Skip to content
goreledger
Director
Clive Barker
Year
1987
Country
UK, USA
Runtime
93 min

Also released as

  • Clive Barker's Hellraiser
  • Le Pacte
  • Hellraiser 1
  • Clive Barkers Hellraiser
  • Pekelník
  • Fogo Maldito
  • 猛鬼追魂
  • La puerta del infierno
  • Восставший из ада
  • Hellraiser - Non ci sono limiti
  • Hellraiser (Le pacte)
  • Hellraiser Das Tor zur Hoelle
  • Hellraiser: Renascido do Inferno
  • Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave
  • The Hellbound Heart

Hellraiser

Hellraiser is a 1987 British and American body horror film directed by Clive Barker.

Clive Barker adapting his own novella, and the Cenobites are on screen for about eight minutes.

goreledger editorial rating: 7/10 · Read the review

Sign in to track what you have survived.

A man solves a puzzle box and is taken apart. His brother's blood, spilled on the attic floor, starts bringing him back, and the man's former lover starts supplying the rest.

Barker had written the novella and hated the films made from his earlier scripts, so he directed this himself for about a million dollars.

The Cenobites are not the villains and the film is clear about it. Julia is: a bored suburban wife who discovers she is willing to do a great deal, and Clare Higgins plays it as an awakening rather than a corruption.

The design is the legacy. Bob Keen's makeup, the leather, the hooks and the pins were assembled from fetish photography and hospital equipment, and Pinhead speaks about eight lines.

Christopher Young's score is enormous and orchestral, which was the correct instinct for material this operatic.

Ten sequels. The first two are worth it.

Goreledger editorial rating

7 / 10

The Cenobites get about eight minutes, and the real villain is a bored suburban wife who discovers what she will do. The design and the operatic score are the legacy. Only the first two films are worth it.

Our opinion, not an average. How we rate

Goreledger editorial profile

goreledger editorial profile for HellraiserEditorial character scores, 1 to 10, describing the film rather than rating it: Dread 6 out of 10, Gore 8 out of 10, Atmosphere 7 out of 10, Rewatch 7 out of 10, Disturb 6 out of 10.Dread6/10Gore8/10Atmosphere7/10Rewatch7/10Disturb6/10

Describes the film, not its quality: high gore means very gory.

Rate this film

No ratings yet. Score it on the five axes and yours will be the first.

Sign in to rate this and add it to your shelf.

Trailer

The sleeves

The same film, sold as a different film in each territory. Click any of them.

poster
EN · poster
EN · poster
EN · poster
JA · poster
SK · poster
PT · poster

Where to watch

Discuss with AI

Open a chatbot with a question about this already typed out. Useful for a second opinion, a plot detail, or working out which cut you are holding.

Adjacent

Sleeve art for Re-AnimatorWATCHknown

Re-Animator

1985 · USA · 104m

The funniest Lovecraft adaptation ever made, which is not what anybody expected.

Goreledger 8/10
Sleeve art for Tetsuo: The Iron ManWATCHknown

Tetsuo: The Iron Man

1989 · Japan · 67m

67 minutes of black and white industrial noise made over eighteen months by a crew that mostly quit.

Goreledger 7/10
Sleeve art for SocietyWATCHknown

Society

1989 · USA/Japan · 99m

A Beverly Hills teenager suspects his family are not human. The last twenty minutes prove it, wetly.

Sleeve art for PossessionWATCHknown

Possession

1981 · France · 123m

A divorce film with a tentacle in it. Adjani's U-Bahn scene is the most extreme acting on this site.

Sleeve art for SawWATCHcanon

Saw

2004 · USA · 103m

Two men chained in a bathroom, made for 1.2 million dollars in eighteen days, and it is far better than its franchise.

Sleeve art for FrankensteinWATCHcanon

Frankenstein

1931 · USA · 71m

Karloff in Jack Pierce's makeup, and the flat head is a copyrighted design rather than anything from the novel.