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Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Ashley Laurence, Sean Chapman, Oliver Smith ... see more see more... , Robert Hines , Antony Allen , Leon Davis , Michael Cassidy , Frank Baker , Kenneth Nelson , Gay Baynes , Niall Buggy , Dave Atkins , Simon Bamford , Doug Bradley , Pamela Sholto , Sharon Bower , Grace Kirby , Raul Newney , Nicholas Vince , Oliver Parker

The feature-film debut of multi-talented filmmaker Clive Barker, this grim and surreal project is based on the writer/director's own novella The Hell-Bound Heart. The film opens with a chilling prolog... read more read more...ue in which globe-trotting pervert Frank (Sean Chapman) -- a connoisseur of sexual depravity seeking the ultimate sensual experience -- purchases a small, intricate puzzle box from an unseen dealer in an unspecified country. Upon solving the puzzle, Frank opens the door to a hellish alternate universe and is promptly torn to ribbons by a network of hooks and chains; his strewn body parts are subsequently collected by the Cenobites -- grotesque, S & M-clad denizens of hell. The story continues several years later, when Frank's brother, Larry (Andrew Robinson), moves into Frank's abandoned house with his daughter, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), and his new wife, Julia (Clare Higgins). An accident causes some of Larry's blood to spill on the attic floor, which somehow triggers Frank's hideous resurrection. His body only half-composed, Frank seeks the tacit assistance of Julia -- with whom he had once had a torrid sexual liaison -- in restoring him to human form. Still secretly in love with Frank, Julia assists him by seducing men from the town and bringing them back to the house so her undead lover can drain their bodies of blood. Her increasingly furtive behavior arouses the suspicions of Kirsty, who had already moved to an apartment to get away from her despised stepmother. After following Julia and her next potential victim home, Kirsty comes face to face with the still-incomplete Frank, narrowly escaping with her life...and with the puzzle box. After losing consciousness, Kirsty awakens in the hospital, where she manages to solve the box's intricate mechanism and summon a trio of Cenobites -- including their apparent leader (played by Doug Bradley and dubbed "Pinhead" on subsequent sequels) -- who are prepared to claim her. In desperation, Kirsty offers them a bargain in which they agree to spare her soul if she leads them to Frank. Kirsty soon returns home to find Julia with her father...whose behavior has become disturbingly unnatural. Realizing that her father has become Frank's latest victim -- and that her uncle is now walking around in his brother's skin -- Kirsty hands Frank over to the Cenobites, who have particularly evil plans for their old friend. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi

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75% liked it

65,360 ratings

Critics

63% liked it

32 critics

R, 1 hr. 34 min.

Directed by: Clive Barker

Release Date: September 18, 1987

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DVD Release Date: March 3, 1998

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Stats: 4,156 reviews

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Frank The Monster played by Oliver Smith Your death will be legendary even in hell Hellraiser remake Promo Photo Frank Cotton Pinhead demons to some, angels to others Hellraiser Hellraiser Hellraiser Pinhead Pinhead Hellraiser Hellraiser Hellraiser Kirsty and the Chatterer Cenobite The Engineer Hellraiser Hellraiser
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Flixster Reviews (4,156)

