![]() ![]() As Doug Bradley, the actor who plays Pinhead in the first eight movies of the Hellraiser franchise, observes, Hellraiser “has elements of a slasher movie about it but it’s not that… In a lot of ways Hellraiser is a Gothic horror film…. Angels to Others.” Although Hellraiser, as a series, is notorious for its significant drop in quality following its first film- of the ten films in the series, the first Hellraiser is the only entry not to be rated as rotten on Rotten Tomatoes’ aggregator- Clive Barker’s original Hellraiser, an adaptation of his 1986 novella The Hellbound Heart, is a multilayered film that skirts the horror genre by focusing on a plot that forgoes the slasher formula prominent in horror cinema during Hellraiser’s initial release in favor of a Gothic family drama. Released in 1987, Clive Barker’s Hellraiser remains one of the most significant horror films of its decade, introducing into a Transatlantic horror lexicon Pinhead and his fellow Cenobites, extradimensional beings the film describes as “Explorers in the further regions of experience. The interplay that occurs in the first Hellraiser film between gendered bodies, domestic spaces, and abjection-e.g., an affect based upon apprehension and revulsion (Kristeva 1)-provides a critique of traditional Western gender norms that synonymizes patriarchal-led households with the production of horror. ![]()
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