Rick & Morty’s spoofed the Cenobites of Hellraiser fame in season 5 episode “Amortycan Grickfitti," and proved the demons' entire modus operandi does not add up. Since the series debuted, anarchic animated comedy Rick And Morty has always had a fondness for parodying classic horror tropes. As the story of an amoral scientific super-genius Rick and his misadventures with his long-suffering grandson Morty, the show naturally parodies family sitcoms and sci-fi conventions more than any other genre.
However, as early as Rick And Morty’s second episode “Lawnmower Dog,” the show featured a goofy parody of A Nightmare On Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger with the surprisingly sensitive dream demon Scary Terry. Since then, the series has spoofed everything from Stephen King’s Needful Things to Nosferatu, to even the largely forgotten sci-fi horror miniseries The Langoliers. With such an evident affinity for the genre, it was only a matter of time before Rick And Morty parodied Hellraiser.
Beginning in 1987 with the horror classic Hellraiser, the franchise centers on gruesome villains the Cenobites. Demons from a dimension where pleasure and pain are interlinked, the creepy monsters were dreamed up by iconic author Clive Barker, and throughout the Hellraiser franchise’s many outings, they inflict all manner of grotesque torture on willing and unwilling victims. However, as Rick And Morty’s Hellraiser parody notes this does not quite add up as, if the pain is a pleasure to the Cenobites, shouldn’t they enjoy being defeated, disarmed, and otherwise rendered harmless?
The Cenobites are villains that make sense on a metaphorical level in Barker’s original novella "The Hellbound Heart," where critics have read the monsters as representations of numerous then-prevalent cultural anxieties. However, the Cenobites don’t make sense on a basic, literal level, as their general ethos of pain=pleasure doesn’t totally add up. As Anne Lane, the writer of Rick & Morty’s “Amortycan Grickfitti” puts in the Inside the Episode segment, “if you love something, isn’t that a good feeling? But then if you hate it, you love it again.” This internal inconsistency allows Rick and Beth to repeatedly outsmart the demons by playing into their paradoxical love/hate relationship with pain/pleasure. After the last episode’s throwaway nod to classic ‘80s horror CHUD, this more in-depth spoof is a treat for fans of the iconic franchise - even if it does ruin a lot of Hellraiser’s supposed scare factor.
Admittedly, a more in-depth interrogation of Hellraiser’s Cenobites is possible, and it could be argued the monsters represent the pain inherent in many forms of pleasure. Countless philosophers and poets have noted (alongside British band The Verve), many believe that “love is pain,” and this Rick And Morty outing does reaffirm this idea when it pains Rick to admit he is not much cooler than Jerry and has grown fond of his daughter’s husband despite himself. In any case, the episode’s choice to bring classic horror parodies back to season 5 is a good one, and this Rick And Morty outing does guarantee viewers will never look at Hellraiser's Cenobites the same way again.