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‘Hellraiser’ Lament Configuration end table
05.02.2017
09:09 am
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This is one of those things I assumed that would totally be expensive and out of my price range. It’s not. This handmade “Lament Configuration” end table based off the 1987 horror film Hellraiser is affordable. I guess I’m used to finding awesome handmade novelty items that I could never justify buying in a million years.

Anyway, the Lament Configuration end table sells for $160 via Scream for Me Inc on Etsy.

According to the listing:

This is a wooden end table that measures 20” x 20” of surface area and is approx. 20” tall. The center contains 4 8” scratch resistant ceramic tiles which make up the lament configuration from Hellraiser.

**Note: The table will not come assembled! You will only need to attach the legs. All hardware is included.

It’s obviously not IKEA-complicated to assemble. You just need to attach the legs. Even I can do that!


 

 
h/t Coilhouse on Facebook

Posted by Tara McGinley
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05.02.2017
09:09 am
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‘Hellraising’ design for new arts venue at World Trade Center revealed (possibly full of Cenobites)
09.13.2016
09:45 am
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The Guardian reported that a design has been unveiled for a new arts venue at the World Trade Center. The translucent, veined marble and glass building designed by architect Joshua Prince-Ramus is a proposed 99,000 square feet with three auditoriums and a rehearsal room. The rooms and halls will feature movable walls to create up to 11 configurations, with the largest configuration able to hold up to 1,200 people for bigger events. The $250m project is scheduled to open in 2020.

What the article failed to mention is the uncanny similarity between the building and the Lemarchand’s “Lament Configuration” box from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser series of films. The fact that the building contains reconfigurable rooms makes the similarity even more profound.
 

The Lament Configuration
 
In the Hellraiser films, solving this puzzle box creates a bridge through which demonic beings called Cenobites may enter the mortal realm to bring about pain and suffering.
 

Solve the puzzle and you get these guys.
 
We think the proposed building at the WTC site is quite gorgeous, but we’re concerned that it could be full of Cenobites who want to tear our souls apart.

After the jump, see what happens when you mess around with the box…

READ ON
Posted by Christopher Bickel
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09.13.2016
09:45 am
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Like a demonic Stephen Hawking: Cenobites scene from ‘Hellraiser’ performed by speech synthesizers

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DECtalk was a text-to-voice speech synthesizer popular in the 1980s. This nifty little piece of technology came with a variety of built-in voices which enabled people who had lost the power of speech to communicate. Its best known user is Stephen Hawking who communicated with the voice “Perfect Paul” (DTC 01).

The DECtalk was also famously the voice of the US National Weather Service on radio and supplied the message to many a telephone answer machine.

In 1939 the Voder was the first attempt at synthesizing human speech by breaking down words into acoustic components. It was the “first device that could generate continuous human speech.”

All well and good, but the one that tickles my fancy was the first time a speech synthesizer was successfully used over a phone to order pizza. This happened at the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Michigan State University in 1974, when Donald Sherman who suffered from Möbius syndrome—a facial paralysis—made his order using a Votrax voice synthesizer and a mainframe computer.
 

 
Now you may have seen the recent clip of Monty Python’s argument sketch recreated with speech synthesizers by Per Kristian Risvik. Well here’s another little film he’s made using speech synthesizers to recreate a classic scene from Clive Barker’s Hellraiser. It’s a perfect fit and far, far more creepier.

Here’s the dialog as performed:

