You're going through granny's old belongings and stored away in the attic you find a curious puzzle
box. You take it home and begin to play with it, discovering how the wooden sides of the box can
slide in and out to completely rearrange the box. Suddenly you get hit with a bolt of inspiration,
and move several of the pieces around before sliding them into place with a satisfying click.
And that's when you unleash hell.
A portal opens up in your room, out of which spills pure darkness creeping across the floor
like a fog, swallowing up all light that strikes it almost like a living thing. From
the other side of this portal you can hear moans of pain and pleasure both,
punctuated by screams of what can only be pure agony. The disturbing
rattling of chains amplifies in volume until suddenly a figure steps through the portal.
It's a horrifying sight, a pale man dressed in long, black leathers, and with a head completely
covered in pins. Looking at you with dark eyes void of any emotion, he stabs a finger
in your direction. “You solved the puzzle, you called us, now prepare for an eternity of pain!”
You've gone and done it, you've summoned a cenobyte from the realm of Leviathan,
and are doomed to suffer an eternity of torments.
How can you possibly defeat Pinhead, lead of all cenobytes?
Understanding your enemy is the key to victory here. Pinhead is a cenobyte,
a special servant of the realm of Leviathan who carries out Leviathan's dark, incomprehensible
will. This mostly takes the form of appearing to mortals who complete the puzzle box known as
the Lament Configuration, opening a portal between our world and Leviathan's realm.
First, forget the holy water and crucifixes, because Pinhead is not a demon and Leviathan's
realm is not hell. It's actually technically not even a place of eternal torment,
at least not in the way that we understand it. Little is known about the mysterious Leviathan,
but what is known is that his realm is one of extreme hedonism. Pinhead himself describes
the cenobytes as neither angels nor demons, though they are certainly one or the other
to some people, but rather as “explorers in the further regions of experience”.
Have you ever heard of the phrase, too much of a good thing can be bad? Well,
pleasure is no different, and Leviathan's most devoted servants- the cenobytes- are created
from individuals who have sought pleasure to the point of extremism, well past the bounds
of anything healthy let alone moral. These are people who became so desensitized to
life that they sought out ways to feel something, anything, at any cost. Murder, human sacrifice,
extreme sado-masochism, eventually nothing could fill that void inside and that's when they turned
to the arcane and promises from entities like Leviathan of pleasure that surpass
the mortal experience. Now each cenobyte is so desensitized that they can no longer
tell the difference between pleasure and pain, inflicting both regardless of the consequences.
So in a weird way, when Pinhead wants to tear you apart with rusty hooked chains, he actually
thinks he's helping you out by treating your flesh to extreme pleasures. Don't worry, after a few
thousand years you'll probably begin to agree and then discover yourself turning into a cenobyte.
Now it's important to note that we're sticking to the original material here, and not any of the
sequel crap. To be perfectly honest, no Hellraiser sequel has ever captured the psychological
horror of Clive Barker's original Hellraiser, instead the franchise has turned into a sad,
boring body horror experience full of gore and little substance. In the original Hellraiser,
Pinhead was merely an arbiter of justice of a sort, the real monsters were the human beings in
the film and the depraved things they did to each other and others. Subsequent sequels missed the
point entirely that humans are the real monsters and turned Pinhead into a slasher monster.
If you're wondering why terrible Hellraiser films keep getting made,
it's because the production company who owns the rights must release a new film every few
years or lose the rights to the franchise entirely. So in a way, it's like we're all
together already stuck in Leviathan's realm of torments and are forced to endure an endless
stream of horrible Hellraiser films. Also, Keeping Up With The Kardashians refuses to die.
But fret not, because in 2020 Clive Barker regained the rights to Hellraiser after a
long legal battle. We imagine that his chief argument was to simply point at
the steaming pile of fecal matter that is films like Hellraiser: Deader and Hellraiser:
Hellworld and then the judge was like, “Oh ok yeah, Dimension Films needs to be legally
stopped from making more Hellraiser films.” So good news, because Clive Barker is once
more under creative control of the Hellraiser franchise and if you've ever read his fiction
set in the universe, you know that what's coming next is going to be terrifying.
Now back to keeping your soul from eternal torment.
Understanding Pinhead is the key to wining this confrontation,
because as an immortal cenobyte there's little you can physically do to stop him
once he's got his sights set on torturing you for eternity.
Pinhead was once an army captain named Eliot Spencer, serving in fRance during World War
1. A charismatic and caring leader, Spencer's heart grew cold and dark after the horrors of
trench warfare. Convinced that God had died along with millions of young men on the battlefields of
Europe, Spencer fell into deep post traumatic stress disorder and found himself numb inside.
Disillusioned and jaded with humanity and life both, Spencer spent the years after the
war traveling the world and indulging in an extremely hedonistic lifestyle,
engaging in any pleasure he could discover.
