Hooked, Not Helpless: The Modern Flesh Suspension Part I
“The Cenobites gave me an experience beyond the limits, pain and pleasure indivisible.” This line is from one of my favorite films of all time, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser, and it rather unexpectedly comes up in my mind while I watch a man swinging over a waterfall. In his back there are two hooks firmly committed to his flesh. They pull up scruff in angry handfuls, securely holding his weight as his toe skips against the water. His eyes are closed and appear peaceful rather than in the tight squint of pain I expected to see. Early afternoon sunlight spears through the canopy of leaves overhead when I realize this thing — flesh suspensions — this thing from horror flicks and casual conversation which I have only vaguely heard about up to this point, is real.
I can see the blood drip down his back like a slowly dancing raindrop making it’s way down a window. I can hear the slow froggish groan a tree makes when the extra weight of a man swings from a purple and yellow mountain-climbing rope looped around one of its limbs. For many people, myself included before today, horror films like Hellraiser are the only place where one might wakefully look and see a person dangling off the ground with an eight inch hook sticking through the skin on each shoulder. Though instead of a black-robed sadistic creature from another dimension named Pinhead, a short bearded guy called Dave who is wearing cargo shorts and a ratty vintage ‘Bauhaus’ t-shirt is running the show.
Flesh suspensions are a bit more in the public eye nowadays. There are conventions, national geographic specials, websites, magazines and YouTube videos for all kinds of body modification interests. But before the days when you could think of anything, and there’s probably at least one website dedicated to it, flesh suspensions had already been part of human history for over a thousand years.