A couple weeks ago, Hulu released a reboot of Hellraiser. There hasn’t been a good Hellraiser movie since the first one and that came out before I was born, so it was strange to have any interest in a new installment. Stranger still to suffer even a bit of anxiety over how good it would be. After nine bad sequels, what harm could one more do?

The information we got before release was heartening. Attached to direct was David Bruckner, a notable horror director whose previous work (The Ritual, The Night House) has gone unseen by me but has received enthusiastic reviews. One of the producers was Hellraiser creator Clive Barker who hadn’t been involved with the series since the fourth entry, Bloodline, and when the trailer for the ninth, Revelations, included his name took to Twitter to complain, “If they claim its [sic] from the mind of Clive Barker, it’s a lie. It’s not even from my butt-hole.” (Dimension Films later removed the reference to him from the trailer.)

The reboot’s budget hasn’t been made public, but assuming it’s even a modest Hollywood production would make it more expensive than several of its predecessors put together.¹ This was not a slapdash job to hold onto the IP nor was it an unrelated script retrofitted to include Pinhead² as many of the direct-to-video sequels were reported to be.