As a cultural movement, the Italian Renaissance affected only a small part of the population. Italy was the most urbanized region of Europe, but three quarters of the people were still rural peasants. For this section of the population, life remained essentially unchanged from the Middle Ages.
Although I enjoyed the book, The Hellbound Heart, the movie version, Hellraiser - with the awesomely cheesy blue and yellow 80's FX - is a bit better and mainly because it was more fully realized.
When Richard Mathesonâs novel Hell House came out in 1971, its fusion of traditional haunted house elements with explicit sex and violence was quite shocking, as most horror novels prior to William Peter Blattyâs The Exorcist avoided graphic material in favor of suggesting the shudders.n fact, Matheson is in many ways the link from the Gothic horror of the past (including his famous work on Cormanâs Poe pictures) to the modern-day scares of Stephen King (who has acknowledged his debt to Mathesonâs I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man, and Hell House, all set in modern times).