Behind the Couch

2005 Dir. Rick Bota When a tough investigative journalist begins researching a bizarre underground cult, dabbling in necromancy and the resurrection of the dead, she becomes embroiled in a nightmarish world in which her very soul is at stake… The seventh film in the franchise, Deader wasn’t actually written as a Hellraiser film. An existing spec script by Th13teen Ghosts co-scribe Neal Marshall Stevens had elements of the Hellraiser mythology added to it by Tim Daly (co-writer of the dreary Hellseeker ). And it sort of shows. Much like Inferno and Hellseeker , it feels cobbled together in a lazy attempt to keep the franchise afloat; the overtly ' Hellraiser ' moments a clunky afterthought. That said, it’s certainly a marked improvement on the prior instalment, and at the heart of proceedings twitches a genuinely interesting concept - an underground goth cult experimenting with suicide, necromancy and resurrection. These are themes that were dealt with in Barker’s o...