Hacker Cinema
Hellraiser
1987 · Film · 93 min
Directed by Clive Barker
A hedonistic man finds a mysterious puzzle box that summons a group of gruesome beings known as the Cenobites. These otherworldly entities open the doors to a dominion where pain and pleasure are indivisible.
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12 comments on Hacker News
But it does, and explicitly - it isn’t a matter of interpretation. Repeatedly god commands his followers to slaughter men, women, children, and even the animals of their foes. Repeatedly god tells his followers to enslave people, and that it’s fine to treat them abysmally as long as it’s not so bad that they die.
This isn’t my opinion of what the bible contains - any more than I could argue that Hellraiser is a cute movie about bunny rabbits.
Not all facts are subjective.
https://hellraiser.fandom.com/wiki/Coil
During the production of the first Hellraiser film, [the band Coil] were asked by director Clive Barker to compose the film's score. Their music was described by Barker as "bowel churning." The group completed nine tracks for the score, however the music was rejected by the producers, who wanted a more traditional, classical-based movie score.
https://www.discogs.com/release/197912-Coil-The-Unreleased-Themes-For-Hellraiser
Coil is the only group I’ve heard on disc whose records I’ve taken off because they made my bowels churn. -- Clive Barker
[Note: AStonesThrow met Clive Barker at San Diego Comic Con in the mid-1990s, and presented this very disc for his autograph, and he obligingly signed it with the Sharpie provided. Very nice guy in person. Yes: Coil's music is disgusting, reprehensible, vile, and usually unlistenable. Stay well away.]
Looks like something from a hellraiser movie
If youre into horror you should take a look at Hellraiser. Good god is that a noisy film. I know there are a lot of purists when it comes to film grain but that film needs some denoising applied
While I did specify theaters sort of like I expected a whole theater complex to be devoted to it, the more common example (at least around me) is for theaters to devote a portion of some theaters (as in "screens", the "theater" terminology is long past the point of being savable as referring to one distinct thing) to running specialty programs. For example, a weekly horror series where a couple showings a couple nights a week are Hellraiser this week, and Nightmare on Elm Street next week, and there's posters on the wall advertising the schedule and there have been fliers out for months outlining the schedule.
Theaters do that not just because they have arrangements with local governments, but because it's profitable. The way the theater industry works (or at least did when I worked in it at the entry level twenty years ago and had it explained to me) is that new releases have about 80% or more of their ticket sale cost go to the distributor/producer, and the rest the theater, and that percentage goes farther in the theater's favor every week after release (making movies that draw crowds for a long time much more lucrative). That's why concession purchases are so expensive, it's where they make a lion's share of the profit.
Older movies are likely much less costly to get and run, and could also possibly be offered to patrons for cheaper admittance. Concessions, of course, cost as they always do, and they still make that money. I suspect in a lot of cases, theaters might turn a better profit offering tickets at half price for older movies, making more money per ticket and for concession sales for each admittance, as long as they can fill the seats.
Things like that are what appeared to be going on in my area prior to the pandemic, where they would do a cult film series and have the 7 PM and 9 PM showings on Thursdays devoted to the cult film of the week (not sure if they ran one or two screens for it, possibly depended on attendance and how good the other movies where doing on the 14 screens it has).
Often movie theaters run special programs for periods of the year (or continuously), where they take a showing or two a week on a less busy night, and dedicate it to a series of movies they advertise through fliers. Since it's all planned out in advance for a few months, it's easy to see what's coming whenever you're at that theater. For example, they might to a horror themed series of movies, and you get Nightmare on Elm Street, Hellraiser, Halloween, etc, each their own week and advertised together on a flier or poster months in advance with the date of each.
Some more movies in no particular order if you want to explore more of psychological horror:
Pandorum
The Lighthouse
eXistenZ
Videodrome
Hellraiser (I’m a fan of the series, some are better than others)
Blue Velvet
Mulholland Drive
The Thing
American Psycho
The Fly
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978 version with Leonard Nimoy)
It's really interesting to hear someone else say this. I too have suffered occasionally from intense, violent nightmares. They don't necessarily continue all night, but the imagery is extremely disturbing, like a Hellraiser movie. I also took SSRIs like Paxil and Celexa in my early to mid twenties.
Recently, I've also begun experimenting with microdosing. I know almost nothing about the science of psychedelics but I've heard that they mimic the chemical structure of serotonin. I've also had a couple of intense nightmares recently. I wonder if there's somehow a connection between the effect of serotonin or things like it and the tendency to experience intense imagery in dreams.
Perhaps it's not exactly the quality (negative or positive) of the content but the intensity that is magnified. I think I could just as well say that I've had a number of intensely positive dreams while taking these substances but I can't speak objectively about it.
Code like this makes me think of the famous line from the film version of Hellraiser: "I have such sights to show you..."
Contrast PostgreSQL or... uhh... virtually any other database. Oracle's mess is clearly a result of bad management, not a reflection of the intrinsic difficulty of the problem domain.
Spotify's recommendations used to be very good for me, but Discover Weekly has gotten dramatically worse in the past few months. I'm lucky to find one good new song in there these days, whereas I used to love the entire playlist.
Netflix's "recommendations" have been pretty terrible from day 1 -- it's mostly random garbage, and suffers from serious issues like grouping sci-fi with horror (seriously? Star Trek TNG belongs in the same category as Hellraiser?) -- and since they started producing their own content their recommendations have quickly become thinly-veiled attempts to push their own mostly-poor content. Add in their horrible UI, replete with autoplaying previews as you browse tiles paired with obnoxious stock music, and Netflix has become something painful to use. I've been moving back to renting/pirating depending on availability and price this year because Netflix doesn't have anything worth watching that I haven't already seen.
He had done a direct to video movie before Emily Rose, a Hellraiser thing with a budget of about $2 million. For that he likely made around $100k salary and if he had any net, it was worth nothing.
But that project proved he could direct an acceptable film, which isn't as common a skill as you might imagine.
So once he'd done that, he had the chance to move up to the next budget range, $20ish million, plus or minus. For that, as I mentioned above, he probably got in the neighborhood of $500k. Maybe a little more, but certainly less than $1 million.
Then when that movie did extremely well, he went on to do The Day The Earth Stood Still, an $80 million dollar project. Whatever he got paid for that is highly variable, but it was likely a million or two.
As he mentions in the podcast, TDTESS did 80 million domestic, total of 240 global. Which made it a success in terms of money, but since the domestic was so low it wasn't perceived as such in the industry.
So he didn't move to the A list after that. He said he got offers for things like big franchise sequels, but his own dream projects weren't able to get the greenlight. If he'd taken the hired gun route on studio sequels, he said he'd probably make a couple million per.
So what he did instead was go and make his own film, cheap. He made the current movie Sinister for $3 million. Again he's back in the few hundred thousand range at most for salary. But this time, since it was his movie and he made it cheap, he's got real gross participation.
As he says in the podcast, after the movie hits a certain breakeven point (which it likely is very close to doing if it hasn't already), the money starts rolling in for him and he'll be "rich". From the podcast, it seems likely his deal on this project will let him get what would be called FU Money here.
It's not a terrible system, really. Directors aren't completely screwed, they do ok for themselves.
The real secret is to own the property yourself.
I tried this once. I'm sure it kicks ass when it works, but when I was done, my face looked like something out of a Hellraiser movie. Never again!