Clive Barker's 1987 horror film Hellraiser, based on his novella The Hellbound Heart, is a twisted personal vision that combines BDSM experimentation with extreme gore. It's not the kind of movie that seems poised to launch a franchise, but that's exactly what happened, with nine sequels of varying (mostly poor) quality between 1988 and 2018. Aside from 1988's Hellbound: Hellraiser II, none of those sequels come close to recapturing the unique style and artistry of Barker's original.
That's meant to change with the new franchise reboot, also titled Hellraiser, which counts Barker as one of its producers and is directed by The Night House's David Bruckner. This new Hellraiser is a marked improvement over the post-Hellbound sequels, especially compared to the micro-budget quickies of the franchise's later years. It's slickly produced and well-acted, and it would have been worthy of becoming the first Hellraiser movie in 25-plus years to be released in theaters, if it weren't going straight to Hulu.
At the same time, it's structurally fairly similar to many of the direct-to-video Hellraiser sequels, which graft series villain Pinhead onto a story of torment and redemption with no connection to any previous installment. This isn't a new adaptation of The Hellbound Heart, but rather a new story that incorporates Pinhead and the other hellspawn known as Cenobites. It's slow-paced (at 121 minutes, it's easily the longest Hellraiser movie) and grim, without any of the kinky sexuality that was essential to Barker's original and has shown up sporadically since then. Its use of the Cenobites as an allegory for addiction is questionable, and it doesn't embrace the series' grotesque nastiness until its belated climax.
Before that, it follows recovering drug addict Riley (Odessa A'zion) as she struggles to stay clean while living with her brother Matt (Brandon Flynn) and his boyfriend Colin (Adam Faison). Desperate for money, Riley agrees to help Trevor (Drew Starkey) break into a warehouse holding supposedly valuable merchandise, although all they find is Hellraiser's familiar puzzle box, the Lament Configuration, which summons the Cenobites when it's solved. The puzzle box gets a slight makeover here, with multiple configurations, each given its own suitably ominous name.
Screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, who worked with Bruckner on The Night House, make some updates to the Cenobite mythology and the rules of the puzzle box, but that has never been consistent from movie to movie anyway, so there's no reason this couldn't function as a sequel rather than a new beginning. The idea of the Cenobites as infernal pleasure-seekers summoned by deviant hedonists has long since fallen away, and once again they're just nasty demons with unusually poetic speech patterns.
After two subpar replacements for original Pinhead Doug Bradley in the last two sequels, Sense8's Jamie Clayton makes for an excellent new Pinhead, without attempting to mimic Bradley's mannerisms. The designs for all the new Cenobites are fantastic, upholding the tradition of horrific beauty established in the first movie. Goran Visnjic shows up in a prologue as a mogul with eccentric tastes who seeks the puzzle box, and he's the only one with the kind of manic weirdness that a Hellraiser movie really needs.
The Hellraiser movies have been so bad for so long that it's tempting to praise Bruckner's film purely for its competence, but it's still a step down from the first two Hellraisers, and a step down from the layered, genuinely terrifying The Night House. Riley's personal difficulties aren't particularly compelling, and the Cenobites, as awesome as they look, are rarely scary. Bruckner delivers a passable modern horror movie, but Barker's original vision remains unique — and uniquely unable to be replicated. ♦
Hellraiser