Lead Cenobite: The box… you opened it, we came.
Kirsty Cotton: It’s just a puzzle box!
Lead Cenobite: Oh no, it is a means to summon us.
Kirsty Cotton: Who are you?
Lead Cenobite: Explorers… in the further regions of experience. Demons to some, angels to others.
Kirsty Cotton: It was a mistake! I didn’t… I didn’t mean to open it! It was a mistake! You can… GO TO HELL!
Female Cenobite: We can’t. Not alone.
Lead Cenobite: You solved the box, we came. Now you must come with us, taste our pleasures.
Kirsty Cotton: Please! Go away and leave me alone!
Lead Cenobite: Oh, no tears please. It’s a waste of good suffering!
Kirsty Cotton: Wait! Wait! Please, please wait!
Lead Cenobite: No time for argument.
Kirsty Cotton: You’ve done this before, right?
Lead Cenobite: Many, many times.
Kirsty Cotton: To… to a man called Frank Cotton?
Female Cenobite: Oh, yes.
Kirsty Cotton: He escaped you!
Lead Cenobite: Nobody escapes us!
Kirsty Cotton: He did! I’ve seen him, I’ve seen him!
Female Cenobite: Impossible.
Kirsty Cotton: He’s alive!
Lead Cenobite: Supposing he had escaped us, what has that to do with you?
Kirsty Cotton: I… I can… I can lead you to him and you… you can take him back instead of me!
Female Cenobite: Perhaps we prefer YOU!
Lead Cenobite: I want to hear him confess, himself. Then maybe… maybe…
Female Cenobite: But if you cheat us…
Lead Cenobite: We’ll tear your soul apart!
Asian Merchant: What is your pleasure, sir?
Lead Cenobite: We have such sights to show you.

Risvik used a DECtalk Express for the central character Kirsty (“Rough Rita modified for higher stress level”). A Dolphin Apollo 2 for the voices of Pinhead and the female Cenobite (“Heavily altered versions of voice 2/3”). And an Intex Talker (Votrax SC-01A) for the Asian Merchant.
 
Listen to eerie sound of the Cenobites via a speech synthesizer, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.16.2016
09:45 am
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Hell on Earth: Behind the scenes of ‘Hellraiser’ and its sequels
08.09.2016
09:48 am
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Author and director Clive Barker with Doug Bradley as the Cenobite nicknamed ‘Pinhead’.
 
Clive Barker didn’t know much about directing when he made his debut feature Hellraiser. He thought it best to clue-in on the subject. He decided to borrow a book on filmmaking from his local library. Unfortunately both copies were out on loan. Barker worried that his cinematic career was over before it had even started.

When he pitched the idea for the movie to Roger Corman’s New World Pictures, Barker avoided too much emphasis on his lack of experience. He presented a brief synopsis of his novel Hellbound Heart, a few storyboard sketches and some catchy taglines. It got him the gig.

Barker wanted direct movies because of the abortion made of his last screenplay Rawhead Rex in 1985. He didn’t want the same thing to happen to Hellbound Heart. He also hoped the film would be his calling card to Hollywood.

But he didn’t have a copy of Directing for Dummies or whatever it was called and New World were quibbling over the title Hellbound Heart. They said it sounded like a bad romance.

Thankfully, Barker’s cast and crew were professional and very patient. Together they helped him realize his dark and gory vision on screen.

The film was shot over ten weeks. It cost around a million dollars.

As for Hellbound Heart.—Barker gave his movie the working title Sadomasochists From Beyond The Grave. One female crew member suggested it should be called What A Woman Will Do For A Good Fuck. Hellraiser was chosen as the title—and a legendary franchise was born.

According to writer Neil Gaiman the infamous Cenobites—those dark, mutilated figures from another dimension—were loosely inspired by a group of likeminded writers (called the Peace and Love Corporation) who gathered one night in a rooming house during a party being held in the building. As Gaiman recounts in an introduction to Kim Newman‘s short stories:

The Peace and Love Corporation, which was never a corporation, although it was a bank account, and had not really to do with either Peace or Love, although I think on the whole we were pretty much in favour of both of them, formed, more or less, during a party. We weren’t at the party—it was being held in Kim [Newman}‘s Crouch End flat by his landlord. But we—Kim, Stefan Jaworzyn, Eugene Byrne and myself—were on sleeping bags in Kim’s room, listening to the party going on down the hall. Kim had the bed.

The party was long and loud and the partygoers (old hippies to a man) were playing old hippy music.

