Welcome back, goblins and ghouls, to the fourth annual installment of SpookyJawn! Each October, our love of horror fully rises from its slumber and takes over the MovieJawn website for all things spooky! This year, we are looking at ghosts, goblins, ghouls, goths, and grotesqueries, week by week they will march over the falling leaves to leave you with chills, frights, and spooky delights! Read all of the articles here!

by Jill Vranken, Staff Writer 

“What’s your pleasure, sir?” 

The world of Hellraiser was created by English novelist and visual artist Clive Barker, a former playwright from Liverpool who first came to prominence as a writer with his Books of Blood short story compilations. During his early years as a writer, Barker also worked as a sex worker to supplement his income. 

His experiences as a sex worker made him want to write a story about “good and evil in which sexuality was the connective tissue”, and he drew inspiration from the S&M scene to write the novella which would become Hellraiser, The Hellbound Heart (1986). 

The Hellbound Heart 

In The Hellbound Heart, a hedonistic criminal named Frank Cotton purchases a puzzle box known as the LeMarchand Configuration, which is rumoured to open a schism to an extra-dimensional realm full of otherworldly sensual pleasures. Frank, a selfish man devoted to the sensual at all costs, solves the puzzle box and is horrified when the Cenobites–creatures who were once human but transformed to their current, horribly scarified state in pursuit of gratification–appear. Frank is taken by the Cenobites, and experimented upon to the point of sensory overload. 

Barker wrote The Hellbound Heart as a first step towards directing a film by himself, as he had been disappointed with the way his material had been treated on previous adaptations. So, he planned on directing a film himself, using his playwright experience. He spoke to film producer Christopher Figg (who would go on to be the producer of the first three films in the series, and who would later produce the adaptation of We Need to Talk About Kevin) and asked how small the budget would have to be for someone to hire him as a first-time director. Figg told him that the budget had to be less than a million dollars, something that could be achieved if the film was “just about a house and some monsters” and if he used a cast of unknown/lesser known actors. 

Barker decided to adapt The Hellbound Heart (which he did under the title Sadomasochists From Hell, because Clive Barker is a cheeky scamp). And thus, from The Hellbound Heart was born… 

Hellraiser (1987) 

Hellraiser keeps most of the novella’s plot beats but makes a few crucial changes. In The Hellbound Heart, Frank’s brother Rory has a co-worker named Kirsty, who has romantic feelings for him. In Hellraiser, Rory is now Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is his daughter, making Frank (Sean Chapman) her uncle. The film opens with Frank, desperate, purchasing the box from a mysterious vendor I Morocco (changed from Düsseldorf in the novella). In a bare, candlelit attic, he kneels shirtless on the floor, and solves the puzzle box. 

The film has a few tricks up its sleeve, and one of them is how it almost tricks you into thinking you’ve imagined what happens next. Because what happens next happens so quickly and abruptly that even Frank himself doesn’t see it coming (HOW COULD HE?). From the box, hooks and chains emerge, tearing him apart. A quartet of creatures (the previously mentioned Cenobites) appear, and one of them–a statuesque figure clad in a black leather robe, with a head adorned with nails–takes the puzzle and resets it. In a flash, the room resets, the creatures disappear and for at least the next twenty minutes, the movie also resets, shifting the focus on getting to know Larry, Kirsty and Larry’s wife, Julia (Clare Higgins). 

Higgins is the film’s ace. From the first moment we see her, entering the house with Larry, we don’t need her to speak to understand how she’s feeling. She looks tired, wistful, lonely, as if even being in the same room as Larry is psychically harming her. We slowly are let in on her secret affair with Frank through the film’s most sensual scenes (scenes which the MPAA famously told Barker were only allowed two consecutive buttock thrusts from Frank, BUT NOT THREE). A softer, looser Julia is seen opening the door to Frank, drenched in rain and looking the kind of hot that could devastate your entire life with one glance. And for Julia, he kind of does–there’s an instant pull between the two of them, something that Frank awakens in her. Her sexual submission to Frank sets free a side of hers that she is clearly hurting for in the present.

