Title: Hellraiser

Year of Release: 1987

Director: Clive Barker

Length: 93 mins

Starring: Andrew Robinson, Claire Higgins, Sean Chapman, Ashley Laurence, Doug Bradley

Liverpool-born Clive Barker has always been a bit more cerebral than your average horror writer, which is probably why his work translates to the screen so much more successfully than some of his contemporaries. There’s just a bit more depth and substance, much of which lends itself very well to horror imagery. Though he has written many more works of note which have been turned into movies or TV series, including Rawhead Rex (1986), Nightbreed (1990), and Candyman (1992) this, Barker’s directorial debut, remains his tour de force. It was based on his novella, The Hellbound Heart, which was first published in the 1986 anthology Dark Visions 3. At the time, Barker was riding a wave of popularity on the back of his Books of Blood series, and had recently been dubbed “the future of horror” by none other than Stephen King himself. No pressure there, then. In a scathing retort to this accolade, critic Roger Ebert gave the film half a star when he reviewed it, saying, “This is a movie without wit, style, or reason. I have seen the future of implausible plotting, and his name is Clive Barker.”

A simple, yet fiendishly clever plot begins when hedonist Frank Cotton (Chapman) comes into possession of an antique puzzle box said to be a portal into an extra-dimensional realm of ‘unfathomable pleasure.’ He opens the box and unleashes the bloodthirsty cenobites led by Pinhead (Bradley) who literally rip him to pieces (“No tears, please. It’s a waste of good suffering”). The Cenobites are revealed elsewhere as being members of a religious cult in hell called the Order of the Gash (as names go, that has to be in the top few per cent) who exist solely to explore the further regions of human experience and grant sadomasochistic pleasure to those who call upon them. Okay.

Years later, Frank’s brother Larry (Robinson, best known for his portrayal of the psycho killer in 70’s classic Dirty Harry) and his wife Julia (Higgins), who once had a lusty affair with Frank, move in to the house to try to repair their fractured relationship. Whilst moving in, Larry cuts his hand on a rusty nail. The blood drips down through the floorboards and brings Frank, or what’s left of him, back to life. He needs more blood to become more solid so persuades Julia, who still has the hots for him, to bring home a succession of men who she then viciously murders. Frank’s daughter Kirsty (Laurence), who slowly becomes the star of the show, rumbles them, and then has her own close encounters with both the rejuvinated and perpetual horndog frank and the Cenobites. The whole thing ends with Kirsty escaping and the puzzle box ending up with its original owner, so the cycle can begin again.

Several cuts were made post-production to enable the movie to be down-graded from an X (18) to an R (15) rating in order to reach a wider audience. The sex scenes between Frank and Julia were originally a lot more explicit and included sadomasochistic overtones to further enhance Frank’s decadence. Desire is front and centre in Hellraiser, as Barker later explained, “Sex is a great leveller. It made me want to tell a story about good and evil in which sexuality was the connective tissue. Most English and American horror movies were not sexual, or coquettishly so – a bunch of teenagers having sex and then getting killed. Hellraiser, the story of a man driven to seek the ultimate sensual experience, has a much more twisted sense of sexuality.” He added that, “The MPAA [Motion Picture Association of America] told me I was allowed two consecutive buttock thrusts from Frank but three is deemed obscene!” Nevertheless, it was still banned in Ontario.

Despite the controversy, the reviews were generally positive, especially in the UK. Time Out London called Hellraiser, “Barker’s dazzling debut,” that “Creates such an atmosphere of dread that the astonishing set-pieces simply detonate in a chain reaction of cumulative intensity.” The Daily Telegraph agreed with these sentiments, stating that, “Barker has achieved a fine degree of menace,” while The Daily Mail went one step further and described it as, “A pinnacle of the genre.”

A reboot directed by David Bruckner appeared in 2022 meaning that to date there have now been a total of eleven Hellraiser movies, alongside various comics and spin-offs, making it one of the most enduring franchises in movie history. For the record, the other movies are: Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996), Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), Hellraiser: Decader (2005), Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005), Hellraiser: Revelations (2011), Hellraiser: Judgement (2018). Barker himself has had very little to do with any of these, though he has written and released two sequels in The Scarlet Gospels (2015) and Hellraiser: The Toll (2018) but neither have been adapted for the screen (yet).

In an interview with Game Radar, Doug Bradley, who played Pinhead, said the success of Freddy vs. Jason (2003) led Hellraiser distributor Dimension Films to flirt with the idea of a Hellraiser vs. Halloween film. “Clive said he would write it and John Carpenter said he would direct it,” Bradley said. But Moustapha Akkad, who owned the rights to Halloween, vetoed the idea.

Phew.

Trivia Corner:

During filming, Doug Bradley had difficulty seeing through the black contact lenses he wore as Pinhead, and lived in constant fear of tripping over stuff. According to barker the character of Pinhead who quickly became one of the most recognizable and terrifying horror icons ever, was inspired by a hardcore S&M club he visited in New York, where he, “Watched people get pierced for fun.”