Writer Peter Briggs Opens the Puzzle Box to Discuss His Unmade Sequel ‘Hellraiser: Lament’ [Phantom Limbs]

phantom limb /ˈfan(t)əm’lim/ n. an often painful sensation of the presence of a limb that has been amputated.

Welcome to Phantom Limbs, a recurring feature which will take a look at intended yet unproduced horror sequels and remakes – extensions to genre films we love, appendages to horror franchises that we adore – that were sadly lopped off before making it beyond the planning stages. Here, we will be chatting with the creators of these unmade extremities to gain their unique insight into these follow-ups that never were, with the discussions standing as hopefully illuminating but undoubtedly painful reminders of what might have been.

This time, we’re paying a visit to Hellraiser: Lament, a project that was intended to be the seventh entry in the long-running franchise that sadly never made it past the treatment stage. Named for both the puzzle box at the heart of the series and the town that would have served as the sequel’s primary location, Lament would have displayed a much larger scope than the last two films in the series, which had been relegated to DTV releases after 1996’s Hellraiser: Bloodline. In addition to introducing a new cast of heroes populating Lament, the film would have brought back Pinhead alongside a few fan favorites from prior entries in the series in a story that culminates with the nearly apocalyptic destruction of the titular town.

Discussing Lament with us is writer Peter Briggs (Alien vs. Predator/Hellboy), returning to Phantom Limbs after previously discussing his unmade Judge Dredd with us last year. During our discussion, Mr. Briggs will detail the project’s origins, its story, and why he feels it ultimately didn’t happen.

“They approached me for the Hellraiser project because of Freddy vs. Jason, I think,” Mr. Briggs reveals, noting his involvement with his “Development Hell” draft in that project. “As with any movie industry project, being in the right place at the right time helped. I guess somebody at Miramax remembered that and said, ‘What about Peter Briggs on this?’ Which is always nice. [Miramax] gave no parameters, so it was an open field. I came up with my take and gave it to them.

“It got really confusing, because both projects [Mr. Briggs also worked for 18 months on a Highlander project for them] were just about the time that Miramax/Dimension was sold by Disney, and all of the rights of the various properties Miramax owned ended up fragmented everywhere. As I recall, I kind of finished on both projects roughly the same time. It was ultimately a wasted effort, because the studio was dead.

“I always seem to be in the right place to have something done, and then something horrible happens like a producer dies or a movie studio goes bankrupt or the entire studio development slate goes into turnaround for whatever reason, which has happened to me on far too many projects. That happened to me on Alien vs. Predator, that happened to me on Forever Man that I did for Paramount with Stan Lee and Robert Evans. It happened to me here on both of these projects at Dimension. But really, in the case of Hellraiser, there was no script. It was just the initial ten to fifteen page treatment.”

So what story did the treatment tell?

Dated June of 2002 and noted as being slated as the seventh installment of the Hellraiser franchise, the treatment carries not only the title Hellraiser: Lament, but also the potential alternates Hellraiser: Jihad, Hellraiser: Nemesis, and Hellraiser: The New Order. The listed aims for the project in the opening paragraph note that it’s meant to be a chronological extension to the first four films, foregoing the standalone approach of the last two DTV entries (Inferno and Hellseeker), “simultaneously furthering and enriching the original ‘Barkerverse’ Mythos (and using the opportunity to tie up some of the pre-V continuity flaws, including the futuristic ending of Bloodline).”

Briggs begins: “It started off with a prologue. Pinhead and his other core Cenobites, members of the Order of the Gash, they’d been imprisoned by the rhomboid god Leviathan (which you saw in Hellbound: Hellraiser II) within the Schism, which is this otherworldly dimensional limbo of blackness, for their overzealous doctrines of Pain and Order.

“It began with a flashback prelude, in 1750s America. You had the Duke De L’Isle, who is the commissioner of the main configuration boxes from Phillipe Lemarchand in France, who we saw in Hellraiser: Bloodline. He leads a ragtag team of prospectors into a fissure rift in the remote parts of the Appalachian Mountains containing ore veins of silver and gold.