Once Frank (or the bits that used to be Frank) is back in the picture and asking her to kill for him so he can rebuild, Julia slowly but surely steps into her own killer power (the scene where she locks herself in the bathroom, drenched in blood, looking into the mirror is a scene that received a 50 minute standing ovation in my living room on multiple occasions). On the other side is Kirsty, who is introduced properly when she arrives to help her dad and stepmother move into their new home (Kirsty is shown to have moved into her own place). Kirsty is wary of Julia to begin with, and when she accidentally sees Julia bringing a man into the house, she follows her in, thinking she’s about to discover her stepmother having an affair. 

The truth is so, so much worse, and Kirsty narrowly escapes the bundle of sinews that is her Uncle Frank, along with Frank’s puzzle box. She collapses while running away, and is taken to the hospital, where - once alone - she solves the puzzle box, unknowingly summoning the Cenobites. If you go into Hellraiser knowing only that Pinhead (Doug Bradley–a friend of Barker’s from his playwright days) is the “main villain” of the franchise, it will surprise you to learn that he isn’t in the original that much. Rather, the Cenobites are more of a neutral evil side faction, “demons to some, angels to others”. The real villain is Frank, and Pinhead (who is only known as Lead Cenobite here) is merely here because Kirsty summoned him by accident. That he is also after Frank, looking to punish him for escaping the Cenobite realm, is a mutually beneficial coincidence. And that he happens to be iconic - statuesque, of few words but all of them effective–is a mutually beneficial coincidence for the viewer.

A sequel was greenlit while the first movie was still in production, and a year after Hellraiser’s release, we got… 

Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988) 

Starting with a brief “previously on Hellraiser” recap of the ending to the last movie, Hellbound does a bit of tampering with the story to get Kirsty to wake up in a psychiatric hospital. She is visited by Dr. Philip Channard (Kenneth Cranham), and tells the story of what happened to her, pleading with Channard to destroy the mattress Julia died on. 

However, Channard has ulterior motives; he’s the Lament Configuration’s number one stan, and has the mattress brought to his home. He convinces one of his patients to lie on the mattress and self harm. The patient’s blood drips onto the mattress, resurrecting Julia. With the help of Channard’s assistant Kyle (William Hope), and a mute fellow patient named Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), Kirsty sets out to find Julia, and she will need to venture into the domain of the Cenobites to do so (a moment of pause for the stunning sets that make up Levithian’s realm, they are truly mind-bending). 

Hellbound shifts the focus to Julia as the villain, and oh what a magnificent villain she is. Ask me who my favourite horror movie villain is and I will always go to bat for Julia Cotton. Her evolution from tense, sad and wistful to this glorious queen of hell, strutting around looking glamorous even with half of her flesh missing is a fascinating one, and one that Barker wanted to take even further in sequels, properly making her Queen of Hell (sadly, Clare Higgins declined to return, which is a damn shame–the studio also wanted Pinhead to be the focus of a sequel, which… keep reading). 

Kirsty, however, is more than a match for her, and it’s she who discovers something pivotal about Pinhead: that he was once a human, a British soldier named Captain Elliot Spencer, who after becoming disillusioned by life and humanity during his experiences in World War I, discovered the box and joined the Cenobites. We see this happen at the start of the film, and once Kirsty makes the connection, it gives Pinhead a sad new depth, which is explored in… 

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992) 

The revelation of Pinhead’s humanity causes a split into two entities: Captain Elilot Spencer, and Pinhead (as a manifestation of Spencer’s id, now with no restraint or moral code). Captain Spencer gets trapped in limbo, while Pinhead is trapped in the mysterious pillar that materialised at the end of the last movie. 

The pillar gets bought by a nightclub owner, and when a clubgoer is admitted to hospital with hooked chains embedded in their flesh, reporter Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell), who is at the hospital, is drawn into the path of the Cenobites. Joey has recurring dreams about how she presumes her father died in the Vietnam war - during one of these dreams, Spencer contacts her, explaining his story and what Pinhead will do now his moral compass has been removed.

