Welcome DC Juris

Hi folks! ::waves:: DC Juris here, and I’ll be your guest host for this little moment in time! For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a bisexual transgender man who writes GLBTQ and heterosexual romance. That’s a mouthful, eh?

Since my favorite holiday, Halloween is just around the corner, I thought I’d talk about my favorite movie villain—Pinhead, from the Hellraiser series. Basically, his job is to harvest human souls.

I always get a lot of raised eyebrows when I say he’s my favorite. He’s far darker than a lot of other creepy baddies, far more intense. He’s intelligent and articulate—no corny, cutesy lines from him. No flashy special effects. He’s just pure evil. And yet…there is a charm about him…something that draws a person in. That enigmatic smirk, or the way he’s very nonchalant about torture—he’s just doing his job, after all. Not a bad guy, really, just a working schmuck like you…except he works for Hell. The other thing that distances him from other horror movie baddies is that, unlike most of them, he knows what he's doing. He's not driven by an insanity, he's not the product of a wasted youth. He's in control.

But the absolute scariest thing about Pinhead, for me anyhow, is that he can read minds. So, when he says he’ll make you enjoy the torture, there’s a ring of truth to that. He knows what you like, even if you don’t. He can see into your soul. Plus, he’s just damned sexy in that leather get up of his. Yeah, he’s got pins sticking out of his head but…did you *see* all that leather???

From an early age, I’ve watched horror movies, and throughout the last thirty some-odd years, Pinhead has been the only character to frighten me. The puzzle box freaks me out to no end, and until this year, I’ve refused to be around a prop of the damned thing. I’ve even shied away from Pinhead props in Halloween stores. I guess, for me, he represents that gray area inside all of us—that realization that everyone has a breaking point…everyone has a line they’ll cross in the right situation. And no matter how much you might want to know what that point is, you instinctively steer clear of it because you know—you just know—it’ll be your undoing. 

Some of my favorite Pinhead quotes (as found on http://www.imdb.com):

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992)

The Priest: You'll burn in hell for this!
Pinhead: Burn? Oh, such a limited imagination!

Pinhead: Unbearable, isn't it? The suffering of strangers, the agony of friends. There is a secret song at the center of the world, Joey, and its sound is like razors through flesh.
Joey: I don't believe you.
Pinhead: Oh come, you can hear its faint echo right now. I'm here to turn up the volume. To press the stinking face of humanity into the dark blood of its own secret heart.

Pinhead: [shouting] Don't debate with me, girl! Just come here and die while you still have the option of doing it quickly!

J.P. Monroe: Jesus Christ!
Pinhead: Not quite.

Pinhead: Down the dark decades of your pain, this will seem like a memory of Heaven.

Pinhead: There is no good, Monroe. There is no evil. There is only flesh.

Pinhead: [to Joey] I will enjoy making you bleed. And I will enjoy making you enjoy it.

Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996)

John Merchant: For God's sake!
Pinhead: Do I look like someone who cares about what God thinks?

Pinhead: What you think of as pain is a shadow. Pain has a face. Allow me to show it to you. Gentlemen, I... Am... Pain

Dr. Paul Merchant: And what do you have faith in?
Pinhead: Nothing. I am SO exquisitely empty.

Pinhead: [to Paul while looking at the Earth] Glorious, is it not? The creatures who walk its surface, always looking to the light, never seeing the untold oceans of darkness beyond. There are more humans alive today than in all of its pitiful history. The Garden of Eden. A garden of flesh.