The Blade Was Meant for Who?
A review of David Bruckner’s 2022 adaptation of 'Hellraiser'
The Yearning Rating: ✰✰
Romance ✰
Sex ✰✰
Storytelling ✰½
Performance ✰✰½
Yearning ✰✰
There are some spoilers ahead for both the 1987 version and 2022 reboot of Hellraiser. If you haven’t seen the original, you can watch it for free here on Tubi. The 2022 reboot is streaming on Hulu.
And real quick: we are including a content warning up top for nonspecific discussion of gore, violence and physical mutilation.
Written by Meg Heim
Is there a God in Hell? Well, maybe just Pinhead. (And if we’re lucky, Jamie Clayton). This week, we are taking the spooks a little closer to Satan. As an avid consumer of horror and the queerness within, it is my honor to helm The Yearning’s first review of a genuine horror film—the 2022 reboot of Clive Barker’s Hellraiser.
Hellraiser’s opening parallels its original inspiration with a hedonistic man seeking the ultimate sexual experience. Roland Voight, a twisted millionaire, tricks an innocent victim, Joey, into solving the final configuration of a mystical puzzle box. Joey is then stabbed by a hidden blade inside the box. The box, having received his blood and marking him as a target, opens a portal, from which chains fly out and rip Joey apart. And Voight, having supplied the fifth and final required sacrifice, demands an audience with the almighty and unholy power, Leviathan.
Years later, Riley (Odessa A’zion) is trying to stay sober by living with her overbearing brother Matt, his boyfriend Colin and their roommate Nora. Riley’s situationship Trevor, an art handler, convinces her to assist him in breaking into and stealing from an abandoned warehouse for a quick cash scheme—and wouldn’t you know it, here enters the mystical puzzle box. After a huge fight with her brother, Riley relapses in an empty park and solves the puzzle box but avoids being cut by the blade. The Cenobites—monstrous suggestions of human bodies, adorned with horrific, physics-defying mutilations and piercings—appear and demand that she choose someone else as a sacrifice. “The Blade was meant for you,” they croak. “If not you, then you must choose another.”
Through what I’ll call a series of unfortunate events, the Cenobites set their sights on Riley’s brother, Matt, making quick work of whisking him out of the abandoned park and into a violent ending. This jumpstarts the unfolding of the malevolent box’s second go-round: once the blade draws blood, its forces will not rest until it does so four more times. As in the original 1987 version, the Cenobites act upon the will of the box as well as hold fast to a simple, sadomasochistic principle: the most excruciating pain allows for the most exquisite pleasure. This explains their bodies, contorted grotesquely beyond human possibility.
Let’s add a little context: the original Hellraiser, while not explicitly queer, has been properly cemented in the zeitgeist of foundational queer horror films for many reasons. Clive Barker is an openly queer author and filmmaker who wrote and directed the 1987 Hellraiser based on his novella, The Hellbound Heart. The original begins with a hedonist of its own, Frank Cotton. Frank solves the puzzle box himself and the Cenobites’ hooked chains emerge, tearing him immediately and completely to pieces. Through flashbacks, we see Frank engage in many violent sexual acts. There was even a sex scene involving some spanking that Barker had to cut to get the movie’s rating revised from X to R. This shows that the open and fluid way sex and sexuality was portrayed in Hellraiser defied a cultural standard at the time. When you compare Hellraiser (1987) to some of its contemporaries—it was released during the 80’s horror boom alongside popular horror franchises such as Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween—its core messages about addiction, sexuality, and love stand out as unique. As Barker himself put it in a 2017 interview with The Guardian, “Most English or American horror movies were not sexual, or coquettishly so—a bunch of [virginal] teenagers having sex and getting killed. Hellraiser…has a much more twisted sense of sexuality”.
Both versions of Hellraiser illustrate the source material’s love affair with kink and BDSM culture. You see this primarily through the depiction of the Cenobites, whose physical appearances Barker drew inspiration for from Catholicism, punk fashion, and most prominently an old haunt of his—a New York underground club in the ‘80s that hosted a “very hard” S&M night. It was the first place he ever saw blood spilt in the name of sex and people pierced for fun; it undeniably informed the conception of Pinhead.
So, we have queer subtext. How does the 2022 version build on this? Unfortunately, in my opinion it largely…doesn’t. There are explicitly queer characters (Matt and his boyfriend, Colin) but their queerness plays absolutely no part in driving the plot forward. While sometimes this is refreshing and worth celebration, in the context of a film franchise built on inherent queer undertones it wasn’t enough for me. Whereas the plot of the 1982 version is a wonderfully unique and brutal tale about good and evil and sex as a mutually affecting force, the reboot molds this into a staler, formulaic, “who-will-get-out-alive” story that could have featured characters of any sexuality or gender identity. It almost feels like a whodunnit with thoughtful diversity casting. At the very least, the first half of the movie moves quickly. Riley and her companions immediately mobilize to find Matt. They begin looking for clues as to the origins of the box and what may have really happened to him. But about halfway through, things really begin to get muddled.
