Hellraiser Movies Ranked, From Pain To Pleasure

Clive Barker's "Hellraiser" series is one of the most recognizable franchises in modern horror history. The gothic horror saga that combined BDSM, queer subtext, and philosophical agony has proven to be a favorite with fans for decades. 

In adapting his own novella, "The Hellbound Heart," Barker brought some much-needed freshness to horror in the 1980s at a time when the slasher villain ruled the roost. Centered on a mysterious puzzle box, the series revealed the demonic sado-masochistic forces of the Cenobites, a priest-like order of former humans who harvest souls for violent experiments. The head of these Cenobites, known as Pinhead, is one of the true icons of horror villainy. Freddy Krueger may offer great one-liners and Jason can slice you up good, but Pinhead is the one who gets into your head.

The "Hellraiser" franchise is a curious mish-mash of great ideas, ambition, studio meddling, and harried script rewrites. Like many a long-running horror series, it has its ups and downs, although "Hellraiser" has always had more low points than high. Mercifully, we're getting a new entry into the saga this month. Simply titled "Hellraiser", the new movie from Hulu seems to tick all the right boxes: it's R-rated, it's made by a genuine horror director with love for the story (David Bruckner), and Clive Barker is onboard as a producer. The trailer certainly got fans frothing at the mouth, with "Sense8" star Jamie Clayton now donning the pins to play our Hell Priest.

To celebrate the release of "Hellraiser", we're looking at the prior ten films in the franchise and ranking them from worst to best. Come, we have such sights to show you.

You'll notice two recurring themes with the latter half of the "Hellraiser" franchise: one, the rush on behalf of Bob Weinstein's Dimension to push out a new movie solely to hold onto the property rights; and two, that the scripts started out as totally separate plots that someone was forced to shoehorn Pinhead and company into. "Hellraiser: Hellworld," released straight to DVD in 2005, started out life as an adaptation of a short story called "Dark Can't Breathe" by Joel Soisson. You get the sense that any horror franchise could have been clumsily shoved into this idea.

The set-up is at least intriguing: an MMORPG based on the "Hellraiser" series has engulfed the lives of six friends, one of whom became so obsessed that he apparently died by suicide to escape it. Two years later, they're invited to a private party for the game headed by the legendary Lance Henriksen, and soon, the Cenobites turn up to do what they do best.

Perhaps best known to some for featuring a young pre-Superman Henry Cavill, "Hellraiser: Hellworld" has some decent scares if you think of it as a generic slasher film. Of course, that's not what made "Hellraiser" so special, and as a "Hellraiser" movie, it's pretty bad. The meta aspect with the game could have built to something tricksy in the vein of the Cenobites' machinations, but it's all executed so sloppily. In fairness, it's hard to imagine how a hastily re-written script intended for entirely different purposes could have worked.

It's a real surprise that the 2017 addition to the franchise, which doesn't star Doug Bradley and bears the marks of yet another low-budget rush-job, ended up being surprisingly solid. It helps that the screenplay for this one, written by director Gary J. Tunnicliffe, was actually intended to be a "Hellraiser" film from the offset and not a forced rewrite of something unrelated.

Tunnicliffe himself, also on make-up duty, plays the Auditor, a clerk in Hell who is tasked with aiding the Cenobites in finding new ways to harvest souls in an era of advanced technology and decreased belief. This expansion of the mythos is truly fascinating and feels natural to Barker's world in a way few of the preceding films even attempted to be. This subplot gets bogged down with a more generic police procedural element that was done better in earlier films. Still, if the franchise had been able to continue down this route, fans wouldn't have been mad (the film was quietly dumped on VOD in 2018 after the sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein forced Dimension Films into a panic.) Horror nerds should look out for a supporting turn by "Nightmare on Elm Street" alumni Heather Langenkamp!