“We learn that De L’Isle is wholly financing the construction and funding of a mining community on this site in the hope that it will one day be a prosperous town. He is specifically only interested in mining this kind of strange burnished metal that none of the other miners know that somewhat resembles copper, which is discovered eventually to be a shard of the infernal god Leviathan. Once it’s mined and exported, it forms the metallic components and the puzzle boxes. So this town is basically built on a splintered chunk of Leviathan.”

Leviathan from ‘Hellbound: Hellraiser II’ (1988)

From here, Briggs’ treatment cuts to present day America. “There’s this ‘All American Pie’ town named Lament that’s sprung up on the location. Because the mining’s gone, it’s slowly starting to atrophy, so you can sort of see the wear and tear at the edges of things. The local youth are disaffected and slightly desperate. It’s a bit of a dead end for a teenager. The local movie theatre is thirty miles away, they don’t warm to outsiders. So far, so movie cliché.”

It’s here that the treatment notes that the introductions to the kids in Lament will be similar in fashion to those in the third and fourth Nightmare on Elm Street films, revealing along the way that the key victims’ ancestors were Lament’s “Founding Fathers”, the prospectors from Duke De L’Isle’s mining operation.

“The protagonist was a girl called Jodi Creely, the daughter of a sanitation worker who’s recently moved to Lament. She’s having a hard time fitting in at school. She works at the local library. There’s a geometry teacher named Gardiner, who’s checking out books related to the town’s history. He’s distracted, a bit of a cold fish.”

We’re then introduced to the other teenagers in rapid succession. “The second protagonist is a kid called Vin Vinson, who slings hash at the local town diner. There’s a girl called Tamsin Heartinger, who is the mousy daughter of the town’s chief of police and [Jodi’s] only real friend in Lament. She’s acting progressively weirder and more withdrawn, and Jodi’s concerned for her. Tamsin basically just doesn’t want to go into what’s troubling her, and they have an argument in this diner. She walks out.

“There’s the annoying bad boy, this guy called Dobby Roebuck, a self-styled pinup for the girls at the high school.” The treatment notes that Roebuck and his goons are making life difficult for class nerd Eric Arlot, who has a secret crush on a fellow schoolmate named Amber. When Jodi sticks up for Eric, an altercation breaks out between the bullies and Vin, distracting Jodi from Tamsin, who sneaks into a car driven away by Gardiner. Jodi sees this, wondering what that could possibly mean.

“So you know, I intentionally wanted to set-up pretty much your standard horror movie characters. There’s a lot of familiar horror movie tropes in the setup of it. Anyway, this guy Gardiner has a sort of flashback dream late one night. We see he is involved in quantum work and abstract geometry, that he worked previously at this sort of high-tech particle accelerator facility doing experiments on various different types of metals.

“So he’s come here claiming to be a teacher and is acting as a teacher, but really he’s got his own agenda. He had found a sample of this metal that doesn’t fit on the atomic table. When he had bombarded this metal, he opened the dimensional gate and freed the Cenobites at this particle accelerator facility, and the whole research team was killed.

“When the machinery’s automatic shutdown timer sends the Cenobites back, Gardiner’s the only survivor. He was questioned by the police, but the cameras were knocked out and all this kind of thing. Anyway, he wakes up after having this nightmare and goes to the bathroom, and he has a vision of Pinhead, in a wreath of swirling smoke, watching him.” Gardiner leaves his house, leaving behind a chalkboard that we see is filled with dense equations that, at a distance, form the visual geometry of the Lament Configuration.

Gardiner drives out of Lament and to a “ramshackle tin shack in the middle of nowhere.” There, a fetish club is revealed within, full of smoke and music. Gardiner approaches his favorite dominatrix (a masked brunette), wises off, and receives “a vicious kick to the face that leaves his lip split. He smiles gratefully as he licks the cut.”

Briggs continues: “So Jodi herself has a bad dream,” culminating with crows battering her window while a deep voice asks after her desires. “Her father at this point, when he gets the diagrams – surprise, surprise, the town’s sewer system also seems to represent part of the Lament Configuration from the boxes.”

