For decades, the Hellraiser franchise has floundered in direct-to-video purgatory, hardly living up to the nightmarish vision of the original film. For queer horror fans in particular, the diminishing returns of the series felt like a case of missed potential: original creator Clive Barker was one of the first publicly out filmmakers in the genre, and his works have always had a gleefully transgressive queer streak that have long been absent from the many sequels.
But more than any other recent horror remake, this year’s new Hellraiser offers a chance at bloody redemption, with the compelling choice to cast trans actress Jamie Clayton as horror icon Pinhead. Director David Bruckner and writers Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski — the team behind the acclaimed The Night House — haven’t just revived Hellraiser, they’ve injected it with new life, offering an interpretation that’s both distinctly 21st-century and more in touch with Barker’s source material.
Clive Barker’s original novella, The Hellbound Heart, on which the first Hellraiser film was based, serves as a more direct inspiration for the 2022 remake than any of the previous films. In the novella, the central Cenobite that would become known as “Pinhead” was not the macho leather daddy of the films, but more androgyous and ethereal, a being who exists outside of more binaries than just pain and pleasure. Actor Doug Bradley, with his brooding presence and deeply resonant voice, solidified Pinhead as one of horror’s most recognizable icons. But icons bring expectations, and having the series so firmly associated with one character and one performer became a weight: As time went on, Hellraiser focused more on Pinhead, and less on themes like the complexities of physical sensation.
Though the setting is contemporary, the new Hellraiser is in many ways a welcome return to the roots of the series, with the Cenobites depicted as something truly beyond our world. Their distinctive look has also been refashioned; the peeled skin and piercings remain, but the leather is mostly gone: they’re queer but not quite kinky, more alien invaders than dungeon freaks. They look like they sprung out of Pan’s Labyrinth instead of an underground pleasure den.
As portrayed by Jamie Clayton, Pinhead is somewhere between a cherub and a demon, almost like the androgynous Lucifer of Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. It’s not just stunt casting either — Hellraiser is not particularly interested in exploring what it means to have a trans woman in such an iconic role, as it avoids any possibility of tokenization. Hellraiser instead does what every film with trans performers should do: it allows them to flex and express the fullest extent of their talents. Pinhead and the Cenobites are used sparingly to Jaws-like effect, but in every moment that Clayton is onscreen, she channels a Shakespearen intensity. Her features are soft and deceptively inviting, but there’s an uncanny modulation to her voice.
While the BDSM overtones of the original Hellraiser aesthetic were unmissable, Doug Bradley’s foreboding presence always made Pinhead feel a little more like a conventional slasher, more interested in inflicting pain than blurring the lines of sensation. Clayton’s performance is eerier, and in some ways more effective, radiating a distinct energy that feels simultaneously safe and hostile. This new Pinhead suggests the realm of the Cenobites might be inhabited not only by those looking to experience otherworldly pleasure, but by individuals looking to escape other forms of human binaries and boundaries.
What ultimately distinguishes the two single-titled Hellraiser movies is the context of their day. The 2022 Hellraiser arrives in a world that, while still terrifying for queer folks, has become more nuanced when it comes to discourses around gender and sexuality, Barker’s original film was only a few years removed from something like William Friedkin’s Cruising, which stigmatized queerness in general and, more specifically, the kink culture that inspired Clive Barker. The world of Hellraiser was informed by Barker’s own experiences as a sex worker in England in the 1970s, on the peripheries of the BDSM scene — the same world that produced the heavy metal homoerotic fantasies of Judas Priest, whose song “Hellbent for Leather” could serve as a de facto theme song for the Hellraiser series.
As the AIDS crisis reached its peak, horror movies like Fright Night suggested a direct link between queer desire and the death drive, essentially implying that homosexuality doomed you to a painful existence of violence and vampirism. Though the fetish culture that inspired Barker’s distinctive aesthetic had to exist underground for reasons of safety and legality, the inherent illicitness of queer existence gave something like Hellraiser a transgressive edge. The film was a temptation to come live deliciously and sleep with the enemy.
The new Hellraiser makes a similar proposition, but the stakes are very different: the new set of characters drawn in by the aura of the Cenobites and their contraptions aren’t exactly looking to escape conformity. Roland Voight, the conniving businessman who unlocks the deadly portals, is on a quest for infinite pleasure similar to Frank in the original series, but his endless appetite ultimately has nothing to do with sexuality. It’s because he’s a rich man looking for another means of control, another object to add to his collection, another experience he can claim for himself and no one else. In that way, the film probably has more to say about the corruption of the contemporary art world à la Velvet Buzzsaw than it does about queer desire.
Indeed, although the new Hellraiser is a refreshing update, it ultimately illustrates how larger societal discourses around sex have changed in the last thirty years. In the 1980s, Hellraiser was very much about the politics of personal desire, and the societal norms we violate in pursuit of ecstasy. But in the 2020s, the takeaway feels different. In this hellish world, sex is just a form of power, a commodity for the wealthy to buy and trade.
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