Hell on Earth is ambitious, campy and balances delicately on the verge of collapsing all together. It also contains one of the most beautifully bananas scenes of the whole franchise, the infamous Black Mass scene (for which director Anthony Hickox was refused permission to film in a real church). Doug Bradley in this scene in particular is delightful, elegantly chewing scenery as he conducts his evil ceremony. 

In the end, Joey (who if I may say so is rather underrated in the canon of horror heroines) manages to narrowly avoid being turned into a Cenobite, as she is saved by Spencer, who forcibly fuses himself with Pinhead (a name used for the first time on camera in this film, as a taunt by Joey), allowing her to break free and stab him through the heart with the puzzle box, which has transformed into a dagger. The film ends with Joey calmly burying the box in a pool of concrete at a construction site before walking away, only for the camera to cut to some time later, revealing a building with an interior design identical to the Lament Configuration. 

I should warn you now that we are about to get introduced to a surprise villain in the Hellraiser story - Miramax/Dimension films and Bob and Harvey Weinstein. Leading to… 

Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) 

Oh boy, you know a film has had a rough time of it when there’s an Alan Smithee directors credit on it. 

You could write an entire separate article on the production of Bloodline alone; it’s the last one until the series reboot in 2022 to have any involvement from Barker, it’s the last one to be released theatrically, and it’s the first one to truly be blighted by the Weinstein brothers’ insistence on MORE PINHEAD. Doug Bradley called it “the shoot from hell,” because it was so plagued with emergencies, firings, illness, and general bad vibes. And that was before Miramax saw the final product and declared it unsatisfactory, requiring reshoots, a move which drove director Kevin Yagher, already exhausted from the grueling shoot, off the project. 

It’s a shame, because on paper the idea is a bold, ambitious story (Paul Kane, writer of The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy described the original screenplay as one of the best of the sequels). Across three time periods, we follow the creation of the Lament Configuration by toymaker Phillipe LeMarchand (Bruce Ramsey) in Paris, 1796, the subsequent present day (1996) attempts of his bloodline to rectify the curse put on the family by LeMarchand unwittingly opening a portal to Hell and freeing a demon named Angelique (Valentina Vargas), and the desperate final gambit of a spaceship engineer in 2127 to close the portal once and for all. 

The film also introduces more of the intrigue and dynamics among the denizens of hell, with Pinhead coming to blows with Angelique over their preferred methods of corruption. Again, on paper, this is a good story, but the final product was critically panned, made little money at the box office and essentially doomed the franchise to direct-to-video limbo. It also cost the franchise Barker, as while he wasn’t opposed to assisting the next sequel, he eventually got shut out.

Thus, we enter the second phase in Hellraiser’s life as a franchise, a phase I like to call the “three franchises in a trench coat” phase. Although, arguably, it’s more like five… 

Hellraiser: Inferno (2000)/Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) 

Directed by future horror horror heavyweight Scott Derrickson (Sinister, The Black Phone), Hellraiser: Inferno is the first of the direct-to-video sequels and the first in a duo we can call the “Jacob’s Ladder Hellraisers”. In Inferno, a corrupt police detective named Joseph Thorne (Craig Sheffer, who had previously played Aaron Boone in Nightbreed, an adaptation of Barker’s novella Cabal) discovers a strangle puzzle box at the scene of a crime. 

Fascinated with puzzles, he brings the box home and solves it, after which he begins to experience a series of bizarre hallucinations. The first of the sequels to just… insert Pinhead into the situation and hope for the best (you will see this become a trend), Thorne discovers that the psychiatrist he has been seeing for the hallucinations is in fact Pinhead, and that he has been in the Cenobites’ realm since opening the box, subjected to psychological torture for his many sins. The film got mixed reviews, with some praise for the David Lynch-esque elements, but noting that Inferno felt less like a Hellraiser sequel and more like a Jacob’s Ladder follow-up. 

Hellseeker, meanwhile, does try to connect back to the original quadrilogy by bringing back Ashley Laurence as Kirsty Cotton, only to essentially commit a character assassination on her. The film starts with Kirsty and her husband Trevor (Dean Winters) getting into a car accident. Trevor manages to escape but Kirsty is nowhere to be seen. 

