The best horror movies on Amazon Prime – The A.V. Club

Working with a modest budget, director Clive Barker created a bloody fairy tale complete with a wicked, if not quite evil, stepmother in the form of theater actress Clare Higgins. Playing the wife of ineffectual husband Andrew Robinson (Dirty Harry), Higgins barely hides her contempt as the two move into a family house once inhabited by Robinsons hard-living, now-missing brother, with whom Higgins once had an affair. Thanks to supernatural forces, Robinsons brother returns, sort of, as a skinless pile of organs that entreats Higgins to kill for him in an effort to flesh out his half-formed body. Meanwhile, Robinsons scream-prone daughter (Ashley Laurence) begins to suspect that matters might be amiss, a suspicion confirmed by the arrival of four pale demons fitted out in bondage gear. One of these, a bald demon with nails pounded into his skull, has become the most enduring image of Hellraiser and its sequels, and rightly so. A deeply unsettling, S&M-inspired creature whose blurring of the division between pleasure and pain extends to a blurring of the division between good and evil, it neatly and instantly sums up some of Barkers themes. Pinhead barely appears in Hellraiser, a film that, with its intense and uncomfortable family drama, might have even worked without him. With him, however, it becomes one of the most innovative and memorable horror films of the 80s, a middle ground between mainstream fare and the work of David Cronenberg, in its most powerful moments conjuring up the latters ability to make viewers feel uncomfortable in their own bodies. [Keith Phipps]

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The best horror movies on Amazon Prime - The A.V. Club

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Reviewed and Recommended by Erik Baquero
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