Puzzle Box: Chiasmus, Queering, and Subjective Finitude in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser

Abstract

This essay, an analysis of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, enters into the conversation of queer negativity by utilizing a Foucauldian framework for understanding subjectivity and limits. This framework is expanded by Eve Sedgewick and Susan Sontag’s analyses of camp, in order to attend to the experience of the horror viewer. In addition to queer-focused philosophy, the essay takes inspiration from Eugenie Brinkema’s book Life Destroying Diagrams (2022) in which she employs a formalist approach to reading film. Finally, formalist literary studies shape this thesis through their investigation of the chiasmus: a rhetorical device which makes legible the crossings that queer the subject within horror. 

At the core of this essay lies the queer subject-other positionality of the Cenobites in Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. The Cenobites’ freedom, and their queerness, is found in their continued sadomasochistic illegibility. Though they are trapped at one’s fingertips, always summonable through the iconic puzzle box, they are ephemeral: specters discernible only in discrete collisions with the mortals who summon them. By illuminating the intertwined relationship between perceived interior (the home) and exterior (the sadistic hellscape of the Cenobites), the essay rejects the premise of an outside and presents alterity as a disruption within the Foucauldian grid. Hellraiser’s Frank Cotton becomes the site of such a disruption through his summoning of the Cenobites, but his refusal to relinquish subjectivity bars him from becoming queered in the way that they are. Frank thus finds himself dragged between forces as the film unfolds—agonized by continued visibility, yet trapped within the grid he sought to transcend.