"Hellraiser: Inferno" has a lot going against it. The initial idea of having Kirsty face a plot by a cult to unleash the Leviathan and the Cenobites into the real world was nixed due to budget concerns. The script was, again, not intended to initially be for a "Hellraiser" film. And it had a first-time director behind the camera. Fortunately, said filmmaker is Scott Derrickson — best known today for "Sinister," "Doctor Strange," and "The Black Phone" — and you can see the origins of a sturdy horror director on display here.

At the very least, he understands that Pinhead is best utilized as a bystander to humanity's ills rather than a quippy slasher villain. The meat of the story is a morality tale wrapped up in a police procedural. An emotionally damaged detective with a history of cruelty and drug abuse is brought in to investigate what appears to be a ritual murder. He solves a puzzle box and then slowly his life starts to unravel. He's plagued by hallucinations and haunted by his own tumultuous past. 

While all of the expected "Hellraiser" beats are here, what makes "Inferno" most effective is in how it utilizes Pinhead as a purveyor of psychological torture. Sure, chains and mutilation can get the job done, but what's more interesting than having your prisoner punish himself? Derrickson makes the most of a tiny budget and actor Craig Sheffer, who previously worked with Barker on his underrated fantasy horror "Nightbreed," gets some stand-out moments. If any of the maligned "Hellraiser" sequels deserve reconsideration, it's this one.

With the third film, you could start to see the wheels fall off the franchise. It became clear that the radical aspects that made "Hellraiser" so fresh only a few years before were about to be intensely diluted with each passing installment. None of the human characters from the first two films are present (except for one brief video) and the sexual element that's key to the Cenobites' allure is gone. Yet what we have is still an intriguing series of ideas that offers a succinct conclusion to Pinhead's story and, if you choose to view it as such, a satisfying ending to a cinematic trilogy.

Following the events of the second film, Pinhead finds himself trapped in a statue called the Pillar of Souls, which finds its way to the office of a womanizing douchebag who quickly becomes Cenobite fodder. This Pinhead is utterly bereft of the slivers of humanity or calm distance he embodied in earlier films. Now split into two entities — including Captain Elliot Spencer, who later became a Cenobite — the film offers an often fascinating study of two halves of a broken man. 

Would that the entire film was so inclined. Most of "Hell on Earth" gets kind of campy, with lots of fun new Cenobites including one comprised of CDs. There's a thematic reason this take on Pinhead goes full merciless slasher villain, but it feels like a harbinger of things to come in the franchise. Still, Doug Bradley totally steals the show in a dual role and those sillier parts are pretty fun, certainly more so than later installments.

Of course the original remains the best, and for good reason. Directed by Barker himself, "Hellraiser" is a tightly put-together horror that most potently captures the essence of the author's novella. The purest id of "Hellraiser" is here, that exploration of the malleable boundaries of pleasure and pain, and the depths some will sink to in order to achieve their most taboo desires.

A relatively faithful take on the novella, "Hellraiser" was infamously dismissed by Roger Ebert upon release with a half-star review that declared the film to be "as dreary a piece of goods as has masqueraded as horror in many a long, cold night." It's a strange description for a work that is certainly bleak in its moral outlook, but far more vibrant than such a description. It's often said that we're more scared of what we can't see than what we can see, but Barker makes sure the audience is just as petrified of what is shown in the harshest lighting available. The first true reveal of the Cenobites still ranks as one of the all-time great moments in '80s horror, and it's because you see every single detail of their astonishing make-up. The only scene that beats it is the extremely gooey reconstruction of the villain's body as it reverse-melts out of the floorboards!

While the Cenobites scare, the darkest and most effective part of "Hellraiser" is the humans, particularly its true antagonists, Frank and Julia. The former was torn apart by the Cenobites, while the latter kills unwitting souls to help him regain her lover's flesh. If you took out all of the inter-dimensional BDSM torture, you would still have an eerie and truly deviant tale of dark love gone horribly wrong. The Cenobites are mostly in the background here, truly acting as the clinical guards of obscenity that made them so upsetting in the first place. Even if we'd never gotten another "Hellraiser" film after this, it was clear from the get-go that we were seeing a genre masterpiece in the making.