An experience beyond limits... pain and pleasure indivisible.
This is the untold truth of "Hellraiser."
What's in a name? Well, quite a lot when it comes to a movie. Just imagine if "Toy Story"
had been called "Toyz in the Hood," "Alien" had been called "Star Beast," or "Back to the
Future" had been called "Spaceman from Pluto" — because they all almost were. Would these films
still have gone on to be box-office smashes and critical faves? We'll never know. But what we
do know is that "Hellraiser" was very nearly called "Sadomasochists From Beyond the Grave."
Clive Barker explained in a 1987 interview with Fangoria that he
originally wanted "Hellraiser" to have a very different title. He revealed —
"The imagery we're employing is, as far as the creatures from hell
are concerned, something that hasn't been done before. They're like sadomasochists
from beyond the grave. In fact, that's what I originally wanted to call the picture."
As far as titles go, it's certainly a bit beyond the pale, and definitely a lot different from
"The Hellbound Heart," the title of the novella that inspired the film. Still,
if there was ever to be a gang name that nailed the vibe that Pinhead, Butterball, and the rest
of the cenobites give off, "Sadomasochists From Beyond the Grave" is perfectly spot on.
Alongside Leatherface, Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, and Pennywise, Pinhead
is an almost universally recognizable villain and an iconic embodiment of '80s horror.
It might be surprising, then, that in the first "Hellraiser" films, he's not technically a bad
guy — just an infernal ambassador who takes his job extremely seriously. According to his creator,
though, the moniker "Pinhead" doesn't exactly do the character justice.
Clive Barker explained in an interview with Dread Central that the character was a priest
of hell who remained nameless in the original script. However,
a special effects artist referred to him as "Pinhead," and that was that. Barker recalled —
"I was like, 'Wait a second, you just named my villain Pinhead?'
I didn't think that sounded very dignified. But it ended up on the call sheet, and it just stuck."
"Who you callin' 'Pinhead?'"
Before the release of "Hellraiser," no one realized how popular the guy
with nails in his face would end up being. The hell priest wasn't even the original
poster boy for the film: Pinhead actor Doug Bradley told HorrorOnline.com that
a flayed Frank was originally the image intended to grace posters and lunchboxes.
At some point during production, the powers that be opted for the grid-faced man to push
the film into the darkest corners of the public consciousness. Bradley explained —
"The image is so original, so startling. It is just an incredible image to look at,
and that made a big difference in terms of the public's perception of the movie."
On one level, "Hellraiser" is a cautionary tale about what happens to a curious individual when
he meddles in the supernatural. In another sense, if you look past the flesh flaying,
the screams, the carnage, and the sadist with pins in his face, you'll find what
Clive Barker has referred to as "a love story from beyond the grave." It might sound absurd,
but take a closer look and you'll see that Barker isn't wrong. The author explained that
just as it's desire that leads Frank Cotton to a lonely place where he's skinned alive,
it's the same desire that leads his brother's wife, Julia Cotton, down the road to ruin.
Julia attempts to resurrect her old lover by butchering unsuspecting men
so Frank can feed on their precious blood, but as Barker points out,
she doesn't do it because she's a psychopath — she does it for love. Barker stressed in
the same interview that he intended "Hellraiser" to be an "intelligent and popular horror movie"
that didn't exploit women or manipulate sensibilities. He told Monsterland —
"There has been a general move towards the infantile in horror pictures recently,
a desire to soften the blows. I hope this time we're going to get tough again."
Let's be honest — the Cenobites are a pretty eye-catching bunch. If Pinhead and his posse
strutted into a party, it would certainly cause a stir. Their look is hellish, and with all the
leather and boots it's reminiscent of the weirdest shock rock group never to play a
gig. You wouldn't want to bump into these guys in a graveyard or an S&M club, the latter of which,
according to Clive Barker, is the inspiration for the Cenobites' distinctive look. Barker told The
Guardian that both the physical and emotional make-up of the Cenobites was inspired by S&M
clubs he had frequented, specifically an underground club in New York called Cellblock 28.
Barker revealed that Cellblock 28 had a hardcore S&M night where there was no drinking or drugs:
just intense pain, pleasure, and a whole lot of piercings. He elaborated —
"It was the first time I ever saw people pierced for fun. It was the first time I saw blood spilt."
