You Need This Pinhead Like You Need, Um, Pins in Your Head

A review of the 2022 Hellraiser, now streaming on Hulu, a remake that can’t match the perverse and grotesque Clive Barker original.

Vulture and New York TV critic Jen Chaney previously worked for the Washington Post and has bylines at the New York Times and Vanity Fair. She also wrote As If: The Complete Oral History of Clueless.

Hulu’s Hellraiser, the remake of Clive Barker’s 1987 horror classic, plays it way too safe. Photo: Courtesy of Spyglass Media Group

In 1987’s Hellraiser, the kinky work of body horror from writer-director Clive Barker, sex was the motivation for everything.

It’s what moves pleasure seeker Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) to purchase a mysterious puzzle box that promises to open a portal filled with otherworldly opportunities for sensory bliss, only to have his body torn apart by meathooks. That’s because to the Cenobites, the odd creatures summoned when the puzzle box is solved and led by the so-called Pinhead, pleasure and pain are synonymous.

Sex is also what drives Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins, dolled up in an ’80s coif and neon eye shadow) to help the skeletal remnants of Frank rebuild his physical self. She seduces men in bars, brings them home, then sacrifices their flesh to her brother-in-law, with whom she had a torrid affair prior to marrying her husband. Her goal: Put Frank back together, then run away with him so they can bang with the same abandon they once did.

In that version of Hellraiser, the intersection of the titillating and the grotesque is the whole point. By the time you reach the end of the film’s tight 90 minutes, you may feel like you’ve been transformed into the window-peeper from the sicko meme, and that’s part of the point, too — that as human beings, our hunger for new and greater orgasmic highs can be dangerous. Yes, that’s true even for you, allegedly innocent viewer.

Thirty-five years and nine sequels later, there’s a new version of Hellraiser streaming on Hulu that gestures at similar ideas and borrows familiar plot points but makes the classic reboot mistake of adding too much story to what should have been a more concentrated reimagining of the Pinhead universe. In the hands of director David Bruckner and screenwriters Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski, who collaborated on 2020’s creepy, effectively focused The Night House, this Hellraiser piles too much exposition and too many twists onto what was once a pretty straightforward, if bizarre, creature feature. It’s as if the 2022 Hellraiser — on which David S. Goyer receives a story credit and Barker serves as a producer — is the reconstructed version of Frank from the original but with a bunch of unnecessary, extra layers of skin.

Like the original, this iteration opens with the acquisition of that puzzle box, this time by a woman named Serena Manaker (Hiam Abbass of Succession) who works for the wealthy, eccentric, and horny businessman Roland Voight (Goran Višnjić). Serena brings the cursed toy to Roland’s palatial home in the Berkshires, where he regularly hosts orgies. Inevitably, he solves the puzzle, sacrificing the body of a random young guy to the Cenobites, at which point the movie jumps ahead a few years to what appears to be New York, where Riley (Odessa A’zion, previously seen in Netflix’s Grand Army) and her boyfriend, Trevor (Drew Starkey of Outer Banks), are having sex.

Trevor persuades Riley, who is in recovery and struggling to get back on her feet, to steal the puzzle box from where it’s been locked up in a storage facility, then sell it and split the cash. But of course Riley has to fiddle with Satan’s Rubik’s Cube, accidentally sacrifice her brother Matt (Brandon Flynn, a.k.a. Justin from 13 Reasons Why) to the Cenobites, then go on a quest to solve the puzzle and get her brother back. That pleasure/pain dichotomy serves as a metaphor for addiction here and, tangentially perhaps, a commentary on the hubris of the very rich. Which could have been interesting territory to mine if the movie didn’t drag so often.

While this version of Hellraiser can’t be accused of completely avoiding the in-your-face gore of its predecessor — we do get treated to the sight of knives slicing into hands, hooks tearing into human tissue, and, in one case, a view of a needle penetrating a person’s neck, partially shown from inside that person’s neck — it still feels like a safer version of the film that inspired it. As corny as some of the practical 1987 effects may look today, there is still something visceral and grimy in the aesthetic of the first Hellraiser that isn’t matched by the more glossed-up grit of the remake. Perhaps that’s to be expected from a Hellraiser that is technically being brought to you by the Walt Disney Company. (“From the corporate entity that gave you Encanto and Jungle Cruise, it’s … Hellraiser!”)

The appearance of several of the Cenobites — including the one whose entire face is dominated by a menacing set of chattering teeth — is almost identical to the look of the monsters in the original. The most notable deviation comes in the form of Pinhead, the terrifying, nail-laden face of the Hellraiser franchise, occupied in the first eight films by actor Doug Bradley. Here that role is taken on by a woman, Jamie Clayton of The L Word: Generation Q, which offers the opportunity for a potentially refreshing new direction for the character. Unfortunately, the result is not nearly as menacing as one would hope. Instead of highlighting, say, the glints of evil in her deadened eyes, this Pinhead — known in the script technically as The Priest —is softened, made up, and shot in a way that comes across as more ethereal than terrifying. Clayton plays her with a reserve that is authoritative but not particularly expressive. With her azure skin and glowing needles, the resulting effect is that of a hologram just back from Glow Night at the local acupuncture joint, rather than the successor to an iconic horror villain.

Which is a shame because A’zion, with her raspy, Natasha Lyonne–esque aura, makes for an effectively panicked yet determined heroine, one who is clearly swapping her fixation on pills and alcohol for an obsession with a puzzle box and her missing brother. If she had been forced to face off in a meaningful way with a more competently rendered female Pinhead, the movie might have had a better shot at reigniting the kink and sadomasochistic fuckery of the first Hellraiser. Instead, we get a reboot that takes no risks and steers away from the uncomfortable sexual jolts of its predecessor. This movie doesn’t raise hell. Honestly, it barely raises heck.

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