Horror has become quite particular. There’s the usual assembly-line production of slashers, but otherwise it’s become dominated by adult horror, elevated horror, or whatever you wish to call the current crop of metaphor-heavy films that are as likely to leave you sad as scared. There’s little room for a scrappy, confronting film like 1987’s Hellraiser was, which took its villains’ tenant of melding pain and pleasure in the name of sensation as its own guiding light.
You shouldn’t be able to blend the bombast of Hellraiser into today’s horror mode of choice, but franchises are franchises, so of course they’ve attempted the feat. Director David Bruckner, whose recent films The Night House and The Ritual put an intelligent core in the middle of unabashed genre delights, is about as prepared as you can get for the task. The Night House was a startlingly realistic take on battling suicidal ideation while a ghost relentlessly lurks. The Ritual put four buddies up against grief and whatever was stalking them in the woods. As these films show, Bruckner isn’t afraid to let a horror film be a horror film (jump scares and all), but his movies have enough thoughtful oomph behind them to survive today’s fickle expectations.
So no, the new Hellraiser (it reuses the name) doesn’t even try to recreate the original’s appeal. Instead, it does something just adjacent. It’s a film that retains the purity of sensation, but it cleans it up and gives it a respectable suit.
Aesthetic Sensation
The original Hellraiser dragged you through the mud, and it wanted you to feel the grime. Its aesthetics were purposefully gross, which this studio version would never be allowed to replicate. Bruckner is just as purposeful with his smoothed-over style, though, and it’s hypnotizing enough to drag you around yet again.
The updates made to the horror icon Pinhead are a perfect microcosm of what the movie does right. As the leader of the Cenobites, she must embody whatever tenor the stalking, dimension-hopping bad guys take on in each Hellraiser iteration, and what Bruckner and actress Jamie Clayton land on this time is an inscrutable menace. Chilly and unfeeling isn’t a new approach to these beings, but what’s striking is how many spine tingles they get from her silent stillness.
The key to this is the interplay between character design and lighting, which morphs her face as you try to grasp her motives. The major tweak in design is to her eponymous pinheads, which now have bulbous, light-catching ends. Against her ashen face, they protrude and obscure, and in a trick, Bruckner deliciously repeats, shifting light makes their glints and shadows transform her steady gaze from menacing to calculating to something akin to amused. It’s an unnerving thing to witness, and it perfectly matches the calmer approach Bruckner has applied to the material.
The rest of the production is worth wallowing in as well, from the perspective-cracking warp that occurs when the Cenobites enter our dimension to an imposing mansion that becomes its own puzzle box. In a way, the grandness of the filmmaking becomes the tingling sensation the film thrives on, no longer chasing the constant shock of lurid sexuality or gore (although there’s enough bloody nastiness to satisfy) but twisted, beautiful awe, even as the story it’s following occasionally sputters.
Horror That Has Themes
Moralistic underpinnings are another common element of the Hellraiser series that the 2022 version retains, and with thoughtful horror in style, it takes the opportunity to slow down and mine the torment the main character endures after her encounter with the puzzle box.
Riley is introduced as a young woman who doesn’t quite have it together. She’s living with her brother (Brandon Flynn), not really making her part of the rent, and seeing a guy who seems ambivalent about whether she’s staying out of trouble and off drugs. Her brother makes up for the lack of concern, and quickly (if less than gracefully) the wear and tear of caring for an addict is established. Riley stumbles upon the puzzle box while doing a little thievery with her boyfriend (Drew Starkey), and as the puzzle clicks into place everyone in her orbit falls victim instead of her, making the wear and tear her family and friends experience into literal tearing of their flesh.
Guilt, then, becomes her driving force, and the film attempts to explore the weight she must carry as she makes decisions she can’t take back. The idea is too imprecise, though, and the middle section meanders away from firm meaning. When the cascading deaths wrought by the Cenobites make a mark on Riley, the film has weight. When the deaths are less connected, it all feels a bit airless.
Odessa A’zion as Riley doesn’t lift the flabby material, but she holds up in scenes where her character has a reason for all the running and screaming beyond fear. The rest of the cast is at the same level, with no one sticking out as either remarkably impressive or remarkably bad. Their uniformity isn’t a detriment, though, because they aren’t intended as the movie’s focus. They’re mostly chess pieces in a movie where the rest of the filmmaking process is leaned on far more to evoke mood and meaning, and even when the meaning gets shaky, the mood is always strong enough to carry it through.
Conclusion: Hellraiser
For a Hellraiser movie this is fairly prim and proper, but what’s lost in gleeful sexuality is made up for in its eerily beautiful style. In that way, aesthetics still bring plenty of sensation in a twisted, bloody way that would make the Cenobites proud.
What did you think of Hellraiser? How do you think it ranks in the series?
Hellraiser is available on Hulu October 7th.
Watch Hellraiser
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