Hellaraiser Reeboot and not Remake
That long series of sequels regrettably turned out to be a very mixed bag quality-wise in the eyes of most critics and fans. But now Hellraiser is getting a fresh start way to director Bruckner Hellraiser 2022 director David Bruckner explains why the film had to be a reboot instead of a sequel. Clive Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart first have become a movie again in 1987, with Barker himself in the director’s chair. The movie went on to become a horror classic that spawned a long series of sequels.and his Hulu-released reboot. The largest change being added in Hellraiser 2022 is manifestly the presence of a new actor in the role of iconic horror villain Pinhead. Doug Bradley of course performed Pinhead in the unique movie and most of its sequels, however he’s been replaced for the reboot by Jamie Clayton.
Rebooting the Hellraiser franchise and recasting Pinhead have been certainly bold decisions for Bruckner and company to make. In a new interview with Collider, Bruckner explains why in his mind it was necessary to erase all those sequels from the board and begin over with a new take on Barker’s unique story.
I think that it become hard to sort of trace it as canon in any type of strict regard. And I feel like there may be this sort of spirit of invention in the original movie that, to me, sticking in a few very strict manner to the activities that have been performed out throughout many many sequels was sincerely less in the spirit of the unique, which was this bold vision of some thing new that wasn’t terrified of where it’d go. And then I’ve also always been a fan of, I mean, how do we regard our IP? I like a little bit of what DC has finished over the years where every few years somebody gives you a different take on a popular person and you go, “I didn’t know I was down for an emo Batman detective till Matt Reeves confirmed it to us.” And there’s a piece of me that goes “What if this is Batman?” And you play that game for a length of time. And this can not be the last Hellraiser film but that is our Hellraiser film, and this was the direction we were most inspired to take it.
Why Rebooting Hellraiser Made More Sense Than Doing Yet Another Sequel
As beloved as the first Hellraiser is amongst horror fanatics, the franchise ordinary isn’t held in excessive regard by people who experience Barker’s original ugly and kinky vision. Indeed, a brief look on the Rotten Tomatoes scores for the series paint a grim photograph of diminishing creative returns. While the original film holds a stable rating of 70% amongst critics, none of the sequels manages to rise above 50%, and three of them sit at an ignominious 0%.
Those scores alone show how dead-in-the-water the Hellraiser series had become by the point of 2018’s Hellraiser: Judgment, a direct-to-video dud. But Hellraiser 2022 can now clean away all the ones accrued sequels and their bad ideas and go again to Barker’s source material. The hope of course is that by returning to the original Hellbound Heart story, the new film can tap into some of the inspiration that made 1987’s first Hellraiser experience like this sort of formidable and shocking statement of a horror movie. Not bringing again Bradley as Pinhead also offers the movie a chance to re-imagine the character for a new time and audience, though trailers have proven that Clayton’s Pinhead is visually very much like the traditional design of the character.
It stays to be visible of direction if fans include this new take on Pinhead and Hellraiser. But Bruckner and company at least have given themselves the gap to get again to what made the first movie good, without having to deal with all of the lore and different baggage that was heaped upon the series through all those mostly-horrible sequels. And if Hellraiser 2022 succeeds in its efforts, possibly it’ll release a brand new series that doesn’t go downhill quite as fast or as far as the old one.
