortunately left with a normal-bad movie instead of an interesting-bad movie. The plot is, literally, Se7en. A pair of Hard-boiled detectives are hunting The Preceptor, whose serial murders correspond to the seven deadly sins the ten commandments. However, around a third of the movie's runtime is spent with The Inquisitor, a sort of Cenobite liaison who ushers potential victims through a lengthy (and surprisingly formal!) intake process. These scenes manage to be simultaneously spoopy and extremely gross, an interesting combination! Unfortunately, Judgement falls victim to the same problem as Scarlet Gospells: It retcons the Cenobites as biblical demons fighting biblical angels, reducing the situation to a good/evil binary. This is the least interesting take on who the Cenobites are and what they want. No sir, I don't like it!

There's exactly one interesting idea in this movie: One of the detectives has PTSD following a violent (but otherwise lightly-sketched) military career. This is a fruitful topic for Hellraiser, and surfaces in a few of the anthology comics. This could easily have sustained the sole focus of a movie, but unfortunately this plot thread is just sort of mish-mashed with everything else here.

In the end, Judgement has some wacky visual moments but not much else to recommend it. But the fact that it was made for around 15% of the budget of the truly godawful Hellseeker seems like a definite win for everyone involved. At the very least, it provided the FX crew, set designers, and costumers with some solid clips for their sizzle reels.

Keep the Fire Burning

Like any long-running horror franchise worth its salt, Hellraiser accrued a flourishing fanbase over the decades. Hellraiser fans are typically enthralled by the first two movies' potent stew of raw emotional power, visceral gore, and psychedelic world-building... only to find themselves wading through a morass of increasingly lousy sequels (a sadly common experience for horror fandoms). When I first started this journey, Bob said something to the effect of, "Of all the 80s slasher franchises, I feel like Hellraiser has the most unrealized potential" -- a feeling, I think, broadly shared among the fandom. This basically hits the nail on the head, but now that I've done the whole dang thing, I want to refine this statement with two additional thoughts.

One: As opposed to (e.g.) Childs Play or Nightmare on Elm Street, the first Hellraiser keeps its iconic monsters at a distance; The Cenobites almost revolve around the story, rather than the reverse. This initial decision opens all kinds of narrative doors, paving the way for the series' broadly cannon-eschewing framework. The general effect of this decision is that it expands, rather than restricts, the series' narrative potential from the outset. It's easy to find yourself in a discussion with other Hellraiser fans where everyone has a slightly different take on "what it's all about" -- a huge asset for a horror franchise!

Two: I'd also argue the series' potential has actually been better-realized outside of the films. In particular, short-form collections like the Epic! comics, and the semi-official Hellbound Hearts anthology (2009) are the ideal medium for exploring “what it’s all about.” In Hellbound Hearts, you'll find a group of aging goths meeting up at a graveyard just like old times, 19th c. body horror, the Emperor making a deal with a demon during the siege of Constantinople, film collectors trawling internet message boards, a two-page story about bulimia, and a good old fashion nautical ghost story. The Cenobites don't even appear in many of these -- Hellraiser invites this capaciousness because its source material is rooted in suggestion rather than elucidation.

Because of the series' idiosyncrasies, it attracts an above-average number of artists, queer people, and kinksters than the typical horror fanbase; And during Hellraiser's official-release doldrums, a thriving participatory culture picks up where the official releases end. I’ve been trying (unsuccessfully) to find scanned PDFs of the Coenobium fanzine (mid-90s), which has unfortunately risen to collector’s-item-level prices on the secondary market. The chat boards, subreddits, and wikis remain flourishing.

But Hellraiser is also -- of course! of course! -- a commercial property with a kaleidoscopic, ever-expanding cornucopia of merch. For my money, the most interesting of these are screen-used props (Capt. Eliot Spencer's severed head, screen-used puzzle boxes, etc.), for which specialty auction sites exist. There's action figures, trading cards — all kinds of stuff.

The Reboot

Sixteen years is a long time to wait for a reboot, but in the immortal words of Garth Brooks, "Sometimes God's greatest gifts are unanswered prayers." During this interregnum, two important developments occurred: The mid-2010s rise of prestige horror, and streaming services producing in-house content matching (or eclipsing) the quality of traditional film studios. When it finally arrived, the 2022 Hulu-backed Hellraiser reboot was visually sumptuous, creatively solid, and stayed true of the core ideas that made Hellraiser 1 and 2 so beloved. In short, it's great. 10/10.

In true Hellraiser fashion, rather a straight remake, we get a new story woven around the core ideas in the first two movies. The redesigned cenobites hew closer to their description in the novel, their "flesh cosmetically punctured and sliced and infibulated, then dusted down with ash." Pinhead, described as genderless in the book, is played with a disturbing tranquility by trans actress Jessie Clayton (who got the audition because she rocked a campy Pinhead look on RuPaul's Drag Race. Hell yeah!). Importantly, this movie also re-aligns the Cenobites' origins and motivations to the novel: They’re left deeply ambiguous, concerned only with the extremes of sensation, and the orderly procession of the individuals who open the box through their journeys.

Our protagonist Riley is a twenty-something fuckup crashing with her older brother while she's getting sober. Actress Odessa A'zion delivers a solid chaotic performance here, unhinged and fittingly grimy under the fingernails. Egged on by her no-good-nick bf, she winds up in possession of the puzzle box, and we're off to the races. Where the original Hellraiser is concerned with desire and power, the reboot is concerned with grief and guilt: On an emotional level, this movie is about the struggle to move forward when you've caused harm that cannot be repaired. A'zion's acting style is particularly well-suited to the strange, unmoored stage of early recovery, the constant negotiation with the hovering urge to reach for anything to stop feeling what you're feeling.

The production design on this movie is just *chef kiss*. The transitions between the normal world and the Labyrinth are fantastic: Architecture sectioning and pulling away into oblivion. Picking up on an idea left dangling in Hellraiser 2, the puzzle box gets a major upgrade. The Cenobite designs are wonderfully gross, and the producers didn't shy away from indulging in some intense gore sequences. You love to see it!

Aesthetically, the film has an unusual engagement with formality. In quieter moments, the shots are often painterly, and as the film progresses, the set dressings become more explicitly high-art: Neoclassical sculpture gardens, Indian stone friezes, and modernist takes on Islamic arabesque. The soundtrack is an excellent mix of orchestral and electronic, and includes several reworked cues from Christopher Young's original score. Finally, the structure of the plot -- using the puzzle box's incremental configurations as a framing device -- lends a sort of inevitability to the movie's flow reminiscent of classical tragedies.

OK, so it's not perfect. Like all modern movies it's a bit too log, and including a billionaire villain imho feels like writing in the 2020s. I personally felt there was a little too much lore in the back half, but Bob appreciates this type of thing, so I guess it's a wash? But look, this movie is just... solid. After the series' decades-long parade of direct-to-video schlock, even just an OK reboot would have been phenomenal -- but everyone really went above-and-beyond to make this a special one.

It doesn't just look right, it feels right.

The End

And yes, since I know you're wondering: Conversations for a sequel are in progress.