Free The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy by Paul Kane

is doing differently, to break the unsuccessful pattern and win.” 5 It forms the basis of stories like Cinderella , The Three Pigs , The Three Bears ....
    In Hellbound there are two major patterns like this. The first involves Kirsty and Tiffany’s encounters with the Channard Cenobite. The first time they meet is in the fake hospital on the wards. “The doctor is in,” he bellows, before killing the patients in their beds with his tentacles. The second time, he appears behind Tiffany saying, “Tiffany, come. I’m your doctor, I’m here to help you.” They are able to escape because of the other Cenobites’ distraction, but we see the result if anyone tries to defy him: all the Cenobites die, slashed or stabbed by his tentacles. The third and final engagement occurs within sight of Leviathan, but Tiffany now knows how Channard kills—she has seen him do it twice now—and so avoids his tentacles when he attacks her, which leads to his own death. A perfect example of the rule of three.
    The second key illustration of this is Tiffany’s solving of the puzzles. The first time we see her she is putting together a wooden box, which allows Frank to send his message to Kirsty. The second time is when she solves the Lament Configuration, and it opens the door to Hell; the box is then reconstructed into a representation of Leviathan by Pinhead. The third time, she realizes that if she can turn the puzzle back into a box she can seal the rift and make the escape from Hell a permanent one.
    In addition to these we can also identify the specific use of threes in the movie for dramatic and visual effect. There are three puzzle boxes in bell jars in Channard’s home, for example. When Tiffany opens the gateway to Hell, three doors appear, two behind her in Channard’s Obsession Room, and one behind Channard and Julia in their secret niche. When Kirsty and Tiffany pause after walking through the corridors of Hell, there is a pan from left to right which shows three different corridors they could choose. It is also at this point that Kirsty says, “We have to help each other. Yeah? Yeah? Yeah?” Repeating the question three times (although Atkins has joked that it is a homage to those other famous Liverpudlian exports, The Beatles).
    The Channard Cenobite has three tentacles on the palm of each of his hands. There are three main villains in the shape of Julia, Channard and Frank, which balance quite nicely against the three main heroes: Kirsty, Kyle and Tiffany, except that the Cenobites upset this by appearing this time in long shot as a grouping of four, but we do encounter them three times during the entirety of the movie.

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    THE DOCTOR IS IN
    As a character, Dr. Channard follows a long line of evil doctors in both literature and the cinema. Though perhaps misguided rather than wholly villainous, the first one that should concern us is the inspiration for Hellraiser in the first place: Dr. Faustus. However, Marlowe’s tragic subject must be acknowledged as the direct ancestor of Channard if only because they both share a common goal—to uncover secret information. If anything, it is Channard rather than Frank who more closely embodies the ideas of this story, for he seeks knowledge instead of carnal desire. Any contact of this nature—such as his relationship with Julia—is purely a by-product of his search for answers.
    The next most obvious forebears are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll, both characters from books that Barker read as a child. These literary inventions are perhaps the most celebrated examples of what the genre has termed mad scientists, people who tamper with nature for their own ends, creating chaos in their wake. For those not familiar with the tale, Dr. Victor Frankenstein was the eldest son of a high-class family from Switzerland, brought up with an orphan named Elizabeth. After the passing of his mother from scarlet fever, he started to take an interest in