What if there was a puzzle box and if you solved the puzzle, sex demons appeared and tortured you to death? That’s the question Hellraiser seeks to answer. Summarizing it as such may come off snide, but I only mean to highlight how bold and weird the film is. Hellraiser gets lumped in with Halloween, Friday the 13th, et al., but structurally and thematically it’s a far cry from your average slasher. Nightmare on Elm Street comes closest. Both films focus on their supernatural elements, their iconic baddies have personalities rather than being silent, faceless killers, but tonally and in myriad other ways, the two diverge.

Hellraiser begins in a bazaar in some unnamed country where Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) buys the aforementioned puzzle box, a black lacquered cube with unique patterns of filigreed brass on each of its six sides. Frank solves the puzzle in his attic, then hooks shoot from the box to tear him apart. His square brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) and Larry’s wife Julia (Clare Higgins) move into Frank’s house, oblivious to what happened there. While hauling a mattress upstairs, Larry cuts his hand on a nail. His blood seeps beneath the attic floorboards where it is absorbed by what remains of Frank.

The blood resurrects Frank but only partially; he’s all exposed muscle and bone and lymph. He enlists Julia to bring home men so he can steal their life force to restore his flesh back to normal. The two had had an affair during Julia and Larry’s engagement. Larry is slow to notice something is afoot in his home, though he can tell something is wrong with his wife. Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), his adult daughter from a previous marriage, agrees to try bonding with Julia. This leads to her stumbling upon her stepmother and uncle’s murdering scheme and discovering the horrors of the puzzle box.

If you haven’t seen the film, you’re probably wondering where Pinhead (Doug Bradley) fits into this, considering he’s the face of the franchise and the one widely known thing about the movie. You’ll be surprised to find out how little he appears on screen (according to one site, it’s eight minutes). He’s leader of the Cenobites, the beings summoned by the box, in his words, “Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some, angels to others.” This brief line, their BDSM-inspired appearance of leather and open wounds, and Frank’s sexual depravity are about all the hints we’re given as to the nature of the Cenobites. The audience is trusted to piece things together. It works far better leaving them mysterious. They seem to follow some set of rules, but exactly what or why is not stated. They are not killers out for revenge like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. They function outside human understanding.

Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins) washes up after her first murder.

Also, they look cool. Let’s be real. These are some of the most inspired creature designs in horror and there would not have been nine sequels, a line of comic books, parodies, and endless merch had they been something more generic. Of course, the idea of interdimensional S&M monsters is ludicrous. What the sequels didn’t understand (as so many sequels don’t) is that explaining such a thing in greater detail, “expanding the lore” as the kids say, doesn’t make it more believable, it merely draws attention to how loopy the premise is. No, something like the Cenobites works better at the periphery of the story, exciting your imagination, not straining your credulity.

It’s the twisted love triangle that drives the film. Frank is a slave to his vices which is what makes him enticing to Julia. He isn’t caring, supportive, or charming, even in a superficial way. What he offers is danger, something she could never get from his brother who’s frankly a weenie. When Larry cuts his hand, he comes to her like a prissy child to his nanny. Since Julia’s motivations are driven by lust, she is neither good nor sympathetic, but Clare Higgins squeezes every bit of humanity from the character. She seems reluctant during the first killing and is shaken afterward, though who knows if she’s struggling with regret or anxious about being caught. Higgins pulls off being a deadly seductress with a horrendous haircut I’ll charitably assume was stylish at the time.

Andrew Robinson conveys the blandness of Larry Cotton while not making the character one note. It was his first role to break from the psychos he’d been cast as since playing the Scorpio Killer in Dirty Harry. Ashley Laurence plays Kirsty with the right degree of innocence. Though she’s the only one not middle-aged, she isn’t the obnoxious teen you find in most horror from the time. She’s competent and independent. In her first scene, she tells her father she found a place to live on her own despite his protestations. The characters and the drama are as fleshed out as you get in a 90-minute splatter movie.

Clive Barker

The movie was Clive Barker’s debut as director. Based on his novella, The Hellbound Heart*, Barker insisted on directing after seeing the two previous adaptations of his work. He was upset when Rawhead Rex featured an ogreish creature when he wrote the monster as a giant phallus. (Can you blame him? Alien got made, after all.) He’s fond of telling the story of going to the library to check out all the books they had on directing and the only one they had was checked out. The movie does not look like it was helmed by a guy who couldn’t even consult The Complete Idiots Guide to Directing. While his other two films, Nightbreed and Lord of Illusions, don’t suggest he was the greatest of auteurs, he undeniably had talent and an eye for arresting visuals—not surprising considering he is a painter in addition to everything else.