  • flixsterman
    April 7, 2012
    flixsterman
    A blood drenched fright fantasy from the brilliant but twisted mind of Clive Barker. As much as I enjoy a good scare, gore just isn't my cup of tea. I waited 25 years to see this film, it'll be at least that long before I want to see it again .
  • TheDudeLebowski65
    March 18, 2012
    TheDudeLebowski65
    Clive Barker's ultimate masterpiece of on screen Horror. Based on his novella, the Hellbound Heart, Hellraiser is one cool film to watch. The film surrounds a mysterious puzzle box built by toy maker, Philippe Lemarchand, unlocked the box opens the gates of hell, and summons demo... read morens. Hellraiser is a very cool, and atmospheric horror film. The film is gory and solid. Hellraiser is a terrifying film. There's nothing that Clive Barker doesn't do to your senses. He successfully twists your imagination in ways that no other Horror master can. Barker's film has perverse elements of sexuality which add a certain twist to the overall plot of the film. I have read the book that Hellraiser is based on, and Clive Barker stays very faithful to his novella. The film as much as the book are excellent and this screen adaptation is very well done. After all the film is directed by the mastermind who conjured up this terrifying journey through hell. The acting is great, and the story has a melancholic Horror vibe to it, which makes Hellraiser a fine cinematic work in Horror, what else could you expect from Clive Barker? One thing that I love about Clive Barker, and the thing that he's able to do so well is obviously that he's able to reach beyond your imagination to truly terrify you. Enter the terrifying mind of Clive Barker.
  • skeletonking101
    October 26, 2011
    skeletonking101
    Hellraiser is one of the most disturbing films made in the 80s, and when I say disturbing I mean sadomasochistic disturbing, mainly because of what the cenobites do to humans, but this is a very creative film when it comes to the plot and with the characters.
  • CloudStrife84
    June 6, 2011
    CloudStrife84
    Genuinely creepy and rife with suspense. Great make-up and gore effects for its time. Some characters actions are a bit stupid and unnatural though (such as the scene where Andrew Robinson's character gets his hand all bloody in an accident and his wife barely reacts to it). I wa... read mores also repeatedly distracted by Clare Higgins' ugly hairdo. What in God's name were they thinking back then? Just minor irritants, however, in an otherwise good and well-made horror film.
  • FiLmCrAzY
    June 5, 2011
    FiLmCrAzY
    God knows why they went on to make 2 others? but it was a very bad movie. Maybe i cant appreciate it because its an old moie and the graphics and the design of hellraiser himself was truly dreadful but i seriously wouldnt inflict this movie onto anyone.
  • blkbomb
    May 31, 2011
    blkbomb
    Hellraiser is a cool and entertaining movie, but that's all it is. It's predictable and goes through long spells of horrible dialogue and even worse acting. All of that can be forgiven though because the story is really awesome. The greatest aspect of the movie is definitely the ... read morescore which really sets the eerie atmosphere for the entire movie.
  • Deano78
    April 9, 2011
    Deano78
    A cult classic and for the time I can see why. However if watching it for the first time now, like I have, it looks very dated and the effects quite poor. Still it has its gory moments a rather simple story and could do with the cenobites being in the film a bit more. It did laun... read morech a whole load of sequels, 7 altogether?! and a remake of this is on the way soon!
  • ajv2688
    January 31, 2011
    ajv2688
    A brilliantly crafted horror film. The story is creepy, realistic, ancient, and awesome, the actors are good, and the blood and gore is spectacular. If you're a true horror fan you must see this movie. I love it!
  • groaningbitch
    January 25, 2011
    groaningbitch
    Cenobites as polyphonic embodiments of superego in Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart

    "Outside, somewhere near, the world would soon be waking. He had watched it wake from the window of this very room, day after day, stirring itself to another round of fruitless pursuits, and ... read morehe'd known, known, that there was nothing left out there to excite him. No heat, only sweat. No passion, only sudden lust, and just as sudden indifference. He had turned his back on such dissatisfaction. If in doing so he had to interpret the signs these creatures brought him, then that was the price of ambition. He was ready to pay it."
    .....from Frank in The Hellbound Heart.


    The Hellbound Heart is Clive Barker's gothic tale about the pursuit of unfathomable pleasure through Lamarchband's box going awry, and the deformed Cenobites, which are semi-human creatures mutilated by excessive body-piercings, would be emancipated once the puzzle-box is solved, to torment the trespasser with excruciating pains like Pandora's box in Greek Mythology. The trespasser Frank is a lecherous occultist whose life has descended into a state of abjection after tasting various perverse form of carnal pleasure, and his fleshes are torn into fragments and re-incarnated into a wretched figure with feeble human resemblance. Thus Frank seeks to resuscitate his human flesh by the aids of his brother's wife Julia, who uses her sex appeals to prey male wooers for Frank, whose secretive reincarnation are exposed to the Cenobites after the murder of his brother. Forever as ever, no one could ever make his escape from the Cenobites.

    I shall interpret Hellbound from four perspectives:

    1. Edge Allen Poe has brought up the idea of "spirit of perverseness" in his short story The Black Cat, and that is a potent force of morbidity propelling humans into brutal deeds. In other words, the spirit of perverseness is an archaic presentation of Lacanian jouissance. Abjection, according to Kristieva, is "the place where meaning collapse," and Goth is product of abjection which leads toward the reckless pursuit of jouissance. Here we have Frank and Julia, who're the abject figures who practice this extreme form of pleasure through violence. Contrary to the slasher genre, the victims here are all men who cannot resist the power of female sex, and Julia, as a jaded but beautiful housewife, protests the idea of female domesticity through her pursuit of jouissance. Julia even refers the doomed room where the uncanny Frank dwells as a "deadwoman's womb" in which she finds great soothing comfort of darkness. Julia here shall be Zizek's the dame who subjectifies her fate (Zizek's interpretation of femme fatale in Film Noir), and it is her decision of reviving Frank into human fleshes that enables the happenings of those tragic events because she wishes to have Frank as her kept lover. In a nutshell, woman here has a great personal agency.