Trevor wakes up in hospital a month later, his memory shaky, and while he is aware that his wife is missing, he cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. A series of strange events befall him, including a number of encounters with two odd police detectives. Eventually, Pinhead appears (... told you) and reveals to Trevor that he is in fact dead and in Hell, and Kirsty is very much alive. Trevor is revealed to have been a serial cheater, intent on killing Kirsty for her inheritance (which, was Larry secretly a multi-millionaire?). Trevor forced Kirsty to open the Lament Configuration, which she did, but before Pinhead could claim her soul, she bargained with him and offered to trade him five souls instead. Kirsty killed three of Trevor’s mistresses as well as his friend Bret, with whom he had been conspiring to kill her. Trevor is the fifth soul, and Kirsty is revealed to have staged the accident and the murders so it looked like Trevor had committed them. The film ends with Kirsty, Lament Configuration in hand, walking away from the scene of the crash. 

It’s interesting to note that this marks the start of several occasions where a number of interesting scripts were pitched to take the series forward, only for Dimension to reject the pitch due to budget concerns, as the films were going straight to video. In the leadup to Inferno, a project titled Hellraiser: Hellfire was pitched, which would see Kirsty face a cult plotting to unleash the Cenobites and Leviathan into the real world. The original pitch for Hellseeker, meanwhile, came from a spec script titled The Hellseeker, about a man trying to rebuild his memories after surviving a fire, hunted by the Cenobites.

Neither of these scripts came into being, but it’s two instances in a long line of Hellraiser what ifs… 

Hellraiser: Deader/Hellraiser: Hellworld (both 2005) 

Both Deader and Hellworld were shot at the same time in Romania to save costs. Of the two, Deader (... yes, this is a very silly title, thank you for noticing) is the one that leans in the most toward the general horror trend in 2000s: grim, grimy, nihilistic Hostel-esque in visuals and plotting. Deader sees a reported named Amy Klein (Kari Wuher) sent to Bucharest to investigate a video which depicts the ritualistic murder and reanimation of a member of a cult known as the Deaders. She finds the Lament Configuration in the hands of the sender of the video, who has committed suicide. 

Amy meets the leader of the Deader cult, Winter LeMarchand (Paul Rhys), who is the descendant of the toymaker who designed the puzzle box and believes it is his birthright to access the Cenobite realm and become their leader. As he cannot open the box himself, he has come up with the most convolutedly daft plan to do so via his cult followers. 

And if I think about that any longer, I will give myself a migraine so for both our sakes… 

Hellworld, meanwhile, attempts a more meta angle, tapping into the world of online computer games. In Hellworld, a group of teens get addicted to a game of the same name (based on the Hellraiser series). Two years after the suicide of one of their group, they are invited to a private Hellworld party at an old mansion. They are welcomed by The Host (Lance Henriksen, who was hired by chance as he had just wrapped up filming another movie in Romania), who cordially shows them around the house (allegedly a former convent and asylum also built by Philip LeMarchand, the toymaker). As the party progresses, members of the group start meeting sticky ends, and a very convoluted plan starts unspooling. 

As you can imagine, neither of these movies were originally scripted as Hellraiser movies - Deader was adapted from a spec script, while Hellworld was based on a short story (Dark Can’t Breathe by Joel Soisson). Again, a much more interesting pitch was submitted for the seventh Hellraiser (Hellraiser: Lament, which ignored Inferno and Hellseeker and set out to expand on the original four films) but rejected on grounds of budgetary concerns. In the years after Deader and Hellworld being released, a genuine effort to produce a theatrical remake of the original kicked off in earnest, with Barker originally on board to write the script. A number of high-profile directors (among which were a few key names in the New French Extremity movement, such as Julien Maury and Alexandre Bustillo, the directors of Inside and Pascal Laugier, the director of Martyrs) were attached but left due to creative differences with the Weinsteins regarding the direction of the movie they envisioned. 

