The Hellbound Heart

I had a strange experience while reading this novella. I only realized, after reaching around the 70% point, that my subconscious was picturing the stuff happening in the style of 80s film practical effects. My imagination is usually pretty straight forward. I picture what's written however my brain thinks it would look. But in this book everything was fake blood and wet puppets and spotlights through smoke and shadow and I loved it. It's got me thinking about actively cultivating different stylistic choices in my imagination while reading and that's new and cool I guess.

That aside, this book is fucking terrific. It was interesting seeing the iterative elements added between the writing of this and the filming of the movie. Like, I find it wild that Kirsty was only changed to being Julia and Rory's stepdaughter in the movie and that she was only a family friend in the book. It feels like that's such an essential piece of the plot and perfectly encapsulates Frank's moral reprehensibility/corruption. Crazy to me that that wasn't in the original draft.

The book does a much better job of portraying Julia's inner world, Frank's motivations, and the worldbuilding at large and makes the Cenobites feel way creepier and alien, but paradoxically also more understandable. Also the BDSM brush they're painted with in the film kinda sends a weird mixed message that I'm not a huge fan of. Stop yucking other people's yum Clive.

One thing I was really looking forward to was seeing how Frank's reanimation scene ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erpHSw3x5cE (straight up top 3 practical effects horror scenes in movie history)) would work in writing, but it mostly just happens off-screen :/.

Book > film imo, but that's me in most cases anyway.