    2. Gothic fiction is usually a representation of the demons within human unconscious, and it liberates taints within the unconscious where "meaning collapses." In Hellbound, Cenobites are the embodiments of the subconscious inversion of Christian theology on crime and punishments. In Christianity, there're two attitudes toward sinners: rehabilitation and retribution. Rehabilitation is for the morally redeemable in the superstructure of moral hierarchy. On the contrary, retribution is for the unrepentant in the infrastructure. Retribution is what Cenobites inflicts upon those despicable sinners: Frank and Julia, who are punished in a series of sadomasochistic manners. Frank's slaughter of his own straight-laced brother is an implication of Biblical story of Cain and Abel, and Frank is seized again by the Cenobites after his murder of his good-natured brother.


    3. The story of Barker's Hellbound is rendered through a "polyphonic" perspective, and it applies the visages from various protagonists in each chapter. Simultaneously the presences of various Cenobites in different gruesome forms shall formulate a Bakhtinian Carnival. According to Bakhtin's idea on "the carnival of polyphonic truth" in Problems of Dostoevsky's Art, the carnival invents "thresholds" where genuine dialogue becomes possible after the monophony gets shattered. Goth in postmodern stage is an apolitical aesthetic expression, "abandoning any credible historical grasp upon its object " (Baldick and Mighall). The grotesque Cenobites, rendered through polyphonic narrations, shall perform a post-gothic carnival for the reader with great relish, and audience would side with Cenobites to practice their duties of Superego and punishes the un-just with gratifying gore in an apolitical postmodern way, which rejoices pain as pleasure!

    4. After The Hellbound Heart being adapted into the movie Hellraiser, the engineer Cenobite's become the figure of Pinhead, which has been highly fetishized into the Gothic Habitus(idea barrowed from Bourdieu's Habitus), which is a collective conceptualization of the images we see and the things we do as Gothic in the discourses of American Popular Culture.
  • guaybanex
    July 18, 2010
    guaybanex
    Horror films tend to just scratch the surface when it comes to the exploration of human's flirtations with evil. With "Hellraiser", Clive Barker's agents of evil - embodied by creatures called Cenobites - are called upon by a human looking to experience pleasure at any cost - ev... read moreen if the cost is eternal pain.

    "Hellraiser"'s low budget does not prevent it from becoming a truly scary and horrific voyage to the Gates of Hell.

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Critic Reviews

Jonathan Rosenbaum
January 11, 2008
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over. Full Review

Richard Harrington
January 1, 2000
Richard Harrington, Washington Post

It's a dark, frequently disturbing and occasionally terrifying film that suggests Barker's vision hasn't quite made the conversion from paper to celluloid. Full Review

Roger Ebert
January 1, 2000
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination. Full Review

Tim Brayton
August 7, 2011
Tim Brayton, Antagony & Ecstasy

For all that it is an incredible, and incredibly disturbing, film to look at, Hellraiser doesn't entirely click as a narrative. Full Review

Charles Cassady
February 1, 2011
Charles Cassady, Common Sense Media

Gore-torture-horror-ghoul fantasy from the '80s. Full Review

Felix Vasquez Jr.
August 15, 2010
Felix Vasquez Jr., Cinema Crazed

Sharp grim direction and tight writing from Clive Barker who turns his story of a puzzle box invoking the forces of hell in to an experience rather than doing the work for us... Full Review

Fernando F. Croce
February 12, 2010
Fernando F. Croce, CinePassion

Clive Barker's virtuosic De Sadean satire Full Review

Eric Henderson
April 20, 2009
Eric Henderson, Slant Magazine

Barker's vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser's overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can't disguise the fact that the movie is at leas... Full Review

David Nusair
November 25, 2007
David Nusair, Reel Film Reviews

...an entertaining and downright creepy piece of work... Full Review

Christopher Null
November 3, 2007
Christopher Null, Filmcritic.com

One of the unsung titans of the horror industry Full Review

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    • Frank Cotton: And Jesus wept.
    • Lead Cenobite: We'll tear your soul apart!
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  • Which horror movie has the character PINHEAD?  Answer »
  • what is the movie where an unfaithful wife encounters the zombie of her dead lover, who's being chased by demons after he escaped from their sado-masochistic Hell.  Answer »
  • There are 40 movies altogether between the Friday The 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Halloween, Hellraiser, & Texas Chainsaw Massacre movies, but which series has the most at 10?  Answer »
  • What movie is not a Stephen King's adaptation for the screen?  Answer »
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