"Oh, no tears, please! It's a waste of good suffering."
Barker explained that the move to make the cenobites act and dress a certain
way was met with positive reception from the S&M community, saying —
"I was validating a lifestyle. It was
a celebration of the beauty of these strange secret rituals."
Having only made a couple of short films with a group of friends in Liverpool as a teenager,
"Hellraiser" was Clive Barker's first experience helming a major movie production.
Directing a feature film for the first time was a daunting task, as he revealed in an interview:
"I didn't know the rules. I didn't know who the sound guy was. I only knew who the camera
operator was because he was the guy behind the camera. I don't think that finally hurt the movie.
May have actually been useful because I sort of made it up as I went along."
When Barker was young, he and a group of friends grabbed an 8mm camera and shot two shorts,
"Salome" and "The Forbidden," inspired by underground and experimental directors
like Kenneth Anger. Future Hellraiser collaborators Doug Bradley and Pete
Atkins were involved in the productions. Barker reflected on his work by saying —
"They are technically extremely crude and their storylines obscure.
Actually I think it has a strange poetry about it."
That "strange poetry," as well as the themes of pacts,
rituals, killers, and sexuality, have a lot in common with "Hellraiser" as we know it today.
The puzzle box in "Hellraiser" with which Frank opens the doors to another dimension
is integral to the franchise's overarching plot. The peculiar-looking device — also
known as the Lament Configuration — was described in "The Hellbound
Heart' as one of several in existence that was created by Frenchman Philip LeMarchand.
One is said to be safely under lock and key in the basement of the Vatican, another was rumored
to have been in the possession of the Marquis De Sade during his tenure at the Bastille,
and a third found its way into the hands of an Englishman named Frank.
"Let me see—" "No, don't touch it! It's dangerous.
It opens doors."
The inspiration for the puzzle box came from an unlikely source: Clive Barker's grandfather.
According to an interview with the podcast The Geek's Guide To The Galaxy,
Barker wanted his characters to access hell in a unique way. He was eventually drawn to a
childhood memory of an elaborate wooden puzzle box his grandfather, who was a ship's cook,
brought back from the Far East. Barker recalled playing with the box a lot as a child. When he
was puzzling about how best his character in "The Hellbound Heart" could open the doors of Hell,
he remembered his grandfather's box, and the final piece fell into place.
It's no good sweating buckets to create a horror film designed to shock and
unnerve the audience if you pay little attention to the soundtrack:
music adds ambience, atmosphere, suspense, and dread to a movie. In short, the cenobites can't
exactly share screen time with a Disney-style soundtrack — it would be terribly unbecoming.
Before "Hellraiser's" release, industrial band Coil delivered a
sonically charged hellscape of a soundtrack to accompany Clive Barker's film. However,
it never made the final cut and was replaced by Christopher Young's more traditional score.
Barker was friendly with the members of Coil,
and felt their unique sound would make a perfect fit for "Hellraiser." The studio disagreed,
apparently deciding that the soundtrack was just too unsettling. Anyone familiar with
Coil's work during that period wouldn't have been surprised — as Barker himself once said —
"Coil is the only group I've heard on disc,
whose records I've taken off because they make my bowels churn."
However, the truth as to why Coil's "Hellraiser" soundtrack was never given the green light is
far more pedestrian. Coil's Stephen Thrower told The Quietus that when Barker asked the
producers for more special effects funding, they said something along the lines of,
"We didn't think this was going to be as commercial as it is. Re-shoot those
effects scenes and here's some more money. One stipulation, we want our man to do the score."
Movie sets are hectic places. Everyone's got a job to do and everyone's rushing around frantically,
trying not to get in one another's way. Costume designers, camera operators, production managers,
and boom operators all play their part in a constant effort to keep things from going off
the rails. On the set of "Hellraiser," they also had their very own maggot and cockroach
wrangler to keep things in order. It was an odd job, but a necessary one in a pre-CGI
age where everyone had to get their hands dirty to create something authentic.
In an interview with Film Threat, Clive Barker pointed out that being on a movie set for fourteen
straight hours and dealing with thirty different people, all with equally important jobs to do,
was far more tiring than he had anticipated. But relief came with the insects: Barker enthused —
"The moments which were really exciting were the major cockroach scenes,
which I really liked. We had a roach-wrangler. We had Tupperware,
you know? The ultimate Tupperware container — your Roach Tupperware Container — in the fridge."
