The Hell Tale Heart

Since toy companies like to ignore the majority of non-monster characters from horror movies -- especially the heroines -- I've once again taken it upon myself to make another custom figure in my Horror Heroines line. This time it's Hellraiser's Kirsty Cotton. For a while there, I considered Kirsty to be my favorite Horror Heroine. (I'll get to the reasons why that changed.)

I got into the Hellraiser movies big time in 2003. I just wasn't into Hellraiser much when I was younger, and hadn't watched a movie beyond the third one -- and it's memories of that third one that negatively influenced what I thought of the series until I decided to give them another chance. I was pretty damn surprised at how much I ended up liking the first one after revisiting it; it's a smaller scale horror movie, about adult characters and for adult fans.

Monstrous human characters are the movie's major villains -- the over-the-top Cenobites are just supporting players. On one side, you have Frank Cotton -- a walking embodiment of the seven deadly sins -- and Julia Cotton, his sister-in-law who's rotted from an unhappy marriage and is blindly manipulated by Frank into becoming a monster for him; killing for him to get him back seemingly resuscitates her and makes her more alive than she's seemed for quite a while. On the other side, you have Larry Cotton, who's just a poor, but well-intentioned schlub, and his daughter Kirsty, who wants the best for her father. (She has pretty much seen through Julia all along.) Larry ain't stupid: he senses Julia's unhappiness which is why he decides to move to her "home turf" in England, which is a strange city in England that can't quite tell if it's English or American. (Other than Julia, accents come and go, and cops have guns in the sequel!) I feel there's a definitively clear black and white, good versus evil represented by both duos. I know Clive Barker's more interested in shades of gray, and I think Julia is a bit more complicated than being a flat-out villain (she begins her descent into madness out of a misplaced sense of love). And she definitely has shades of gray, but Frank is total scum. There's *nothing* likable or redeemable about him.

Kirsty benefits from being an older character than typical horror heroines -- she's obviously around college age, at least in her early 20s and not mid-teens like the norm. She joins her dad in England, probably to keep touch with him. (And keep an eye on Julia?) Right away, it seems like something is after her: she begins to dream premonitions and is followed by the homeless man, who is later revealed to be a watcher of the puzzle box. It's checking up on Julia that gets her pulled into the web -- she hears screams come from the house, but she doesn't flee, she investigates. She finally, finally is about to get confirmation on all she's probably suspected about Julia, and she finds...Frank. She's justifiably terrified, but she stands her ground and fights Frank back. Kirsty's courageous and in a believable way, I find. There's a lot of horror movies that are trying to portray such a positive image that the protagonist is nearly superhuman in their strength and resolve. For example, I think the Scream movies are pretty bad about that. Sidney goes through and does stuff that would probably kill Wile E. Coyote, but will be on her feet in the next frame, her senses sharp as only a screenwriter could make them. Sidney should be with the Teen Titans, you know? Kirsty can fight and keep her senses, but not to a cartoonish degree like that.

You get the sense that she's the first person to even think of talking to and trying to deal with the Cenobites. Well, she at least seems to be the first person that tried that with Pinhead. She puts it all together, realizing Frank escaped them, and promises to lead them to him in her place. When the Cenobites seem to go back on their word, after dealing with Frank? By that point, she's through with this shit. She sends 'em back like *that*. (Watch for that funny scene when the Engineer enters the front door and Kirsty's milksop, Larry Appleton-looking love interest tries to take the box from her and she just punches him out of the way. It's hilarious.)

Kirsty really shines in Hellraiser 2, though. Her goodness, her pureness of heart leads her to...willingly walk into hell to save her father! And not only does it end up being a trick by Frank to lure her to him, but she has to contend with a more powerful Julia and the even more powerful Channard Cenobite (who's so powerful, he disposes of the four Cenobites in no time), while racing to prevent the dimensions opened by the puzzle boxes from merging with Earth. Not only that, but she has to play guardian to Tiffany. And not only that, but she tricks Channard and saves Tiffany...BY PUTTING ON JULIA'S SKIN! That's dedication, man. Meanwhile, Ginny's practically dry-heaving at putting on Jason's mother's moldy sweater in Friday the 13th Part 2. Amateur!