A strong visual sense would mean nothing if the special effects weren’t just as strong. Enter Bob Keen and his crew. On a $1 million budget, they created scenes that belong to the pantheon of horror. Frank’s resurrection, possibly the goopiest scene outside Japanese adult video, is the show stopper, a masterpiece of animatronics and reverse photography. Frank’s post-resurrection scenes feature impressive makeup effects to give him that Saint Bartholomew look. (In the audio commentary, Ashley Laurence claims skinless Frank is “sexy.” Women.) The one area where it falters is with the VFX of the Cenobites disintegrating once they’re “defeated” at the end. It’s cartoonish and couldn’t have been impressive even in the ’80s. Due to their budget running dry, Barker had to animate these scenes himself over a weekend.

If you’re a real nitpicker, you could also complain that in the scene where Kirsty is chased down a hall, you can see the crewmen pushing the monster. YouTuber Rob Ager claims the monster symbolizes a penis (his NSFW video). This seemed like smarty pants gibberish, the sort that assumes every cylindrical thing symbolizes a penis, even toothy monsters. Then I watched the movie in black and white and noticed when she solves the puzzle box before being chased the pink energy particles that float out of it look just like sperm. Guess Clive got his phallus monster after all.

The Cenobite Butterball.

We can’t talk about the movie without mentioning the music. Originally Barker hired the industrial band Coil to compose the score, but New World Pictures put the kibosh on that and an established film composer, Christopher Young, was brought in instead. How Coil’s Hellraiser would’ve turned out is one of those great what-ifs. The music they created has been released in more than one compilation, but it is incomplete, and it’s hard to know how it would have fit the film. It wouldn’t have been better than what Young created. His orchestral arrangements stand in contrast to the synth-heavy scores popular at the time. There’s a majesty to it. It’s as grand as it is haunting.

This review is already past 1,300+ words, but I have to discuss the sequels, mostly so I can get it over with and never feel compelled to write about them again. Many fans claim the direct sequel, Hellbound: Hellraiser II, is a worthy successor, some even going as far as to claim it is the better of the two. They are morons. The movie is preposterous, it pisses on the mystery of Pinhead within the first five minutes, it is trash.

I will say, though, if the highest standard of cinema was showing people without skin, Citizen Kane would be the Hellraiser II of dramas. Remove the puzzle box and replace Pinhead with a generic demon and you’d never suspect the third entry, Hell on Earth, had anything to do with the franchise. Pinhead is reduced to reciting one-liners like a thrift-store Freddy. He’s joined by a brand new cast of Cenobites, including one with CDs lodged in its head that it can shoot out its arm like a rejected Mega Man boss. The only salvageable part is Motörhead’s cover of Ozzy’s “Hellraiser,” but you’d be better off watching the music video 20 times in a row.

Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence)

I confess I haven’t bothered with any of the sequels past that point. Yes, this means I can’t say anything definitive about their quality, however, from the clips I’ve seen and what I know of their plots and the reception among fans and critics, I won’t be gambling hours of my life on the possibility that Hellraiser: Deader is actually not that bad. Nor do I care to read the comic books or even Barker’s follow-up novel, The Scarlet Gospels.

For me, Hellraiser ends with the novella and the film. The story needn’t extend beyond their borders. Any lingering questions are better pondered in the audience’s mind than resolved by the screenwriter’s pen. To this day, it is a work of a peculiar allure. It is nasty and brutal, yet there is beauty in it too, both in Barker’s prose and Young’s music. Other ’80s horror featured sex but didn’t explore it. Sex isn’t the spice of Hellraiser, it is the main course. What else? Ashley Laurence is the hottest final girl and it’s time someone said so. The Chatterer Cenobite is real freaky. Jesus wept. Alright, I think that covers everything.

Would you look at that. A reboot of the series released last week on Hulu. It’s big budget, a notable director is attached, the Weinsteins have nothing to do with it. Oooh. Wonder what that might be like? Hmmmmm.

*The story was first printed in the third volume of Night Visions, a short story collection edited by George R.R. Martin, a fact I learned writing this review.