This is what HELLRAISER films could be!

TOPLESS ROBOT

If this can be made on almost no budget, Dimension has definitely been doing the sequels wrong. Director Mike Le Han's most prominent directorial credits are on various UK true-crime reconstruction shows. With the aid of concept artist Paul Gerrard (Wrath of the Titans, Seventh Son) he has done one hell of a lot more than simply reconstructing Clive Barker's world. Think Hellraiser meets Silent Hill meets whatever other Japanese video games have depicted Hell over the years...

Oliver Longden of BRUTAL AS HELL contemplates THE DIRECT TO VIDEO DEATH OF HELLRAISER

 

Horror franchises fade and die just like other organisms. What starts off as a vibrant exciting premise winds up puking and shitting itself to death in abject confusion while the rest of society does their best to ignore it like an embarrassing relative in a nursing home. Rarely has this been more true than with the Hellraiser franchise which starts with a film of unique and uncompromising vision and ends a senile dog desperately in need of being put down with a hammer.

Hellraiser is one of the best horror movies of all time. It has been hugely influential and despite featuring some of the most horrifying eighties hairdos ever committed to tape it still has the power to both shock and arouse even in these jaded times. A young woman becomes trapped in a deadly game with the otherworldly Cenobites, sadomasochistic voyagers to the limits of sensation. Three sequels were made, none of which could hold a candle to the original movie. The last, Hellraiser: Bloodlines, was a such an artistic failure that the director refused to put his name to it, insisting on being credited with a pseudonym. That was in 1996 and it felt like Hellraiser had creatively run its course and been put to bed. One great film, three indifferent sequels. Enough good stuff to make the fancy boxed set worth buying if you saw it cheap...

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(Recommended Reads) ‘Demons To Some, Angels To Others’: Celebrating 25 Years of Hellraiser by Keri O’Shea

From BRUTAL AS HELL

How to sum up the importance of a film like Hellraiser? I have much to say on that score, yet I must have started writing the introduction to this piece ten times before deleting it all. I started by trying to sum up what a game-changing film Hellraiser was, coming as it did during a decade which generally seemed happier adding camp humour aplenty to its horror, and then I tried to explain how the film brought monsters – genuinely terrifying monsters – back to our screens. All of the above is true, certainly. But the thing I kept coming back to, as much as I really do feel that Hellraiser revolutionised the genre, and really did make monsters scary again, was my personal response to this movie. Hey, it almost goes without saying; it’s a common theme for all of us who have been writing these retrospectives over the past year, and why I was so keen to be the staff writer to pen this one. So, here’s how I’m going to sum up the importance of Hellraiser, at least for now:

Hellraiser changed my life...

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art by ~pestibug

HELLRAISER the TV series?

From BRUTAL AS HELL

 

And now, the potentially better news… just days after it became widely known that the first steps are being taken toward a Nightbreed TV series, production company Sonar Entertainment have announced plans for Hellraiser: The Series. Aside from the tagline ‘Television is going to Hell’ and the vaguely smirk-inducing concept art below, not a great deal else to report. I guess it depends on their approach, but I find it hard to envisage Hellraiser lending itself to a serial format as well as Nightbreed might, and the lack of any indication that Clive Barker himself is involved gives little comfort. As we may recall Barker pronouncing of the recent Hellraiser sequel Revelations, “I have nothing to do with the fucking thing. If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.” One would assume his position hasn’t changed...