Making a new “Hellraiser” film in 2022 is an exercise about “better,” not “good.” Like most staple 1980s horror series, “Hellraiser” goes two entries deep with the original classic and a good-but-not-as-good follow-up, though “Hellbound: Hellraiser 2‘s” status as less than “Hellraiser” depends on who you ask. But step into the 1990s with “Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth,” and the franchise starts walking on air like Wile E. Coyote chasing the Roadrunner, plunging into a vast and empty canyon. The proceeding “Hellraiser” films are experiences of small pleasures, a la baby-faced Adam Scott’s early career appearance in “Hellraiser IV: Bloodlines,” tucked among colossal chagrin.
Standards, in other words, are low, which makes David Bruckner’s new adaptation of the “Hellraiser” franchise’s ur-text, Clive Barker’s novella “The Hellbound Heart,” an easy layup. For lack of higher immediate praise, the film, simply titled “Hellraiser,” works; there is a puzzle box, there are flying hooked chains, there are demonic creatures decorated with gorily revealing body modifications, there’s a metric ton of suffering, and there’s the main antagonist, equally as stately as fearsome, distinguished by rows of neatly organized pins jutting from their head. There isn’t much more to “Hellraiser” than these macabre features apart from Bruckner’s eye for and love of well-designed monstrosities. But there could have been more packed into the film’s startling aesthetic package, and this is a worse sin than its predecessors’ bloody, head-scratching nonsense.
“Hellraiser” opens in a prologue where prototypically curious and wealthy Richard Voight (Goran Višnjić) deceives a young man into tickling the Lament Configuration, that irresistible ornate puzzle box full of excruciating pain. If you’ve seen a “Hellraiser” movie before, you know how the gullible schmuck’s story ends. Cut to recovering addict Riley (Odessa A’zion) and her sort of boyfriend Trevor (Drew Starkey) moistening her bedsheets. Riley’s at odds with her brother-cum-roommate Matt (Brandon Flynn), who means well but isn’t equipped for assisting her recovery, and in the middle of their futile bickering, Trevor convinces her to nick a forgotten valuable left collecting dust in a locked safe in a locked storage unit in a locked derelict warehouse.
Surprise, surprise: The locks were a hint and the valuable is the Lament Configuration. Enter everyone’s favorite extradimensional sadomasochists, the Cenobites. Enter their Mayor McCheese, referred to as “the Priest.” Bruckner and his gaggle of screenwriters, Ben Collins, Luke Piotrowski, and sliding into home with a “story by” credit, David Goyer, can’t beat good old-fashioned abductive reasoning: If it has a head full of pins like Pinhead, and if it talks with well-heeled eloquence void of emotion like Pinhead, then it’s Pinhead. Doug Bradley claimed the character for himself in the 1987 movie, a meaningful achievement considering Barker wrote the character as androgynous and sexless; his voice’s gravelly, commanding boom echoes throughout the series even after 2011’s “Hellraiser: Revelations” replaced him, out of necessity and not choice, with Stephan Smith Collins and Fred Tatasciore.
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Collins and Tatasciore don’t sum to half a Bradley. Jamie Clayton, stepping into the part for Bruckner, does. Wars will be fought on Horror Twitter over whether or not she’s a better Pinhead than Bradley because nerds gravitate to petty squabbles like creeps to the Lament Configuration. Clayton is just different from Bradley, a snugger fit for the brief, by far, with a strangely reduced presence in the material. This isn’t a marker of her work–it’s a marker of the writing. There’s an inexplicable distance between the film and Pinhead, even in close-ups, maybe intended to heighten the character’s frightening intrigue. She feels like a messenger, within the text and without, instead of a character. To Riley, Pinhead is the snake to her pill-addicted Eve, tempting her with dark promise. To Bruckner, she’s an empty vessel for bearing 40-year-old iconography to new viewers.
Clayton sticks in the mind like Bradley despite the mostly reactive role Pinhead occupies in “Hellraiser.” She is terrifyingly stationary. When she reaches for and draws a pin from her scalp, only the arm moves, and with a veteran ballerina’s graceful discipline. Clayton smiles without smiling, too, which reads from moment to moment either as regal or just plain old chilling; when she talks, the sound design fluctuates her voice from masculine to feminine. Her Pinhead is easily defined and at the same time ineffable, evil conducted by a strange, eldritch code. Stick to that code and you’ll live, though others will probably get dead in your place. Stray from it and you’re the one getting peeled like a banana.
The problem with all of this–with Clayton’s performance, with Riley as “Hellraiser’s” protagonist, with the very thought of making “Hellraiser” in 2022–is that the film lacks a point of view. Framing “Hellraiser (1987)” through a lens of sexual kink helped cement its legacy as an all-timer for queer horror; not everyone is into, say, having their soul torn to shreds, but everything is someone’s fetish. “Hellraiser (2022)” is missing that element. It isn’t even about missing the kink. It’s missing substance of any kind. Civilian casualties in Riley’s battle with addiction function as a minor foil for Voight’s pursuit of greatness at any cost, but Bruckner thankfully stops far short of beating that horse to a pulp; there are echoes of her struggle in the Cenobites’ ethos of traveling further into new realms of sensation without retreat.
“Hellraiser” trusts the audience to get it. Metaphor is window dressing. Bruckner’s style emerges best in the Cenobites’ conceptualization and realization. He tosses out the S&M leather getups in favor of bare flesh and exposed muscle; he constructs their bodies with visible joints, like marionettes cobbled together from discarded limbs. Like Clayton is to Bradley, Bruckner’s Cenobites aren’t superior to but separate from Barker’s. They inflict their own brand of dreadful madness on the audience. This is the key joy of “Hellraiser” as a companion to the 1987 movie: Their contrasting approaches to making unspeakable horror explicit.
But it’s impossible to watch Bruckner’s adaptation without comparing it to Barker’s. Barker tapped into the darkest locus of human desire and expressed it on screen as shocking carnal violence. Bruckner sands down that perverted, forbidden lust into an accessible blueprint: Setup, kill, exposition, repeat. Clayton carries that blueprint with ghastly poise–she’s having a good time even though she isn’t letting on–that may, years from now, enjoy endurance in modern horror’s canon. But her performance is what we’ll remember best from “Hellraiser.” The film has so few other sights to show us. [C-]
“Hellraiser” debuts on Hulu on October 7.