Barbie wilde12/4/2023 ![]() Funny, irreverent, erudite, and sharp-edged as the torture tools the Cenobites tote, Wilde has been creating horror media for decades, while remaining tied to the crazy world of Hellraiser fandom. Of course, the Female Cenobite is a construct of Clive Barker’s voluptuously venereal imagination, but when I was honoured to interview the famous and infamous Barbie Wilde, the actress who portrayed the Female Cenobite in Hellraiser: Hellbound, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that all the things fans find so enchanting about the character is part of Wilde’s horror persona. As a younger horror fan, I was enthralled by the Female Cenobite for all that she promised women in horror cinema could be: equally appealing, appalling, and spellbindingly powerful. ![]() ![]() Aside from being calm, cool, and as assured as her male counterparts, she wields a subtle, sexy deadliness that even the best femme fatales are robbed of in a genre still driven mostly by males and their infamous gaze. You might be forgiven for forgetting the delightfully macabre, glamorously ghoulish Female Cenobite from the Hellraiser franchise, but you won’t get any pardon from me. Yes, grandma, the Bride of Frankenstein is pretty cool, but let’s try to keep thing recent. Okay, for the sake of time (and my ever fraying sanity) we’re going to elide over the sexism inherent in many of the genre’s beloved standbys - I’m looking right at you, slashers - and focus on the thing that draws us in, draw us out, and keeps us coming back for more: the monsters. I don’t care how much of a die hard horror fan you are, if you’re even the tiniest bit honest, you have to admit: horror has some problems with women.
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