Hellraiser 2 saw Kirsty and Tiffany exiting the asylum, maybe finally free and clear of trauma, but ready to go kick some Cenobite ass in future installments, right? Not really. Kirsty's reduced to a lame VHS cameo in Part 3 and then forgotten about until the sixth movie, Hellseeker, a lame and lazy rewrite of another script that decides to shoehorn a character named "Kirsty Cotton" into the script, only the character isn't Kirsty Cotton. The Kirsty Cotton I know wouldn't be some petty sneak who opens the box just to get back at her shitbag husband, then talking Pinhead into letting her kill her husband and his mistresses for him instead of the Cenobites taking her. This is Kirsty, who attempted to pull her dad out of hell. This is Kirsty, who wore another woman's skin to save someone.

Look, it's bad enough that Hellseeker is an abysmal movie that feels three hours longer than it is -- did they really need to make Kirsty into a villain? Into someone more like Julia, a person she despised? And while one of the things I find interesting about Pinhead is that he's willing to LISTEN to people, he doesn't just hack and slash them, do you even buy that he'd go for Kirsty's insane deal? At that point his "good friend" (as Captain Elliot Spencer referred to Kirsty in Part 3) had shown signs of being no better than someone like Julia -- I think the Cenobites would have taken her. I'm sure the Hellseeker writers are under the belief they made Kirsty "real," "flawed," or "complicated," or like they had a great twist, but they were way off the mark -- it wasn't Kirsty.

That's the last the movies saw of Kirsty, or the so-called Kirsty. But wait! There's hope yet -- Clive Barker decided to write comics from the BOOM company that ignored every movie after Part 2. It was going to be the definitive showdown of Kirsty versus Pinhead. Great, ignore the sequels. Please; a lot of them are bad. Surely -- surely! -- Clive could somewhat save Kirsty's image, right? (I say "somewhat" because, in the back of my head, comic spin-offs don't count as much as a movie installment.) Clive has supposedly said he liked Hellseeker, which I don't understand, so I shouldn't have been surprised to see that he didn't quite save Kirsty's image. In the comics -- which probably make more sense if you read them while on acid and cocaine and Hawaiian Punch and Holy Fuckin' Shit from 21 Jump Street -- Kirsty has this insane anti-logic where she thinks if she becomes a Cenobite, she can reunite with her dead loved ones, so...she willingly switches places with Pinhead, who pretends as if he wants to be human again, but really has some bonkers Dr. Doom scheme secretly planned.

So, Kirsty becomes a female version of Pinhead and, since the comics make no sense and seem like they were written on the go, she forgets all that junk about her loved ones and instead decides to let people summon her with the box and she uses that to weed out sickies and/or variations of the Lament Configuration. In the meantime, she also finds out that Cenobitin' ain't easy. And she's repeatedly tricked by a variety of different characters. And she ends up just doing nothing much but seeming stupid -- she gets trapped in a box and the day has to be saved by the Female Cenobite, Harry D'Amour, and Elliot Spencer's handicapped, octogenarian, born-of-incest daughter...or some crazy shit like that. What...the...fuck. Even Takashi Miike would find these comics weird. Long story short: Kirsty's image is still marred.

Where's the brave heroine? The one who fearlessly fought off Frank. The smart heroine, who put together just what all of that crazy Cenobite stuff was, who solved the mystery of Pinhead's identity? Barker's novel from which Hellraiser is based is called The Hellbound Heart; while the film makes some changes from the novel, it's essentially the same. (One wise decision: making Kirsty Larry's daughter; it involved her in the story more, made her more important. In the novel, she's just a mousy co-worker of Larry's who's interested in him and snoops around the house when Julia's doing her killing.) Kirsty in the book and first film is pure of heart. It's all motivations of the heart. The two with the poisoned hearts get what they deserve. Kirsty, with the pure heart, looking out for the best interest of others, is who wins.

I think actress Ashley Laurence really kicks ass and does a great job as Kirsty. (And even though I think the "Kirsty" in Hellseeker is some character from a bad Silk Stalkings episode wearing the skin of Kirsty Cotton, Laurence is still good in that movie.) Laurence seems like a strong, take-no-crap kinda woman in real-life, and that really comes through in moments where Kirsty's standing up to these hellish monsters. Laurence also didn't mind getting dirty for the role, really having maggots dumped onto her in that scene in the first movie and being covered with blood at the end of Part 2.

Since I think Hellraiser 1 and 2 go nicely together, I wanted the figure to represent both movies. Her outfit's based on her look in the first movie, but accessories pertain more to 2 -- the Spencer photograph and...Julia's skin! I just knew that had to be part of the set. And here's the result:

Front and back of packaging.