Hellraiser: Prophecy is a fan film that combines the storylines of both the Hellraiser and Prophecy mythologies.
The 1995 film Prophecy created a mythos about a second angelic war in heaven. The Archangel Gabriel leads an insurgency that seeks to revert creation to a time before man, when angels were most loved by God. He battles against the Archangel Michael, who fights to keep humanity intact. Watching all this unfold, Lucifer fears Gabriel’s victory. While he loathes humanity, he does not want to see another angel succeed where he has failed.
In the 1987 film Hellraiser and it’ sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Hell is not a place of fire and torment but a dark stone labyrinth, presided over by a deity known as Leviathan. One can find entrances to the maze of Hell by solving complex puzzles, most notably the puzzle box known as The Lament Configuration.
In Hellraiser: Prophecy, Lucifer (Jeremy Yost) seeks to find a way to tilt the scales in Michael’s favor, by enlisting the help of Leviathan. However, he cannot communicate with Leviathan directly, so he extorts Natasha (Lori Pyzocha), a theology student, to solve the Lament Configuration for him and open the passageway into the Labyrinth.
Content
According to the director, this movie was made entirely by volunteers, none of whom had any experience in filmmaking. In fact, most were biology graduate students – which is perhaps the complete opposite of any form of creative media. With that in mind, I was quite impressed that this gang was able to produce a decent quality short without any previous experience.
I really liked Jeremy Yost as Lucifer. He had a really good screen presence, and I loved the way that his character tend to stay crouchingly low, creating a very ominous presence.
I haven’t seen either of the films which provided the inspiration, and consequently it was a little difficult for me to understand the plot and the characters. Even though it was geared more toward fans of the genre, it might be a good idea to provide a more concrete summary of the story at the beginning. This can be done most simply by use of a black title card with white text, or perhaps even a brief narration by Lucifer. His narration as it exists now serves to set the mood, but it doesn’t introduce him and it’s also somewhat cryptic. This narration could also be carried throughout the film as a means to introduce the characters.
I also noticed that the grimoire that Natasha is translating looks a lot like the Necronomicon from the movie Army of Darkness. And while the text on the inside looked creepy enough, I think the cover should have been made unique for this film. (For future reference, the Gothic singer/songwriter Voltaire has a section in his book Paint it Black: A Guide to Gothic Homemaking on making your own creepy-looking grimoire.)
Visual Look
For being a first project, there were some really nice visual aspects to this film. My favorite was a shot montage of Natasha’s sister Lydia getting in a fight with her boyfriend and later stabbing him with a knife. The entire scene was washed out, and there was a nice sound effect of Lydia’s heavy breathing. These two elements really made for a great-looking montage. In addition, the special effects blood on Lydia and her boyfriend were also well done. In making a horror film, it can be a temptation to overdo it with the blood and gore, but in this scene there was enough blood to make it believable, and not too much to be over-the-top.
There were a couple of lighting issues that I noticed. At the beginning of the film, Lucifer is sitting outside at what was either night or just after sunset. Obviously, shooting the devil in broad daylight would not be appropriate to his character, but, as it is, this scene is still quite dark. Shooting at night is very difficult to do, but it is possible. One option is to shoot day-for-night – shoot the scene in the daytime and then adjust the color in post (Microfilmmaker actually did an article a couple months ago about how to do this). Another way to cheat it is to disguise your lights as street lights, or park several cars nearby and use the headlights as extra ambience.
