Not your average horror monster: Pinhead of the Hellraiser franchise

The Hellraiser series' monster, Pinhead,—creator Clive Barker hates that name, but we still don't know what else to call him—played by Doug Bradley, is the shining example of what horror movie monsters can be. He is fascinating, multidimensional, mysterious, and all the more terrifying because as a viewer I have no idea what he’s going to do next. In each of his appearances he gives us another glimpse at his character, where he gives viewers a little bit of who/what he is, but there’s obviously more we’re not seeing, much of which is horrifying and dark, some of which may not be. Many viewers complain that he tends to show up for a fairly short time in his own movies, but I think that adds to him. Seeing a monster too much makes it less frightening, less interesting.

In the first Hellraiser, we’re introduced to Pinhead as the leader of a group of Cenobites, Hell’s priests dedicated to “exploring the limits of sensation,” demons of torture and sex. Pinhead is erudite and intelligent, and has literally seen it all, so now everything bores him; he’s got a duty to drag humans down to Hell and do unspeakable things to them, but he never shows us if he thinks or feels anything while he does it.

The second Hellraiser tells us a different side of Pinhead’s story. He, like the three Cenobites that follow him, was once human, but lost his humanity through his immoral life (a key component of the Hellraiser mythology in general). He was reborn in Hell as a priest of pain and pleasure, dedicated to the experience of sensation without morality or empathy to temper it. Yet his humanity remains, and can be reached, something that terrifies him, but that he doesn’t seem to regret when it happens.

The third movie shows us Pinhead split in two. After his humanity was touched in the second movie, it split from the demonic side of his nature, leaving Demon Pinhead all about ripping humans apart and making them his Cenobite slaves, while his human side works to stop the demonic. Demon Pinhead has more of a temper than he did in the first two movies, with moments of snarling fury and joy at carnage. Still, through much of the action he retains his detached nature, barely batting a chalky eye as he forces a priest to eat bits of his brain. Human Pinhead seems sad by contrast, burdened by his responsibility to stop his evil self.

The fourth and fifth movies are, again, Pinhead detached and “deliciously empty.” In the fourth he fights for his life against a hero bent on destroying him; in the fifth he calls himself “the Engineer” and guides a twisted and immoral human man to recognize his sins, acting as judge and counselor. The scenarios are different, but neither is anything that inspires feeling or even interest in Pinhead.

The sixth movie, however, reminds Pinhead and we the viewers that even he is emotionally invested in someone: Kirsty Cotton, the heroine from the first two movies. Though many years have passed, not only has he never forgotten her, he has apparently stalked her. What kind of woman, viewers wonder, can captivate an immortal demon who has experienced everything to the point of boredom?

A survivor, apparently. Kirsty breaks horror conventions right away by having sex with her boyfriend in the first movie and not dying in response, and she just keeps refusing to die. When faced with Cenobites in the first movie, she swears in their faces and makes a deal for the release of her soul. When faced with evil men in the sixth, she gives them to the Cenobites in her place. When faced with an innocent person in the second, however, she rescues them, giving her a complexity unusual to horror heroines, and making her a match for an unusually complex monster. I’ve never seen anything like her in a horror movie, and it seems Pinhead hasn’t either.

Though she appears to be a good guy in the first couple movies, the sixth movie shows Kirsty taking a darker path and sacrificing, not just evil men, but people she’s angry at, to save herself from Pinhead. He is surprised—pleasantly—at her darkness, praising her by saying he underestimated her. Did he underestimate her capacity for evil or her will to survive? Either way she’s a character in her own right rather than just Pinhead’s foil, and Clive was right to make her a major character in the current Hellraiser comic book series. She’s interesting enough to carry a story of her own, and deserves the chance.

Pinhead himself seems conflicted when around Kirsty, insisting he wants her, but always letting her go. It’s not because he wants to preserve any innocence on her part, because in movie six she shows she doesn’t have any, and he’s okay with that. Is the human in him repulsed by what the demon wants to do to her? Or does he desire for Kirsty to come to him willingly? Or maybe he’s fascinated watching Kirsty’s fall into darkness, and doesn’t want to end their game yet. Or, like most people, perhaps Pinhead doesn’t know what he wants, and when he wants something too much, he grows afraid of it. It’s hard to say for sure getting only glimpses at his character, which makes it that much more interesting to speculate.

Clive Barker has written what he calls the last chapter of the Hellraiser mythos, The Scarlet Gospels, in which he has promised to show us Pinhead’s thoughts (and his real name), and then kill him in a way befitting one of horror’s greatest monsters. I’m eager to read it, but also don’t want to, because Pinhead has been so much fun for so many years as an enigma. Well done, Clive and Doug.

-Elizabeth Reuter
Author, The Demon of Renaissance Drive