by Victoria Potenza, Staff Writer

The covers to the Hellraiser VHS tapes at Blockbuster always scared me when I was a kid. I remember trying to cover my eyes and scurry past them on my way to a section that did not provide a hefty amount of nightmare fuel. So it was not until much later in life that I decided to venture out and actually watch the Hellraiser films. Pinhead is the iconic figure and tends to be what you think of when you think of the series, so I was surprised when I watched the first two and noticed that Pinhead is pretty scarce. I love the first two entries and have watched them many times, but now I typically think of Julia, the evil stepmother responsible for much of the death and mayhem in Hellraiser and Hellraiser II: Hellbound. 

Hellraiser centers around Julia, played by Claire Higgins. She has moved into the family home of her husband. She discovers the partially formed body of her brother-in-law Frank who tells her he needs her to bring him more humans for him to fully come back to the world. Julia lures men to the home so Frank can feast, but their plans become more complicated when her stepdaughter Kirsty begins to suspect Julia is hiding something and the Cenobites, led by Pinhead,  realize that Frank has escaped their clutches. Hellraiser II takes place almost immediately after the events of the first movie. Kirsty is in a psychiatric ward since no one will believe her and her story of the cenobites. The one person who believes her stories is Dr. Channard, the head of the hospital who uses his knowledge to bring Julia back from Hell in the hopes of gaining power. 

Julia is the ultimate evil stepmother. It is clear from the beginning that Kirsty never liked Julia and does not understand why her father is with her. The two always seem slightly at odds even before Julia becomes a murderer. It makes sense however, when it is revealed that Julia had an affair with her uncle Frank before she married his brother. Frank is mysterious, well traveled, and sexually aggressive, very different from his brother Larry who is made out to be the goofy overly nice type. It is clear Julia has held a torch for Frank for years so when she finds his half-dead body upstairs she agrees to help him get back to his true form. Even as grossed out as Julia seems over Frank’s appearance it is clear she is so unhappy in her marriage that she is willing to bend to his whims for a chance at “love”. Julia’s cold and calculating demeanor helps her lure men to her home with the promise of sex, only for them to be devoured by her skinless lover. 

While Julia is plenty of fun in the initial Hellraiser she is made out to be the unhappy wife who goes to extreme measures to get laid again. Her husband is aware of her unhappiness but does not seem to suspect her of cheating let alone being an accomplice to murder. She is ultimately betrayed by Frank who accidentally stabs her and then consumes her body. While she gets played she is the full on baddy we want in Hellraiser II. Without Frank, Julia is thriving, Dr. Channard brings her patients to feed on and she seems to have a fair bit of power in Hell. Claire Higgins talks about coming back for the sequel and says “I had to come back, because to be the queen of hell, you see, it's an opportunity that I couldn't miss!”  She also talks about the difference in Julia from I to II stating that “I hope you understand Julia's reasons for being an unpleasant character, because you see the depths she's prepared to plumb for love. She's a great deal nastier this time, and if anybody sympathizes with her, I'm doing something wrong. I really want everybody to hate me.” After being burned by Frank she now gets to be full on evil, helping no one but herself. 

In the first film Julia does feel like a complex character that we spend a lot of time with as she deals with her unhappy marriage, her evil undead lover, and the men she murders for him. She has moments of being sympathetic and we even see her try to save Larry’s life when it is clear that he is Frank’s next target. She wants love and excitement but she does not understand that Frank will never love her. He is a misogynist and he is so consumed by his quest for pleasure and pain that he will never be satisfied just being with Julia. To her husband Julia seems like an unhappy woman who is distant and at times hysterical. Larry is  oblivious to everything that is going on under his roof. To her stepdaughter she is cold, manipulative, and evil. While Kirsty tries to get along with Julia for the sake of her father she is also ready to find something wrong with her. Early she suspects that Julia is cheating on her father when she sees her bringing a man into the house. And then to Frank, Julia is an easy mark, a woman he knows is infatuated with him and who will do whatever he says. Julia is the perfect person to help him because it never feels like she would say no to him. 

By the time we get to Hellbound, Julia has literally been to Hell and back. Any sympathy one might have for her is gone. She is the queen of Hell and the evil stepmother that Kirsty always thought she was. This transformation is incredibly entertaining to watch. She gets to use Dr. Channard the same way that Frank used her. She also gets to go after Kirsty and her friend Tiffany, making her feel like the perfect evil mother/queen character from a fairytale. She also seems to embrace and relish this role she is taking on. When she and Kirsty first come face to face in Hellbound she says “I’m not just the evil stepmother, I’m the evil queen”. She even gets her moment of redemption against Frank and literally rips his heart out. She is making the most out of her Hell and she embraces the monster she has become. 

It is not often that you get to watch the evolution of a female killer like this through the course of two movies. One sort of feels like Julia’s origin story and two we see her embracing all of the evil that has happened to her. There are several films where we see a stepdaughter realize that the stepfather she thinks is terrible is actually evil. Films like Scream for Help and The Stepfather franchise all play on this idea of the wolf in sheep's clothing who is praying on the vulnerable mother character. She transforms from the manipulated to the manipulator. She also goes from being an accessory to murder who has to hide the dead bodies, to being the murderous queen she wants to be. The Julia we initially meet is someone who would worry about being perceived as the bad guy and when we meet her again she does not care how people see her. She is ruling Hell and she does it in formal wear. 

While Julia is not far from the femme fatales of other films she is someone we get to watch transform between films. It does feel like a dark fairytale take on how the evil queen got that way. It is like Wicked if it were a horror movie. This makes it feel slightly different than the other cold hearted killers we see who oftentimes do not get to share their origin story. What if we learned how Catherine Tramell from Basic Instinct got that way? While we do not necessarily like Julia or what she is doing in the first film we do understand her. She gets to be complex in a way that many other killer ladies are not.