That's when he came across the Lament Configuration in India,
and after solving the puzzle was dragged by chains into Leviathan's realm. After
years of torture he emerged as Pinhead, a converted Cenobyte and devoted servant
of Leviathan. Now he answers the call of the Lament Configuration,
inevitably whisking away those foolish enough to complete the puzzle to torture into eternity.
So how in the world do you defeat an immortal not-demon who wants to tear
you apart with rusty hooks and can appear pretty much anywhere?
Cenobytes don't just appear to those who solve the lament configuration,
they're simply guaranteed to appear when the box is solved as the puzzle itself works as an arcane
ritual that summons their presence. Other ways of calling forth the cenobytes includes long,
complicated arcane rituals, and humans have been calling for the cenobytes
for millenia. The lament configuration is a sort of like a cheat that gets around these
elaborate rituals, and it's very clear that the cenobytes are not happy about it as they often
seek to immediately punish anyone who solves the puzzle box, even if they are innocent.
Cenobytes however also directly approach humans, influencing them via dreams and inspiring them
in various ways. This is specially true of artists, who find themselves inspired
by dreams the cenobytes feed them and create awe-inspiring, if often grotesque or sexually
extreme works of art. Sometimes it appears as if the cenobytes are perfectly happy to simply
revel in the creation of such art, or in the end result of their inspiration of extreme acts of
hedonism or violence. Other times they demand a more direct 'price' for their inspiration,
demanding the very flesh of the artists they inspire. The more an individual falls to their
influence, the more likely it seems that they'll end up on a cenobyte's torture wrack eventually.
But the important thing about cenobytes is that they are very agreeable to making
deals. Those marked for hellish torture by cenobytes can often strike up deals where
they offer up human sacrifices or unwitting victims in their stead. It seems all the
cenobytes care about is having flesh to play with back home, and they're happy to take
either the person making the deal or those the doomed individual can find in their own stead.
So your first step to surviving Pinhead is to offer a deal. It's not exactly the most moral
thing to do, but then again there's probably a whole lot of people who actually deserve
eternal torment. Like, Vladimir Putin for instance, there's an easy one. Surely nobody would
have any problem with you bartering with Pinhead and putting up Vladimir Putin in exchange for
your own life. Need more inspiration? How about African warlord Joseph Kony? You may remember him
from Kony 2012, which sparked a global movement meant to inspire the American government to
increase military assistance in Kony's capture. The movement worked, mostly because Kony is
literally evil incarnate who abducts children and gets them addicted to drugs so he can
turn them into psychopathic child soldiers. He's done other things as well, but Youtube
would immediately demonetize us if we mentioned them so you'll have to google it on your own.
Rest assured, Kony's a bad dude, and nobody's going to shed a tear over Pinhead tearing him
apart with hooks for a few centuries. If those two aren't enough though,
how about T-mobile? Maybe not every single employee of T-mobile, but you know,
at least the senior leadership, because T-mobile is terrible.
The main problem of course is you have to physically lead the cenobytes to
these victims, so you're going to have to get creative. But we've got faith in you,
your skin is literally on the line after all and that's a pretty good motivator.
Now if you've got a problem with leading others to their eternal doom, then there's a second
alternative- you have to solve the lament configuration's second, secret setting. See,
when the box was created it was well known by its creator what the box was capable of. Not
being particularly stupid, the box was designed with a second, secret configuration. However
instead of summoning the cenobytes, this second configuration, the... Joyous Configuration? To be
honest, we're never told what it's really called so we're having to improvise. Anyways, the second
configuration actually banishes the cenobytes back to hell, and without a physical portal to reach
our world through, there's nothing Pinhead can do once you've sent him back to Leviathan's arms.
This second configuration is probably also why the cenobytes hate the lament configuration so
much and seek to kill and torture whoever summons them through it immediately. However, they seem to
be powerless against the box itself, and never actually destroy it. Why this is is a mystery,
but we're assuming it has to do with some kind of protective magic woven into the box.
Solving the second, secret configuration is probably only something a rubik's cube
master could do though, specially when you have no idea how each piece of the box is
even supposed to fall into place. So your third option to defeating Pinhead is... well,
to let him take you. This might not work for all, but sometimes when the cenobytes encounter
a particular individual, Leviathan demands that they be turned into a fresh cenobyte
themselves. At that point you basically have as much power as Pinhead, and it doesn't seem
as if Leviathan has any particular issue with his creations destroying each other.
So if you don't mind being thrown into a horrible torture machine for a period
lapsing from hours to days, months or even longer, then you could come out of it with
cool new cenobyte powers- perfect for taking on Pinhead himself. It's sort
of like Quake 4 when your character gets captured and turned into a Strogg soldier,
which by the way is one of the coolest and most gruesome sequences in video game history.
Now go watch You vs Freddy Krueger or click this other video instead!