Hellraiser (2022)
The name Clive Barker springs many images to mind: from perverse worlds where sex and violence, pleasure and pain are tightly bound together, to twisted horror stories that embrace queer identity and homosexuality, he truly reshaped the genre in the early ‘80s with the Books of Blood collections of novelettes. Most importantly, it is his cinematic adaptation of his own novella, The Hellbound Heart, into the 1987 film Hellraiser that solidified him as a household name and an icon for LGBT, BDSM-obsessed horror fanatics.
The Hellraiser franchise went through troubled times for over two decades, its rights constantly changing studios, and the productions getting cheaper and cheaper until sinking into the limbo of rushed straight-to-video films. However, the announcement that David Bruckner (of The Night House and The Ritual fame) would helm a reboot of the series was the first ray of hope in years for fans of Pinhead and the Cenobites, and casting trans actor Jamie Clayton as the Hell Priest was a choice full of potential, given the genderless nature of the character in The Hellbound Heart.
This brief preamble is necessary to make it easy to understand why this straight-to-Hulu version of Hellraiser is a massive squandered affair. In a year that has seen the return of Ghostface, Leatherface, Esther, and Michael Meyers, it is genuinely shocking that the most sterile and banal film is the one with demonic creatures that torment tortured souls by literally tearing them apart for eternity. A good point of comparison with this David Bruckner film is the 2013 remake of Evil Dead by Fede Álvarez: both have a brother-sister relationship at their core, where she is a recovering addict that no one trusts, only to become the unwilling final girl once the blood starts being spilled. What separates the two remakes is that Álvarez takes the premise from the original and expands on it in the only way that makes sense: nastier and gnarlier gore.
David Bruckner, rather than opting for a tale of inhuman desires, carnal lust, and demented obsessions, he took the easiest route possible, making a now-stereotypical “horror as metaphor”. The genre has always had deeper themes, hidden away inside the violence and monsters that are inherent to it, including Barker’s original vision. To make this primarily a tale of addiction, aping The Babadook and other so-called “elevated horrors”, is a slap in the face to the legacy of what came before it. Not only does Hellraiser fail to elicit any interesting or thoughtful ideas of what it means to be an addict, constantly craving the next fix and seemingly unable to escape their predicament, but this also has a non-existent fear factor: the Cenobites lack any sort of menace, also due to excessively smooth costumes that look plasticky instead of fleshy. Jamie Clayton was indeed a great choice of casting for the leader of the group, but she has so very little to do, and both the voice filter and her dialogue are nowhere near as memorable as Doug Bradley’s.
While Hellraiser is definitely a forgettable and overlong entry in the franchise, it is a notch above the previous six. The budget is clearly visible on screen, with sleek production design and camerawork that are nowhere near as cheap as, say, Hellraiser: Hellseeker, and the cast of young adults, with Odessa A’zion as the protagonist, do a fine job. All the problems stem primarily from the script by Luke Piotrowski and Ben Collins, who are seemingly too afraid of the overt sexuality and queerness of the source material to truly tell a perverted narrative befitting of the Hellraiser name.
Even more of a shame considering that they could have focused on Voight (Goran Visnjic), a hastily introduced villain and Jeffrey Epstein stand-in: now that is a character that, if properly fleshed out, could have been a fascinating protagonist for a fittingly provocative and uncomfortable film. Alas, that is not the case, and while the final product certainly looks nice, 2022’s Hellraiser will not leave a mark on the horror genre.