Six years earlier, supernatural tech horror Evilspeak was banned outright for an overtly blasphemous finale that saw a priest impaled with a nail from a crucifix, and that film wasn’t half as graphic as Hellraiser. I would later discover that Cenobite is a word meaning, ‘a member of a communal religious order’, their aesthetic inspired as much by Catholicism as it was punk fashion and underground S&M culture, a sacrilegious hybrid that would likely have sparked moral outrage if not for the movie’s lack of obvious iconography.Įxplorers… in the further regions of experience. Who were these creatures and why would they self-mutilate in such a manner? It was a concept that was completely alien to me. I didn’t fully understand what I was witnessing, but it was all so morbidly fascinating, particularly the film’s icky visuals, which were a far cry from Fred Krueger’s eye-catching, yet distinctly comedic practical effects set-pieces. When I rented the movie as a kid, I figured it was just another in a long line of throwaway slashers, though for once I wasn’t disappointed when I discovered it was something else entirely. There was something distinctly human about his appearance, which made his disfigurements all the more unsettling. What made him most interesting was that, despite his visual extravagances, he wasn’t your typical masked killer. Talk about monumental decisions.Īll these years later, it’s hard to imagine Pinhead as anything but the leader of the cenobites. The make-up process was such an image-altering hardship that each application took a gruelling 6 hours to complete, and Bradley was hardly a familiar name back then, the fledgling actor almost cast in the small role of removal man, one he initially opted for over that of the film’s most notable creation as he didn’t want to have his face hidden. So startling was Pinhead’s look back in 1987 that portrayer Doug Bradley went unrecognised when out of make-up at an after-shoot party, the actor regarded as a stranger by cast and crew members he’d previously spent hours working with. In fact, it would have been silly to not use his image as the film’s main selling point. With a meagre budget of around $1,000,000, you could have forgiven Barker and New World Pictures for taking a similar approach, but Pinhead needed no disguising. Most of the time you relied on impulse, and great cover art, however inferior the film, played a huge part in that. There were no fully loaded streaming devices to turn to if your choice proved a bad one. It wasn’t like today when all you have to do is search Google for a mountain of reviews and opinions on any given movie. In an oversaturated home video market it was important to simply stand out. For many low-budget distributors, canvas art was a form of promotional chicanery that disguised a film’s deficiencies. If the 80s taught us anything, it was that a memorable horror villain is key to franchise immortality, and it was Pinhead who ultimately found his way onto the film’s press material with his deathly blue cranium of nails, a startling image that leapt out of the video isles like a real-life monster in a realm of fanciful fiction. In terms of screen time, they were very much outsiders looking in.Ĭommercially, it was a very different story. A series of steadily diminishing sequels would expand on the cenobite legacy, Pinhead becoming more central to proceedings as the series unfolded, but the original instalment kept the cenobites largely in the shadows. Initially, it was lip-licking monstrosity, Butterball, and the receding-gums eyesore known simply as Chatterer who took centre stage, the two bequeathing their dialogue duties to Bradley’s black-eyed demon and Grace Kirby’s wire-headed monster, Open/Deep Throat, whose aura of femininity makes her arguably the most perverse creation of all. In fact, Pinhead wasn’t even intended as the lead cenobite, the character a mere passenger who’d grow in prominence due to make-up difficulties that prevented other cast members from delivering their lines. When it comes to modern horror’s most notable figures, Pinhead is one of the most iconic, but he wasn’t planned as a franchise player in the Michael Myers mode. One of the most striking elements of Hellraiser is that the cenobites, a brethren of malformed demons who introduced audiences to a new dimension of terror back in 1987, are essentially secondary characters - at least that was the intention when producer Christopher Figg and New World Pictures backed cult author Clive Barker’s refreshingly dark directorial debut. VHS Revival enters the darkly sensuous realm of one of horror’s bleakest creations
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