This articles discusses plot details from throughout Hellraiser: Revival and Money for Girls.
Aiden Lynch, the biker bro protagonist of Hellraiser: Revival, doesn’t fuck. Sure, the game may start with him and his soon-to-be drawn-and-quartered girlfriend Sunny grinding away at each other in carnal facsimile, but the pantomime doesn’t convince. Their perfect bodies sport realistic rivulets of sweat, but their lovemaking (complete with liberal use of Lemarchand’s iconic box as a sex toy) is rote, and unerotic.
What I mean in saying that Lynch doesn’t fuck, is that his attitude toward what he witnesses in the sex dungeons, labyrinths, and mortuaries of Revival is one of total hermetic closure. He avoids the sensuous and dismisses the erotic. “Normally, I’d be into this,” he demurs unconvincingly to a stranger spread and waiting on a bed, but we know better.
In his book, L’Érotism, George Bataille describes eroticism as “...assenting to life…” or being open to the animal, transgressive realm of intimacy and intercourse “...up to the point of death.” Why death? Because, unfortunately, we cannot remain in the realm of pleasure forever. The little death eventually becomes the big death and we lose ourselves in its obliterating embrace. The gooner in his embryonic, encrusted chamber and the addict trawling the dating apps for the next fix could fall under Bataille’s categorization of the being who “...yielding to that urge is human no longer but, like the beasts, a prey of blind forces in action, wallowing in blindness and oblivion.”
Erotic life is also a creative force; a way to touch on our “inner experience” by “tearing” at ourselves through contact with others. But we have to be open to it first. Lynch—likely owing to his own staved-off addiction—is fundamentally closed to his own desire. He’ll wallow through the gooey viscera of countless bodies to get to Sunny, but remain fundamentally untouched, despite losing limbs and copious amounts of blood in the process. Some of this comes down to him being an '80s pastiche of a leather clad macho hero. He’s here to mow down these cultist freaks and win his girl back. He’ll squeeze his way politely through piles of writhing bodies to find the next fetch quest item at an orgy. Nothing touches him. Even when his dick is out, we can rest assured it’ll remain flaccid and inoperative. The only penetrating Lynch is interested in is the knife into flesh kind.
This attitude is carried over from the game’s filmic inspirations. The final girls in the first three Hellraiser movies are typically saintly and chaste. Kirsty Cotton, daddy’s sad little girl, must constantly fend off the gelatinous advances of her leering uncle Frank. Her hellbound stepmother Julia is seduced by Frank, and damned for it. Joey Summerskill from Hellraiser: Hell on Earth, hides in the fantastical memory of her dead father. And while she flirts with a sexy runaway, she remains pristine and untouched to the end. These women survive the events of the films thanks to their self-closure: they will not enjoy; they cannot.
Bataille writes: “...asexual beings die of their own development, of their own impulsion… whereas sexual ones can put up only temporary resistance to their own teeming energies.” Letting these energies rise to the surface, beyond the skin, as the victims of the Cenobites do, can only lead to obliteration. Getting what you want, everything you could ever want, means dying in a burst of bloody jouissance.
At the conclusion of Revival, Lynch is given a choice by the Cenobites: stay a boring human or join the Cenobites in hell. This decision is unearned, however: Lynch was never on that latter path. He’s just the dumb hero who has to kill bad guys so we can see what happens to the more interesting characters. If anything, he’s more like Frank Cotton, the sadistic libertine of the first Hellraiser. Both hide within their walled-off manhood. When Frank solves Lemarchand’s Box and the Cenobites come, he’s terrified. In the novella, Hellbound Heart, his inner monologue describes anticipating classically patriarchal fantasies: “...he had expected sighs, and languid bodies spread on the floor underfoot like a living carpet; had expected virgin whores whose every crevice was his for the asking…” He never thought he would have to give up his masculine position, his sense of control, in order to experience the sublime. As Astrid Anne Rose writes: he is “...fatally unprepared for his grand coming-out.”
Money for Girls is a visual novel that follows the journey of a highschool girl named Cancer, as she attempts to earn money, find love, and come to understand her own sexuality. It takes a different approach to similar questions of desire and violence. Its post-apocalyptic, authoritarian universe is a space where Cancer explores and is drawn in by the seductive aura of death and the erotic. The game takes place over 12 weeks during which Cancer must find ways to pay down her mother’s debt. She is faced with a path split along several axes: to remain innocent but poor; to become rich and compromised; to entertain perverse fantasies and engage with the abject. How Cancer is shaped and scarred by these choices evokes the ways children are inducted into the problematic position of adulthood. Many things are forced on us as we grow up, but we also choose, and continue choosing, how to find pleasure within this fucked-up world.
Cancer’s choices find her navigating the frayed median between innocence and abjection, between cleanliness and the dirt. Yet the dirt is oh so alluring. One scene has her crawling around on her hands and knees over trash while her love interest, a cherubic blond girl named Agnel, forces coins down her throat. Later, Agnel lets her sip on something sweet—through the roughly carved glory hole of their high school’s bathroom stall. The game trades in these evocative scenarios of perverse submission, based on the liberatory erotics of letting a beautiful girl tell you what to do.
But if Cancer lets things go too far, opens herself up too wide, bad things happen. She is easily consumed by manipulative forces eager to feed her young body to the wolves. One of the game’s final scenes partially mirrors the ending choice in Revival: Cancer stares down a long dark hallway ending in a glowing threshold. The choices given are “Not yet” and “Go all the way.” Going all the way promises swift oblivion, but curiosity, and the craving for more, inevitably wins out. Within this choice, and the perverse offer of the Cenobites, is the dual promise and threat of the erotic. Eroticism “opens the way to death,” according to Bataille. But, he adds: “...without doing violence to our inner lives, are we able to bear a negation that carries us to the farthest bounds of possibility?”
The more Cancer opens herself up to the realm of the erotic and the promise it carries of acceptance, love, and money, the more pieces of herself she loses to the lascivious misanthropes who run the world. But what is the alternative? Repression, stagnation, death through your own impulsion, cut off from the world; Aiden Lynch’s dull gaze as others take in pleasures which he cannot. His past marks a limit as to how open he allows himself to be, and he is understandably terrified to go there again. For many, enjoyment only leads to grim ends. It’s safer to stay chaste, to zip yourself up and let nothing in or out, to survive as the final girl, promised a safe, flat future, free from pleasure and desire. Not death, but not living either.
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Yussef Cole, one of Bullet Points’ editors, is a writer and motion graphic designer. His writing on games stems from an appreciation of the medium tied with a desire to tear it all down so that something better might be built. Find him on Bluesky as @youmeyou.