Fictional character
Fictional character
Kirsty is a fictional character from the Hellraiser media franchise. Created by writer Clive Barker, Kirsty first appears 👏 in the 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart. Her full name is identified in the sequels as Kirsty Singer, before being 👏 adapted in the 1987 film adaptation Hellraiser as Kirsty Cotton. The character served as a major focus in the original 👏 film and its sequel Hellbound: Hellraiser II, later playing a supporting role in Hellraiser VI: Hellseeker. In all of her 👏 appearances in the film series, she was portrayed by actress Ashley Laurence. The film describes her as being Larry Cotton's 👏 daughter, while in the novel she is simply a friend of his.
Appearances [ edit ]
In film [ edit ]
Kirsty first 👏 appears in Hellraiser as the teenage daughter of Larry Cotton (Andrew Robinson) and stepdaughter of his second wife Julia Cotton 👏 (Clare Higgins). Kirsty moves with her parents to England to the house of her uncle Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman), who 👏 has disappeared sometime ago, but refuses to live with her parents, instead opting to live in a place of her 👏 own. When passing by her parents house one day, Kirsty sees Julia and a man enter the place and, believing 👏 Julia to be cheating on her father, follows the two inside and up to the attic of the house. It 👏 is there that Kirsty witnesses Julia attack the man and her uncle Frank, who is now a skinless entity needing 👏 to feast on the blood of others for nourishment, begin to eat him. When the man tries to escape, Frank 👏 chases after him and discovers Kirsty, whom he tries to attack, before stopping when she grabs the nearby Lemarchand's box. 👏 Realizing the puzzle box has some significance to Frank, Kirsty tosses it out a window, distracting him and allowing her 👏 to escape outside where she, after picking up the box, collapses. Found and taken to a hospital, Kirsty wakes up 👏 and, at first believing everything that has happened to be a dream, realizes she is wrong when a doctor hands 👏 her the box. Toying with the puzzle box, Kirsty solves and inadvertently summons the sadomasochistic demons known as the Cenobites 👏 and their leader, Pinhead (Doug Bradley). Kirsty bargains with the Cenobites, revealing to them that she knows where the escaped 👏 Frank is and offering them him instead of herself. After escaping from the hospital (presumably with the assistance of the 👏 Cenobites), she returns to her father's house and encounters Julia and her father, who claim Frank is dead and shows 👏 her his body. This turns out to be a ruse, as it is actually Larry who is dead, Frank having 👏 killed him and taken his skin to wear as a disguise. Trying to kill Kirsty when the Cenobites reappear, Frank 👏 accidentally stabs Julia to death and is in turn killed by the Cenobites with hooks. With Frank and Julia dealt 👏 with, the Cenobites turn their attention to Kirsty, who, while fleeing from them, stumbles upon Lemarchand's box which Julia's corpse 👏 is clutching and, using it, manages to banish the Cenobites back to their dimension. With the Cenobites gone, Kirsty attempts 👏 to destroy the puzzle box once and for all by burning it, but while in the midst of doing so, 👏 a man grabs it from the fire and transforms into a winged, skeletal creature before flying away.[1]
In Hellbound: Hellraiser II, 👏 Kirsty is in the Channard Institute, a psychiatric hospital, after being traumatized by the events of Hellraiser. She tells the 👏 head doctor of the hospital, Dr. Philip Channard (Kenneth Cranham), and his assistant Kyle MacRae (William Hope), about her experiences 👏 with the Cenobites. Kirsty begs them to destroy the mattress that her stepmother died on, believing that it connects to 👏 the Cenobites realm. Dr. Channard is revealed to have been searching for Lemarchand's box for most of his life. He 👏 summons Julia from the mattress by having a mentally ill patient cut himself on it. As the patient sees bugs 👏 crawling all over his skin because he is hallucinating them and he uses a razor to cut them off of 👏 himself. He is bleeding so badly the blood awakens Julia and she eats him. Kirsty asks for Kyles' help in 👏 stopping whatever it is Channard plans to do. Going to Channard's house alongside Kyle, Kirsty plans to use the Lament 👏 Configuration to resurrect her father. Kyle is killed and eaten by Julia. Then Kirsty, Channard and another patient of Channard's 👏 (the seemingly-mute Tiffany (Imogen Boorman)) are taken to the Cenobites' realm. After an encounter between Julia and Frank, with the 👏 former killing the latter, Kirsty and Tiffany are attacked by the Cenobites. Before the Cenobites torture them, Kirsty reveals to 👏 Pinhead a picture of a man identical in appearance to him she found in Channard's office. Seeing the picture, Pinhead 👏 and the other Cenobites realize that they were once human, minutes before being killed by Channard, now a Cenobite himself. 👏 As Channard returns to his psychiatric institute and goes on a rampage, Kirsty has Tiffany re-solve the Lemarchand's box while 👏 she uses Julia's skin to disguise herself as her. Lured back to the Cenobites' realm, Channard tries to kill Tiffany, 👏 only to be fooled by the disguised Kirsty and be accidentally killed by Leviathan. With Channard dead, Kirsty and Tiffany 👏 manage to escape back to Earth using the puzzle box.[2]
Kirsty makes a small cameo appearance in Hellraiser III: Hell on 👏 Earth in several videos taken from the Channard Institute that protagonist Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell) watches to learn about the 👏 Cenobites.[3]
Kirsty returns in the sixth installment of the Hellraiser series, Hellraiser: Hellseeker, where she has married a man named Trevor 👏 Gooden (Dean Winters), and supposedly died in a car crash, which Trevor has incurred amnesia from. Attempting to piece his 👏 life back together, Trevor's past is revealed to him by Pinhead, who tells Trevor that he repeatedly cheated on Kirsty 👏 and had conspired with a friend to kill her using Lemarchand's box. Trevor's plan backfired, as, after summoning Pinhead and 👏 the Cenobites, Kirsty proposed to give them five souls for her own. Pinhead reveals to Trevor that Kirsty had killed 👏 three of his mistresses and his friend, and that he is the fifth sacrifice. Trevor is in the Cenobites' realm, 👏 Kirsty shot him in the head while the two were driving, which caused the car accident. The film's final shot 👏 has Kirsty leaving a crime scene with Lermanchand's box, having escaped all conviction by framing Trevor for the murders she 👏 committed before killing him.[4]
In literature [ edit ]
Kirsty originates from the novel The Hellbound Heart. This version is not Larry 👏 Cotton's daughter, but rather a friend who shares a romantic interest in him. The 2024 sequel to The Hellbound Heart, 👏 Hellraiser: The Toll, identifies the character as Kirsty Singer.[5][6] Kirsty reappears in Boom! Studios' Hellraiser comic series, set roughly twenty 👏 years after the events of the third film. By issue #8, she becomes a Cenobite, a female Pinhead, as the 👏 original Pinhead becomes human again.
Reception [ edit ]
In Divine Horror: Essays on the Cinematic Battle Between the Sacred and the 👏 Diabolical, Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper[7] note the differences between Kirsty and Julia:
"...in Hellraiser's portrayals of Kirsty 👏 and Julia as "light" and "dark" characters respectively, embodying "a universal duality" that, in the Western world, is traditionally associated 👏 with good and evil, angel and demons". "The actions of the two women become equally polarized as the film moves 👏 toward its climax. Julia emerges as a seductress who lures men to their deaths in order to harvest their blood 👏 and Kirsty as a virtuous "final girl" whose only goal is survival. The film then moves toward a final battle--a 👏 conclusion that is absent in the novella--between the forces of good and evil, in which Kirsty banishes the demons to 👏 Hell".
See also [ edit ]
