#192: Hellraiser

Release Date: September 18th, 1987

Format: Streaming (Tubi)

Written by: Clive Barker

Directed by: Clive Barker

3.5 Stars

If you were born in the US in the ‘80s, it’s likely that Hellraiser has been a part of your life since you can remember. On those weekend trips to the video store, there it was, lurking in the horror section: Hellraiser, in blood red font, and that horrifying image of Pinhead staring directly at you, clad in black leather and bathed in blue light. 

It didn’t even matter whether you had actually seen the movie or not - I hadn’t until tonight - the movie seemed to make an impact on you through its sheer existence. 

Now that I’ve finally watched it, I can’t stop thinking about it. 

Based on his own novella, Hellraiser is the feature film debut of horror author and visual artist Clive Barker. By his own admission, Barker largely didn’t know how to make a feature length movie, and furthermore, he was saddled with a budget of just a million dollars.

None of that matters. Hellraiser is a great horror movie, and it goes to show that a strong vision and an uncompromising belief in the material can oftentimes outweigh a small budget and inexperienced direction. 

In fact, I think the budget and inexperience lends itself to Hellraiser. It’s an ugly movie - I mean that as a compliment - that doesn’t seem to exist in a particular time or space. The fashion is crude, the architecture is tired. Some characters speak with an English accent, others with an east coast American accent. The central setting, a three-story house, seems disconnected from any sort of larger community.

As I was watching the film, I was consistently wondering, “Where are we? What is all this?”

Whether intention or not, whether compromised by budget or not, Clive Barker nourishes a total fever dream with Hellraiser. It’s really stuck with me.

As for the plot, the movie is about a man named Frank, who seems like a kind of anti-social sexual deviant, who travels halfway around the world to buy a puzzle box that will unlock a world of forbidden, paranormal pleasures. When he returns to the US penniless, he squats in the abandoned house from his childhood, and the puzzle box unleashes a set of demons - including the infamous Pinhead - who take him to the underworld to be endlessly tortured, seemingly for his awful misdeeds in the real world. 

It’s not until his brother and sister-in-law buy the old house and move in that Frank is accidentally resurrected from the underworld, with a gruesome request to save his soul.

But this is all secondary when considering Hellraiser. Story and plot is not how Clive Barker infects your mind. Like Pinhead himself, Barker traps you in a haunting space that you can’t escape.