We started talking about hippies, lying in the darkness. And we began to rant about commune life and going to San Francisco and putting flour in our hair. It was a kind of free-form improvised stand-up routine, only we were lying on the floor.

The next day we wrote down what we could remember of the rant, added a plot of sorts, called it ‘Peace and Love and All That Stuff’ and sent it off to a magazine, and became the Peace and Love Corporation.

Clive Barker was fascinated by the Peace and Love Corporation. At one point he announced that he was going to write a story called ‘Threshold’, in which Kim, Stefan and I would be creatures from a far-future world beyond the boundaries of pleasure and pain, come to the here and now to hunt down a fugitive. When he finally wrote it it was called The Hellbound Heart, and was later filmed as Hellraiser. Which may mean that Kim Newman was the original inspiration for Pinhead. They are, after all, both snappy dressers.

A new film Hellraiser: Judgment will be released next year.
 
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More images of Hell on earth, after the jump…

READ ON
Posted by Paul Gallagher
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08.09.2016
09:48 am
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Why are these ‘Hellraiser’ VHS tapes being left at bus stop on London’s Old Kent Road?
06.17.2014
06:16 pm
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Three years ago, a VHS cassette copy of Clive Barker’s 1980’s horror film Hellraiser appeared on the top of a bus shelter on London’s Old Kent Road. When it was first spotted by Tom Wateracre, it led to his speculation that perhaps the film’s “antique puzzle box” (as discovered by Frank Cotton in Morocco) actually looked like this:
 
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Was it possible?

Had Tom really uncovered the portal to the world of the Cenobites, a hell where pain and pleasure is indivisible?

It’s a ghoulish thought, right?

But Tom wasn’t the only one to notice the Hellraiser video cassette…or its significance…
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Some suggested it was a calling card for drug dealers, while others asked had anyone dared to retrieve the box, open it and view its contents?

If anyone had…they never replied…

The tape was becoming bleached and weather worn, but then one day…
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
But no, for Tom had uncovered a secret community…
 
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Strangely…that twitter account no longer exists…

And so the legend of Hellraiser on the Old Kent Road continues…

Read the Tom’s story here.
 

 
Via Time Out London

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.17.2014
06:16 pm
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Oliver Reed interviews Oliver Reed
09.19.2011
07:01 pm
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image
 
Since I couldn’t have a dog when I was a child, it became my ambition to become a werewolf. Vampires were dull and foolishly superstitious. Frankentstein’s monster whiney and self-pitying. Though the Invisible Man appealed, he was too cracked and not much company. So, it was the werewolf that clicked, for here was a creature driven by things that could not be so easily explained.

This fascination led me to Oliver Reed and The Curse of the Werewolf. I’d already seen Henry Hull in The Werewolf of London, which was running as favorite, putting Lon Chaney jnr’s The Wolfman into second, that was, of course, until I saw Reed possessed by the cast of a silver moon.

It was a metaphor I liked - life usurped by genetic code, oddly confirming Philip Larkin’s belief we are but dilutions of dilution. In its way it was an easy metaphor for Reed, that instinctual, soft-eyed actor possessed by a brilliant talent and a greater thirst for life.

There was great sense of joy about Reed, no matter how drunk or sober he always exhibited a relentless joy for living. It may have damaged his career, and limited his talents, but it was part of who he was - like Leon Corledo or Larry Talbot and lycanthropy. It made him always worth watching, even in his shittiest of films, for Reed was a life force, the like of which we have rarely seen since.

Here, Reed interviews himself on French TV, in a bizarre publicity package for The Return of the Musketeers in 1989. In it Reed asks himself questions other interviewers would never dared ask - that his career owed everything to Ken Russell, like Eliza Doolitlle to Henry Higgins in the play Pygmalion; and why did he drink? His answers range from the unfocussed to the honest, but underneath, there is the growl of a beast waiting to get out.
 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds

The Incredible Friendship of Oliver Reed and Keith Moon


In Praise of Oliver Reed


 

Posted by Paul Gallagher
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09.19.2011
07:01 pm
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