This iteration of Hellraiser leans heavily on the idea of destiny. This is an odd choice to me given that in the original film and the opener of the reboot, the puzzle box is something that was sought out by Frank and Roland (both in pursuit of carnal wonders untold). When Riley avoids being cut by the blade, she is given the power to choose who should be sacrificed instead. But Matt cuts himself by accident so…she doesn’t choose. This confused concept persists through the final hour of the film—out of impatience, the leader of the Cenobites, Pinhead (finally, we see the illustrious Jamie Clayton) appears to Riley and commands her to sacrifice the final two souls to complete the last two configurations of the box. When Riley protests, Pinhead moves things along by stabbing her with the blade?! This felt like such a weak plot choice to me—there is then almost no significance to Riley’s initial escape of the blade and being forced into the horrible position of marking others to save herself if the Cenobites can just decide they are allowed to force her hand regardless. A classic horror motif is that last minute decision to save yourself, even if it means someone you never wanted to lose dies in your place. I personally wanted more than that from the return of Hellraiser; in my opinion, it isn’t even able to deliver well on that overplayed concept. Riley’s burden of choice fluctuates based on how much Pinhead is willing to show their cards.
The movie sadly continues to fall apart as it loses sight of who its true villain is—is it Voight, who sought the Cenobites’ gifts in the first place? Is it Pinhead and their Cenobites, for refusing to play by the rules that they themselves set? Is it Trevor, who double-crosses Riley in a boring twist? Am I asking way too many rhetorical questions because I’m frustrated?
The greatest service to the original that the 2022 Hellraiser does is cast Clayton, a trans woman and spectacular actress who herself lived through and participated in the 1980s club kid scene in New York. I expect most readers of The Yearning are familiar with Clayton’s work in The L Word: Generation Q and her fan-favorite role in the gone-too-soon Netflix show, Sense8. But if you’re interested in hearing more about her truly self-made path into Hollywood, I highly recommend this interview she did with Kate Moennig and Leisha Hailey on their L Word-adjacent podcast, PANTS. She is captivating, funny, crush-worthy. I really appreciated the directorial choice to cast a trans person in the role and underscore that Pinhead, although played originally by a cis man (Doug Bradley), was never assigned a gender. And as a genderless but delicately feminized Pinhead, Jamie kills. But she’s hardly in the movie? Fans of the original Hellraiser fell in love with the unspoken leader of the Cenobites, who got about 8 minutes of screen time in all. It seems to me like an easy slam dunk to feature the beloved Hell Priest more, maybe flesh out their relationship to the tomboyish, queer-coded Riley. And yet, I came away from this movie feeling again like I wanted more Pinhead. And about half the time we do see Clayton, she’s standing menacingly (but passively) in an ultra-wide shot outside Voight’s abandoned ~spooky~ mansion. Sigh.
The Cenobites are also beautifully rendered in the 2022 Hellraiser, with delightfully scary and inventive bodily corruptions and more diverse casting. (Although I noticed that any reference to the fat Cenobite, Butterball, was missing.) I loved reading these notes from 1987 Hellraiser costume designer Jane Wildgoose, which said: “They should be ‘magnificent super-butchers’...and then here we have in a very Clive turn of phrase, I’ve written down, ‘repulsive glamour.’” I love horror, but I don’t need gore to sell me on a good scary movie. Both the original and rebooted Hellraiser are very violent, graphic, and gory films, but Barker’s version uses gore with intentionality. Despite the inclusion of the word Hell in the franchise name, both iterations of the film toe a nonreligious line, with Pinhead self-identifying them and their Cenobites as, “Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some. Angels to others.” Which brings me to a reoccurring critique—this take on the 1987 horror classic is unfortunately clunky; it lacks thoughtfulness in its storytelling. A quick moment where Riley skims over online articles as she researches Voight pauses on a headline calling him a “sexual deviant.” Sexual deviant? I was jarred by the homophobic weight of that phrase. The characters don’t challenge this and use it as a building block for their understanding of the box and the man who possessed it before them. Unlike his parallel in the original film, Voight is also queer coded. This felt almost kink-shamey, and while I doubt that's what director David Bruckner (who is a straight cis man FWIW…) intended, it felt careless to me.
Outside of Clayton and A’zion, I also felt unfortunately underwhelmed from a performance perspective. Voight is played by Goran Visnjic (you might remember him from a campier but similarly one-note performance in a different queer-coded spooky flick, Practical Magic) and he takes his demented, tortured villain act a bit too far, crossing over almost into bumbling territory. Something about his performance in the second half of the movie made me think of Barty Crouch Jr. (David Tennant) in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. I also found the rest of Riley’s community—Matt (Brandon Flynn), Colin (Adam Faison) and Nora (Aoife Hinds)—unconvincing and stiff in their roles. I think this probably would have bothered me less if the movie was able to hone in on its central message more efficiently.
The movie wraps up in an unsatisfying way as you learn that the horrors endured by the group of friends have all been in service of Voight’s continued aspirations and the conclusion arrives open-ended enough to suggest there is room for a sequel. There are some great, scary visual effects that pay an updated homage to the original Hellraiser—particularly when the Cenobites are claiming their victims and the gates to other dimensions open up, stretching on forever into blackness, wherever the victim is. I’m awarding two stars for yearning because if Clayton as Pinhead isn’t yearning for blood, souls and bodies, then I don’t know what she’s doing.
I’m sure that this review has really sold you all on sitting down to watch this reboot! But I do hope that some of you will watch and want to discuss with me—it had me fired up because I feel so adamantly that—outside of starring queen Jamie Clayton—it does not build on the original story in any meaningful way. If you can stomach the gore, the 1987 Hellraiser is such an excellent movie. If you’ve seen both or end up watching them, I’d love to break this down further with you in the comments or in conversation.