Doug Bradley as Pinhead

Through a series of events, Vin comes across Gardiner’s discarded wallet and discovers from his license that he’s really Richard Morgan, from New Mexico. Vin reveals this to Jodi, who confides that she believes Gardiner and Tamsin may be having an affair. Under the pretext of getting back the library books and returning his wallet, Jodi and Vin get access to Gardiner’s home.

They rifle through his “baffling, schizophrenic” notes, quantum physics diagrams, and a library of occult arcana concerning the puzzle boxes and Leviathan. It’s here that they discover De L’Isle and the nature of Lament’s past, and assume that the town’s origins have been suppressed merely because of De L’Isle’s Sadean history. Jodi notices the Lament Configuration pattern, realizing that she’s seen it elsewhere.

Later, Gardiner returns to his house with his dominatrix, who spurs him on toward completing his equations with her “painful little kinks”. Gardiner completes his work, discovering a brand new way to open the Lament Configuration. Chains erupt from “some fourth-dimensional space ‘within’ his chalkboard”, flaying the man and flooding the room with his blood, which seeps through his floorboards and down into the town’s sewer system.

An earthquake rocks the town, causing mayhem and burning down Gardiner’s home, erasing all evidence of the man’s work (and grisly death). Meanwhile, we spend more time with the town’s teens, all of whom have their own personal demons which make them perfect targets for Pinhead, who coerces each into his machinations by playing on their hidden desires, manipulating them into solving their own pieces of “The Configuration”. From the treatment: “We experience various ‘Dream Revelations’ of the victims … depicting Pinhead and the other Cenobites, veiled in gauzy shrouds so that their identities aren’t immediately apparent to their prey. The Cenobites offer whispered inducement: help them; solve the puzzles; and their heart’s desires will be unleashed.”

The Cenobites’ plan works, with each of the Founding Fathers’ descendants solving their own puzzles, meeting their doom as the boxes tear them apart, draining their blood into the ground and awaiting sewer system below. “We see the literal walls of blood flowing through the sewers, the droplets focused and channeled through the Duke De L’Isle’s ancient infernal genius; all reaching an intersection beneath Gardiner’s burnt house…at the very center of town.”

Having realized what’s been happening, Jodi and Vin race to save Tamsin from a similar fate, only to discover the young woman transformed. “Energized … laughing with cruel abandon.” Tamsin hadn’t been preyed upon by Gardiner, she had been using him to aid in completing Pinhead’s plan so that she might take her revenge on her abusive police chief father. She was the masked dominatrix from the fetish club, and has been acting as Pinhead’s primary conduit on Earth, “orchestrating the whole enterprise to release the demon”.

Once every last configuration is solved, De L’Isle’s “Resurrection Configuration” comes together. Originally designed to resurrect De L’Isle himself, the design ultimately opens the Schism and releases Pinhead. “Hell is unleashed upon Lament in numerous ways … lines of fire explode towards the charred ashes, and an unholy column of light bursts upwards. A charred skeleton rises up from the ashes…flesh and clothing flowing over its form; a network of pins telescoping from its skull … Pinhead is reborn…and Tamsin is to reap her reward from her ‘Lord and Prince’.”

Jodi and Vin attempt to flee, only to be thwarted at every turn by Pinhead’s newly-created army of Cenobites. Just as all hope appears to be lost, Pinhead is stopped cold by a last-minute arrival: Angelique, the Princess of Hell (last seen in Hellraiser: Bloodline). “Angelique regards Jodi and Vin, telling them to leave. Their presence is not intended, or wanted, here.”

Valentina Vargas as Angelique in ‘Hellraiser: Bloodline’ (1996)

Pinhead and Angelique square off, with the Lead Cenobite taunting the Princess with the knowledge that she cannot possibly stand against he and his legion of Cenobites. “Better that she renounce her Lord Leviathan and join their ‘New Order’.” Angelique regards Pinhead with something approaching pity, as he has “failed to understand the awesome power of the town’s infernal, hidden geometry.”

