Hellraiser is far from the worst horror reboot on the market, but it's definitely missing some of what made Clive Barker's original 1987 film special. Like many modern horror movies, the film manages to weaken the impact of interesting and well-crafted scares by surrounding it with a bog-standard central narrative.
After eight sequels of dubious quality, David Bruckner takes up the Hellraiser torch for the reboot. Bruckner's work includes some of the best horror anthology pieces of all time and the stellar supernatural horror film The Night House. Frequent collaborators Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski penned the script with a little help from David S. Goyer.
The original Hellraiser was the directorial debut of Clive Barker, who grew tired of other directors mangling his stories and decided to try his hand at the medium. What he ended up with was a well-remembered psychosexual body horror nightmare that spawned a shockingly long-lived franchise. Hellraiser doesn't quite have the cultural cache of something like A Nightmare on Elm Street or Halloween, but it still has a dedicated fanbase and plenty of nostalgia to burn. The process of rebooting the franchise was a long and unfruitful one, with two sequels dropping during production. The eventual product doesn't feel like a waste of all that effort, but it's not an ideal return to form either.
Newcomers to the Hellraiser franchise won't be completely lost, but returning fans will find plenty of enjoyable callbacks and familiar story beats. The reboot follows Riley, a fragile recovering addict who struggles to make ends meet. When her questionable partner offers to cut her in on a burglary to make some cash, she's desperate enough to say yes. They discover the iconic puzzle box, just in time for Riley's life to fully fall apart. When people start disappearing, Riley is forced to battle the nightmarish forces within the unassuming relic, and she discovers a bizarre conspiracy that could be even more dangerous than the series' trademark horrors.
The best parts of this film are the straightforward horror scenes. The addiction plot line, the tenuous relationships of the main cast, and the supposed twists have all been done elsewhere. The victims are just fairly dull stock characters, despite the solid performances all around. The Cenobites, on the other hand, are very well-executed. The film has some truly stellar set designs and the look of the hideous pain-obsessed monsters is exquisite. Bruckner is constantly pulling off bizarre and unique visual tricks with shifting architecture and long tracking shots. Not only does the film look excellent, but it also sounds fantastic. The score, courtesy of another frequent collaborator Ben Lovett, is beautiful and haunting. It even makes use of a fair amount of Christopher Young's soundtrack for the original film. The sound design is also solid, providing a huge benefit to anyone with a good surround-sound system. The memorable moments of this movie will stick with the audience, even if around a third of its runtime leaves the mind by the end credits.
Hellraiser nails the aspects of the film that it absolutely needs to, but it fails to deliver the polish that would've made it great. It's reminiscent of an old Godzilla movie, in that all the monster stuff that fans came for is top-notch, but the human drama lacks anything particularly special. The film probably would've played better in a theater with a crowd, but this is the same issue Hulu ran into earlier this year with Prey. The iconic role of The Priest, better known as Pinhead, which was held by Doug Bradley in the first eight films, went to Jamie Clayton in this reboot. She's excellent in the role, breathing new life into a character that's been famous for so long. If this film manages to rack up a sequel, Clayton would likely be the main factor in getting it greenlit. Many horror fans aren't even aware of the numerous sequels that came and went over the last forty years, but it's good to see the franchise be an event again.
Hellraiser could be the basis of a fantastic franchise. David Bruckner definitely has what it takes to create something incredible with this concept. A lot of talented people put a ton of work into making the scary aspects of this film work, and they succeeded, but the film struggles because it's chained to a weak central narrative. The original Hellraiser had real darkness in the supernatural and the human elements of its story. The reboot feels too timid to allow its central characters to be the kind of monsters who need to star in this story. Though the franchise has never really gone away, this return to form feels like it was too scared of the pain to fully embrace the pleasure. Hopefully, this isn't the last voyage of the Cenobites, because they still have such sights to show us.
Hellraiser
Both a reimagining and a new novella adaptation of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, Hellraiser is a new film exclusively arriving on Hulu. In this film, a young woman struggling with addiction somehow stumbles upon a puzzle box from ages past. By solving this puzzle, she will summon the Cenobites, supernatural beings with a love of sadism and who believe the line is blurred between pain and pleasure.Â