Barker explained that special passports and visas were needed to import extra
large American cockroaches to the UK. The crew could only import male cockroaches,
because there was a danger that they could escape and procreate. Barker joked —
"Somewhere in customs there's presumably a roach sexer!"
Although many people praised "Hellraiser" upon its release for breathing new life into the horror
genre, not everyone was won over by Clive Barker's vision. Famed film critic Roger Ebert gave
"Hellraiser" a paltry half-star review, decrying it as a dreary sham. He wrote, somewhat viciously,
"This is one of those movies you sit through with mounting dread,
as the fear grows inside of you that it will turn out to be feature-length."
He didn't care much for its sequel, either, which he made clear on his TV show.
"The problem here is that there is no discernable beginning, middle,
or end to this nightmare, just a series of disconnected and gruesome scenes."
If that seems a tad harsh, it gets worse — Ebert questioned the motives of the
audience for going to see the movie in the first place. In his opinion,
"Hellraiser" contained no surprises or emotional engagement, and lacked any wit or flair.
Interestingly, Ebert's harsh verdict on the film appeared to be the opening shot in a war
of words between the legendary critic and Clive Barker, as chronicled on Ebert's own website.
Years after the release of "Hellraiser," Barker would slam the critic for making
the controversial statement that "Video games can never be art." Barker described
Ebert as "prejudiced," calling him a, quote, "pompous, arrogant old man." How much bearing
Ebert's notorious review of "Hellraiser" had on Barker's scathing words we'll never know,
but just as criticism is always subjective, an artist never forgets a bad review.
Imagine Pinhead and Michael Myers battling it out in a cinematic crossover along the lines of
"Freddy vs. Jason" or "Alien vs. Predator…" and then imagine it some more, because it's
never going to happen. However, it nearly did. Although it probably wouldn't have contained a
lot of small talk between the chief cenobite and the masked murderer, "Hellraiser vs. Halloween"
was a promising premise nevertheless. Paul Kane's book, "The Hellraiser Films and Their Legacy,"
reveals that filmmaker Dave Parker once pitched the idea of a crossover event to Dimension Films.
Parker needed a way to get the two villains together for a rumble,
so he hatched an origin story in which Myers is trick-or-treating as a child and receives
a mysterious box from a stranger in black boots. Upon opening it, the Lord of the Dead possesses
Myers' body and goes on a killing spree. Since he's possessed by a demonic entity,
Myers cannot be killed until Pinhead shows up years later. From there, it's game on.
Dimension was excited enough to reach out to both Clive Barker and John Carpenter,
and penciled in a release date of October 31, 2004. However, not only did the owners
of the "Halloween" movie rights throw shade on the idea, a poll on the official "Halloween"
website suggested that the majority of fans didn't want the movie to happen… so it didn't.
One of the most unsettling things about the cenobites — apart from
their insatiable desire to inflict pain — is their unnerving silence.
Unwavering eye contact with unreadable yet intense facial expressions, combined with the
art of keeping your entire body extremely still, is the embodiment of psychological
intimidation. The cenobites are obvious masters at it. With the exception of Pinhead,
who's not exactly mister talkative, the rest of the cenobites in "Hellraiser" are a pretty mute
bunch — even the Chatterer isn't much of a chatterbox. In total, Pinhead is only in the
original film for eight minutes and doesn't have a lot of lines. That's why it's no wonder that,
combined with the industrial make-up, Doug Bradley thought he would be unrecognizable in character.
In an interview with The Guardian, Bradley explained that he was offered
both the role of Pinhead and the bit part of a moving man.
He had reservations about playing a heavily made-up monster, saying —
"Because 'Hellraiser' was my first movie, I thought it might be a good idea to be on screen
as myself. But it was a brief conversation. There was no doubt in my mind that this unnamed guy
with the pins in his head had a certain je ne sais quoi that a mattress-delivery guy didn't."
The first time Bradley saw himself in the mirror as Pinhead,
he knew he had made the right decision. He continued —
"I had a sense of majesty. His threat is implied:
Look what I did to myself — now imagine what I can do to you."
"Trick us again, child, and your suffering will be legendary… even in hell."