Eventually, Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier were attached to reboot the franchise, but…

Hellraiser: Revelations (2011)/ Hellraiser: Judgment (2018)

AKA the “Doug Bradley Has Left The Chat” duology, Revelations and Judgment represent somewhat of a nadir in the franchise. Both were pushed into production by Dimension Films in order for them to retain the rights. As The Weinstein Company was still apparently working on that long-rumoured theatrical reboot (Revelations being released lost them the involvement of Todd Farmer and Patrick Lussier), they rushed a draft script from longtime franchise stalwart Gary J. Tunnicliffe into production and shot Revelations in the space of two weeks. 

It also lost them their Pinhead, as Doug Bradley refused to return once he got wind of the conditions under which this film was coming together. Stephan Smith Collins took his place, and Revelations shuddered into being. The story centres around two friends running away from home to Mexico, engaging in heavy drinking and partying before disappearing after finding a mysterious puzzle box. 

While Revelations descends into the worst excesses of 2000s Hostel-esque horror, Judgment (which saw Tunnicliffe step up to the role of director, something he, despite facing more time limitations, took incredibly seriously) at least was intended to be a Hellraiser sequel from the start. 

Judgment attempts to expand the Hellraiser universe by introducing a new faction of Hell, the Stygian Inquisition. Amusingly, the story is a mix of a standard police procedural with, for lack of better phrasing, Hell-Related Admin, as Tunnicliffe also stars as the Auditor, a clerk in Hell who notes a person’s sin before passing them to the Assessor (John Gulager). It’s also got some pretty gnarly visuals–the Auditor’s typewriter paper is made of flesh and inked in blood, the Assessor in general has some very grotty ways of working–as well as a rather bold ending: God bans Pinhead from Hell and dooms him to walk the earth as a mortal man. The film ends with Pinhead, now human, screaming into the daylight, aghast at his fate. 

The film was originally scheduled for a 2017 release but ran into a delay due to a seeming unwillingness from the Weinsteins to market it at all. Eventually, in the wake of the horrible revelations regarding Harvey Weinstein and two years of silence from Dimension, Lionsgate picked up distribution rights and the film limped out onto home video in February 2018. 

It would have been an inglorious ending to the franchise, were it not for another franchise that successfully rose from the dead later that year. In the wake of the success of David Gordon Green’s Halloween, the gears were set in motion for Hellraiser to finally, properly get rebooted. 

Hellraiser (2022) 

It feels like a minor miracle that a proper reboot of the franchise (with Barker’s approval; he regained the US rights to the franchise in late 2020) did eventually get made. Directed by David Bruckner (The Signal, The Night House), 2022’s Hellraiser wipes the slate clean and brings it back to the tone of the original movies, a human story with a slash of the supernatural through the core. Actor and trans icon Jamie Clayton steps into the role of Pinhead (here referred to properly as The Priest), while Goran Višnjić is the film’s secondary villain, a hedonistic millionaire art collector named Roland Voight.

While not a perfect return to form, the film does a stellar job of getting the franchise out of the mire it had been stranded in by once again marrying an all too human core story with the world of the Cenobites, while also giving us some wicked signature Barker visuals. Odessa A’zion stars as recovering drug addict Riley, who discovers a mysterious puzzle box in an abandoned warehouse. After being kicked out of her brother’s flat, she retreats to a nearby park and solves the puzzle (this is the first movie of the entire franchise to actually make the Lament Configuration a dynamic contraption - Hell on Earth does so briefly, but here it shifts form continuously throughout the film), narrowly avoiding being cut by a blade. Unknowingly, she draws the Cenobites into the world, and they are out for blood. 

With a possible sequel on the cards and a TV series in the works, it looks like there is once again life in Hellraiser. Still, I can’t help thinking of all those projects that got left unmade, of the direction Barker wanted to take Julia in, of the years the franchise spent in direct to video Leviathan. It’s a beautiful, frustrating mess of a world and my only hope is that, should it be able to move forward, we can see it draw closer to what Barker had originally intended. After all, Hellraiser may be a story of an unearthly sect of creatures from Hell, it is most importantly a story about the lengths we would go to for desire and lust, even if it destroys us. 

And that is a story I will always have time for.