the New Pantagruel

Raising Hell

by Annie Young FrisbiewithScott Derrickson

ellraiser: Inferno (2000), the fifth installment in the immensely popular film series created by novelist Clive Barker, tells the story of Detective Joseph Thorne, a man cut from the same bad cop cloth as Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant. He neglects his wife and daughter, has a penchant for nose candy, and, when he wakes up after a one night stand in the same room as a dead and dismembered prostitute, tries to pin it on his loyal partner. At a crime scene, he discovers a puzzle box, the solving of which, in the Hellraiser universe, summons Pinhead, the Cenobite who lures and ushers humans into hell. Once Joseph solves the box, all those around him begin to die in elaborate ways, and Joseph himself begins to be haunted by strange apparitions and visions. In his quest to discover the murderer, he comes face to face with the inescapable truth – Joseph has gone to hell and is now doomed to be torn apart by his sins, over and over, for the rest of eternity.

The New Pantagruel’s Annie Frisbie fell in love with horror films while working at Kim’s Underground video store while pursuing an MA in Cinema Studies from NYU. She had the opportunity to do an email interview with the writer/director of Hellraiser: Inferno, Scott Derrickson. Derrickson is the writer (with Paul Harris Boardman) of Urban Legends: Final Cut and soon-to-be-released The Exorcism of Annaliese Michele (starring Laura Linney and Tom Wilkinson), both of which Derrickson also directed. Earlier this year Derrickson wrote the story for Wim Wenders’ Land of Plenty. Derrickson is a graduate Biola University where he took bachelor’s degrees in Humanities and Communications, and from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema and Television, where he received his master’s degree in film production. (Readers of tNP may be interested in Derrickson’s article, “Behind the lens - A Christian filmmaker in Hollywood,” Christian Century, January 30, 2002.)

The New Pantagruel:

To start off, could you give us the brief rundown on your background and how you got into filmmaking?

Scott Derrickson:

I grew up in a family that watched a lot of movies, but as I got older, I grew increasingly more interested in literature and the arts. Movies for me were entertainment, but books, music, theater, and painting were art. Then when I was in college, I discovered foreign cinema, and that’s when I realized that movies can be art as well as entertainment. I started experimenting with shooting things on both film and video, and I began to understand that cinema is really the combination of the four art forms I just mentioned – it has the structure and thematic import of literature; the experience of music; the blocking, acting, dialogue writing of theater; and the visual compositions of painting and photography. This revelation is what made me want to be a filmmaker – that cinema is the blending of all great art forms into a medium that is inherently entertaining.

After college, I went to graduate film school at USC, and then went on to become a writer and director. For the last nine years, I’ve written about a dozen studio screenplays, and I’m now directing my second feature.

The New Pantagruel:

It was a bit of a thrill to find out that someone like you exists – a Christian filmmaker with a penchant for horror – and not the old-fashioned kind or the über-hip kind, but the gory, bloody, scary kind. Have you gotten much negative attention in the evangelical Christian community for your work?

Scott Derrickson:

I have gotten some negative attention, but mostly from Christians over 30. Younger Christians typically seem to get it – even if they’re not fans of the genre, they seem to understand why I do what I do. I think I’ve confused a lot of older Christians. There’s definitely a generational gap in the church now – much more so than when I was in my teens and twenties – and the difference between generations can really been seen in their differing attitudes toward art and entertainment.

The New Pantagruel:

In the same vein, how much do you care about what mainstream Christians think about you?