Editorial: Why Ingrate Fanboys Need to Let Go of Territorialism (and Why Hellraiser: Judgment Might Be Awesome)
Charlize Theron in a Mad Max film? A rebooted Ghostbusters flick with an all-female cast? A Rocketeer sequel with an African-American woman in the lead? Say it isn’t so! It’s time to assemble the villagers and lay siege with pitchforks and torches to those filmmakers who dare to rape internet trolls’ misogynist-laced nostalgia. Right? RIGHT?
Wrong. This type of behavior is an embarrassment to pop culture fandom, just as is a portion of the horror community’s “Let’s judge it sight unseen” mentality, as witnessed not only by the above but on a smaller scale in the current and harsh response to director Gary Tunnicliffe’s upcoming feature Hellraiser: Judgment, a film no one as of yet has even seen a clip of.
I mean, how dare Tunnicliffe and Dimension cast anyone as that series’ Pinhead other than originator Doug Bradley? This movie is surely going to suck, right? Perhaps tweeting death threats as you did to Ghostbusters director Paul Feig will force Bob Weinstein to just shelve the latest in the Clive Barker-inspired series so that it doesn’t offend your delicate sensibilities with a new take on the character?
Or maybe you should go the other route and opine (as a recent article or two did) that the character of Pinhead should now instead be a woman (but only if she resembles a scantily-clad, augmented 90’s porn star because, you know, girls are only allowed into your boys’ club if they are presented as mindless sex toys and not empowered equals).
Regardless of fanboys’ emotional connection with an intellectual property and their often fervent and ugly NIMBY cries whenever disagreeing with a creative choice, they don’t in fact own that land. This misplaced territorialism and Internet vitriol does indeed have a way of souring that real estate, however, by sometimes driving a wedge between fanboy and artist (just ask Joss Whedon, who decided to Twitter ghost on all of us due to the previously mentioned “Let’s hide behind our keyboards” digital rantings of a few).
So, while fanboys continue to deride the upcoming Hellraiser: Judgment, again without having ever seen a single frame, here’s the similar result:
“Apart from the couple of images that have been released and the casting information that was released,” Hellraiser: Judgment director Tunnicliffe told us exclusively this morning, “we’ve decided, the studio and myself, to stay tight-lipped now until the film’s release next year. It seems to me that any images or fodder given out in good faith are kinda twisted around – usually to the negative – so the best response really is the film itself I suppose.”
“In regard to that, therefore, I can’t say much,” he continued, “but what I can say is that for the first time in over twenty years of dealing with Bob Weinstein as Miramax and as Weinstein Co./Dimension, I did get a personal call from Bob where he very enthusiastically yelled, ‘I love this film. It’s like Fellini and Cronenberg. It’s a descent into hell!’ and other choice superlatives that made my day, week, year, millennia, etc.”
“So there you have it. All will be quiet on the hellish western front until the film gets released. What I would suggest is people take a large pinch of salt with the casting information and storyline information that was released by the casting company earlier this year, [as] that information was provided so as to not give away too much and to [merely] interest agents and actors. I would say wait and then watch the film and then feel free to offer up your critique – good or bad. But at least [it will be] informed.”
You tell ’em, Gary.
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