YMMV / The Hellbound Heart

• Adaptation Displacement: It's not as well known as Hellraiser.
• Awesome Moments:
  • Kirsty fending off Frank's Attempted Rape, first by clawing his eyes out and then by bludgeoning him with Lemarchand's Box, sending him into a full Villainous Breakdown.
  • Kirsty tricking Frank into revealing his name, allowing the Cenobites to intervene and drag him back to hell, saving her life in the process.
• Complete Monster: Frank Cotton is a hideous, hedonistic lech whose pursuit of higher pleasures led him to a tortured Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere at the hands of the Cenobites. From a small trace of his seed left in the human world, Frank calls out to and manipulates his abused girlfriend Julia—Frank's sister-in-law—into luring men to her apartment so she can butcher them and use their flesh to reconstitute Frank's own body; the final one of these victims is Frank's own brother Rory. Julia means nothing to him; after she sacrifices all of her morals just to bring him Back from the Dead, Frank rewards her by feeding upon her while she begs for help. Upon getting a human body back, Frank celebrates the recapture of his physicality by attempting to rape the novel's heroine Kirsty: "Come to Daddy."
• Evil Is Cool: The Cenobites are the most famous examples in Barker's oeuvre, being horrible S&M demons who nonetheless come across as Wicked Cultured and pull an awesome Villainous Rescue at the end.
• Narm: What is Kirsty's reaction upon realizing Frank murdered Rory and stole his skin? "Oh, it's you."
• Nightmare Retardant: The descriptions of the tortures and mutilations inflicted on and by the Cenobites are so meticulously, fetishistically spelled out that it wraps back around into being ridiculous.