Episode 144: On Clive Barker’s ’Hellraiser’ and ’The Hellbound Heart,’ with Conner Habib

In the 1980s, Clive Barker burst onto the cultural scene with The Books of Blood, collections of unforgettable tales of horror, depravity, and decadence the likes of which had been seldom seen since the days of Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror and Huysmans' Là-Bas. In the decades that followed, he went on to create an astounding body of work in fantasy and horror as a writer, artist, and film director. In this episode, author, lecturer, and podcaster Conner Habib joins JF and Phil to discuss what is arguably Barker's best-known work, the 1987 horror classic Hellraiser, as well as the novella that inspired it, "The Hellbound Heart."

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References

Clive Barker, The Hellbound Heart
Clive Barker (dir.), Hellraiser
Tod Browning (dir.), Freaks
Clive Barker, “In the Hills, The Cities” in Books of Blood
Wes Craven, A Nightmare on Elm Street
Angela Carter, English writer
Susan Sontag, “Happenings: An Art of Radical Juxtaposition”
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What is Philosophy?
Sturm und Drang, 18th-century artistic movement
Gayle Rubin, American cultural anthropologist
Stephen King, It
Robert Wise (dir.), The Sound of Music
Slavoj Zizek, The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Robert Wise (dir.), The Haunting
David Mamet, On Directing Film
David Lynch (dir.), Mulholland Drive
Stanley Kubrick, The Shining
Coil, Hellraiser Themes
Bela Bartok, Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta
Golden Section, mathematical ratio
Kevin Williamson,, American screenwriter
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

Special Guest: Conner Habib.