“Don’t Open Till Doomsday” (S1E17)

This is the third episode in a row written by Joseph Stefano that I’ve covered, and here he’s teamed up again with director Gerd Oswald to demonstrate some of the unexpected places The Outer Limits can go. Conceptually, this is the single most bizarre episode of the series that I’ve written about, one that still nominally roots itself in Sci-Fi concept, but focuses more on the strange imagery and a human drama that somehow manages to feel both understandable and completely outlandish, gleefully skating around the edges of melodrama. If we didn’t get some manner of explanation near the end, the concept would work just as well as a piece of Weird Fiction bordering on horror, but this is one of the few cases where explaining something actually makes it even stranger.

Hellraiser (1987)

Maybe not surprisingly, I often determine Creature Classics subjects by asking the question “How often does this get ripped off?” Sometimes it’s not even in terms of ideas, but visuals—and you know you’ve struck some kind of nerve if disparate bits of culture liberally borrow your visual style for years afterwards. I think that’s more of the case with the original 1987 Hellraiser: not many people are doing their own take on the movie’s sadomasochistic themes, but they sure love all those chains and the stylishly leather-clad & mutilated demons that serve as the movie’s monster mascots (yes, even kids cartoons have taken a cue from them.) But, really, the visuals of those monster mascots in their first appearance—let’s just ignore the rest of the disjointed franchise, it’ll save us all a lot of time and a lot of headaches—are tied directly into that theme, creating a sui generis horror aesthetic based in the discomforting interweaving of extreme physical sensations, blending sex and pain in a way few other horror movies do, even when they are otherwise filled with both.