Another earthquake hits Lament. Massive triangular plates bursts from the ground, thousands of feet across. “The sidewalks around Pinhead erupt, and Leviathan’s ‘flesh tentacles’ whip out and attach their talon-tips into each of the Cenobite’s heads. Leviathan has arrived to take its unruly children home once more.”

Jodi and Vin make it to the edge of town, turning to see the massive triangles closing to an apex, revealing themselves to be the tip of Leviathan. The treatment ends: “With the terrifying ‘Bell Chimes’ of Hell, Leviathan sinks back into the earth, swallowing the town and taking it with it like it was never there.”

“I remember, at the time I went out and bought like everything I could get my hands on to do with [Hellraiser],” Briggs notes, explaining his process. “I was reading the Wachowskis’ Hellraiser comics, and saw all of the movies I’d missed. I think if you look at the treatment … I mean, I wouldn’t claim to be an expert in Hellraiser, but whenever somebody gives me a project to do, I try and find out everything I can on it so that I can take care of continuity. So it obviously fits within continuity, and it is a self-enclosed story in as much as it starts and ends and events happen within it.”

Certainly, bringing Leviathan back into the franchise amounts to a deep cut for fans, as the figure hadn’t appeared in the films for four installments by that point. “I was sort of fascinated with Leviathan. I didn’t really feel that Leviathan had gotten enough screen time. I wanted to sort delve into the mythology of it. We knew about Lemarchand and the construction of the boxes, but we never knew exactly how the boxes had come about.

“And I figured, ‘Okay, what is special about these? They’re obviously not just boxes.’ I thought this rare metal would be the Unobtanium of the universe, you know? And it has that sort of Western feeling, a town called Lament. I liked the idea of this shard of Leviathan acting as the means for Leviathan coming about into the world.

“Even though you look back on [Hellbound: Hellraiser II], the matte paintings are astonishingly crude now. But in terms of just drawing an image of something, that huge sort of rhombus floating geodesic thing is like stuffing the Star Gate in 2001 into this mythology. And I kind of wanted to see this big thing floating over a town, having kind of ripped its way out through it. Just having the big, crazy ending.”

So why didn’t this particular take make it beyond the treatment stage? “If you remember, those Hellraiser movies were painfully bargain basement, the ones that they were doing at Dimension. They had like almost no budget. And if you see the end of this, it’s this war with the Cenobites, and Leviathan cracks open in the center of the town and rises up. The whole of the town winds up being swallowed into a sinkhole and vanishing. So it was probably a bit more expensive than the, shall we say, ‘budget-conscious’ Dimension wanted to spend on it.

“That was that. Basically, it never happened, it never went beyond that treatment. I don’t like doing treatments or outlines, anyway. To sort of sit down and put that story together, doesn’t take you on that journey of discovery as a writer, and let the characters evolve and take you in the heat of the moment to places you can’t coldly, logically fabricate. There was pressure to write and deliver it quite quickly as well. There’s definitely some derivative things in there as a result. My usual way of writing would be to sit down with index cards and move them around and write directly from the cards to the screenplay. I never write from an outline because, once you put an outline down, you’re locked into that finite storyline.”

In closing out our talk, Mr. Briggs offers his final thoughts on Hellraiser: Lament: “It was a rough and ready thing. I liked the ambition of the second one because they tried to do something different. I think that’s probably why I had Leviathan. That’s what resonated with me from that film. I wanted this to have scale. Have streets erupting.

“It was almost like when you get to the end of Gremlins. You’re seeing gremlins in shadows, through windows in houses. I wanted this entire town to erupt into that sort of mayhem. That’s probably what gave the guys at Dimension a coronary. They probably looked at it and thought, ‘We can’t do this.’ But now, if you think about it, with massive crowd-based procedural CG, what you could do with this franchise could be incredible.

“At the end of the day, the Hellraiser series is a really odd one in terms of horror franchises, because it’s really about kinky sex. That’s the basic nature of it. Pleasure that hurts you. So how do you make that palatable for Mr. and Mrs. Apple Pie America? Although streaming video outlets have been pushing the parameters of the norm for the last several years. Hellraiser is an odd thing, an odd franchise.”

Very special thanks to Peter Briggs for his time and insights.