Hellraiser: Resurrections – The Onanistic Ritual
Figuring out what a modern man is supposed to be feels like swimming in shark-infested waters with an open wound. We live more inside online echo chambers now than in the real world, which makes finding your own voice even harder. More identities are on offer than ever, pulling toward every extreme imaginable. Those built on hate and control let their believers lie to themselves – trading empathy for certainty. For a lot of men, the manosphere becomes the path of least resistance: an easy answer to who they’re told they’re supposed to be. They mistake dominance and control for strength, chasing whatever their new gods call being a “real man.” A sentiment like this quote is just one drop in an ocean of that toxicity.
“I actually understand them [women]… and since I understand them, I know what is best for them.”
Myron Gaines✦ ✦ ✦Ad✦ ✦ ✦
Writer Zac Thompson and artist Gavin Mitchell explore this path to belief in male superiority and domination in Hellraiser: Resurrections – The Onanistic Ritual. Hellraiser itself explores, as per Thompson, “the thin line between an insanely heightened emotion and its inversion. The division between desire and revulsion is paper thin. Same with pain and pleasure.” Using this approach as the story’s POV lets Mark Gussett’s extreme beliefs and actions feed into it.
With the division between desire and revulsion being central to the story, we can investigate something like lookmaxxing through this lens. There is an act in this division of the toxic manosphere called “bonesmashing,” which is taking a hard object and smashing your facial bones to have a stronger jawline or cheekbones. Mark undertakes this self-induced procedure to improve his own looks because it can “raise your sexual market value”. The depiction of a hammer smashing into his jaw is grotesque in its true nature when we look at it in a civilized manner. But when you see the embrace of the grotesque and leaving behind the confines of polite society in order to become something more, we find ourselves at the core of what makes a Hellraiser story.
When given the option to look into humanity’s darkest desires, most turn away and know they must not unsettle the balance, especially in themselves. But Hellraiser stories follow those who go too far and push the scales to the brink. Even before the Cenobite intervention, the passengers in a Hellraiser story break through their desires, embracing indulgences far beyond human contemplation. While every story has a physical puzzle box, the puzzle we navigate is humanity itself. Desire can be pushed too far, and Mark’s desire to be loved and seen takes the darkest routes that lead him to hell.
Mark believes he was enlightened enough to understand the social order, but that understanding was fueled by the poisonous lies he fed his own beliefs. We see him navigate his personal shame and hatred by projecting it onto others. For those who embrace teachings like Andrew Tate’s or Myron Gaines’s, men who’ve built their platforms on hatred of women, women become “the other”; the enemy to be conquered rather than understood. There is a belief in these circles that women are inferior to men, and that it is a man’s place to remake himself into a master of domination and control. Mark embraces those ideals in this story, following the frivolous teaching that everything should feed his ego — an auto-erotic worship of domination as the only god he serves.
“To dominate women, one had to dominate themselves.”
Mark’s cravings are celebrated in an isolated, hedonistic, euphoric life of masturbating to cruder and crueler pornography as the story evolves as his desires do. These evolutions beyond the lines of civility are core to what makes a Hellraiser story walk the same razor-sharp lines as the original film and the story Hellbound Heart did. The team of this book understands why the original stories worked, but instead of retracing those beats, they modernize them into something that plagues our world today.
The comic not only stands as a perfect Hellraiser story but also as a warning to those who embrace these ideals. Exploring the ideas of the manosphere with the horrors on full display as what they are- horror- instead of aggrandizing them as things to strive for is what makes this issue a modern horror masterpiece. Allowing insecurities and self-doubt to curdle into a need for control by any means necessary is something that is fed by the echo chambers that so many of us are locked into, like hooks in our mortal flesh. Walking a path between pleasure and pain is part of being alive, but the path forward is not to embrace the calling sirens of those who no longer abide by balance but live for overindulgence to the point of ruin.
Main Cover
When you hear the chattering, you know death has come calling… A new era of ecstasy and agony begins here for Hellraiser! The long-awaited return of Hellraiser to comics is finally upon us, starting with Hellraiser: Resurrections, a series of five one-shots setting up the launch of a new Hellraiser ongoing series coming to shelves this winter! The Chatterer bares his teeth for a brand new mission. His goal? To reclaim his rightful place as the right hand of the Hell Priest himself! Meet Mark, the young man obsessed with looksmaxxing, a toxic practice to become the ultimate alpha male in today’s world. When he watches a vintage snuff film seemingly showing The Chatterer’s violent creation, Mark becomes obsessed with summoning The Chatterer as an avenging demon against those he feels wronged him. But we all know the thing about deals with the devil… Witness the rebirth of one of the most popular Cenobites in this transformative one-shot from writer Zac Thompson and artist Gavin Mitchell, and fear the chattering of his grotesque grin!
