In the same Guardian interview, Barker talked about how he used to be a hustler, sometimes even fooling around with the biggest names in Hollywood. How much worse could I be?”īarker’s original story, The Hellbound Heart, was heavily inspired by his own experiences with sex. “It felt as if God was telling me I should direct.

“By the mid-80s I’d had two cinematic abominations made from my stories,” he told the publication. Hellraiser was actually based on Clive Barker’s 1986 novella, The Hellbound Heart, and, according to an interview he did with The Guardian, Barker found himself directing the film adaption because he was unimpressed with how other directors had turned his stories into movies.

The basis for the film was Clive Barker’s interest in BDSM The film wasn’t following the slasher tropes because, despite fitting nicely in the genre, Hellraiser was never a slasher movie. In fact, the movie’s iconic villain, Pinhead, was only on screen for about eight minutes in the first film, and most of the killing wasn’t even done by the Cenobites. Notably, it wasn’t a standard slasher flick. With each passing sequel, the movies were getting worse and worse reviews, and the box-office returns per film were dwindling quickly. By the time Hellraiser hit theaters, Halloween had released three films (with a fourth and fifth on the way), Friday the 13th had released seven films, and Nightmare had released three (with a fourth installment soon to come in 1988). However, in 1987, the genre was petering out and the endless line of terrible sequels had tainted the reputation of horror as a whole. In 1984, A Nightmare on Elm Street was able to breathe new life into the genre by offering a new twist and allowing the kills to become more and more outlandish and sensational since they took place in the realm of dreams. The late ’70s and early ’80s had brought the slasher boom, with Halloween and Friday the 13th becoming cultural phenomenons. When the film hit theaters, horror was in a very weird place. 1987 was a tumultuous year for the horror genre

The original hellraiser