#openthroat

Wow Mr. Head you sure are graceful

Buckle yourselves in I got another long post for ya, TL;DR at the bottom So there’s a new Hellraiser movie in the works, and not much information has been released about it, but it’s said to be a “reboot.” This may be exactly what the franchise needs or what it doesn’t need. “Reboot” is kind of tossed around with no solid meaning it seems. I always took it as a movie that revives a dormant franchise, while possibly retconning some of the sequels, but keeping the original, like Halloween (2018), but many use it as a synonym for “remake” as well. Currently, as far as I’m aware, nothing has been said about which it is. If it is a remake, I’m going to be hella disappointed.

There is some argument to remake franchises like Friday the 13th, A Nightmare on Elm Street and Halloween. You could say those franchises were running out of ideas, getting too silly, too crazy, and they needed to hit the restart button. Jason X, Freddy’s Dead, and Halloween 6 make good evidence for that.

With 11 movies under it’s belt, the vast majority of them being steaming piles of straight-to-DVD crap, it seems like that’s the case with Hellraiser, right? But the difference between the situations of franchises like Halloween, Hellraiser never went creatively bankrupt. 

Unlike the majority of slasher franchises, Hellraiser introduced us to a huge new world, with a vast mythology that we only scraped the surface of in Hellraiser 2. Hellbound showed us the cenobite’s dimension, introduced us to their god, revealed more about their backstories- and not a single sequel has done anything with that. Hellraiser 3, which I actually like, was troubled with reviving Pinhead, but did let us get to know Elliot Spencer more. Hellraiser 4 turned the cenobites into world-conquering chaotic evil demons. All the sequels later never even touched the mythology. You could say Judgement tried, but lord it fell flat on it’s face, introducing brand new stuff that wasn’t in line with Clive Barker’s original creation.

We haven’t seen the Labyrinth, or Leviathan, since 1988. There are still so many things left to discover. The problem with the Hellraiser franchise isn’t that the sequels milked it dry, it’s that they never tapped into it’s potential.Which is why remaking it, and abandoning the original timeline, is completely unnecessary. Shockingly, despite people constantly complaining about the remake craze, I also see tons of people saying remaking this franchise is a good idea, but I couldn’t disagree more. Taking the Halloween 2018 approach and retconning back to Hellbound or Hell on Earth would be much better. I know Hellraiser 3 isn’t liked by many, but at least then you don’t have to worry about reviving Pinhead. You could also say they could remake it to be more faithful to the novella, The Hellbound Heart, but even that’s not necessary. The book and the original movie are incredibly similar. Minor things with the cenobites were changed, but most of their changes didn’t effect the actual story. The ending was slightly altered to be more exciting, but that was honestly the biggest change. Remember, the cenobites have only about 5 minutes of screen time. No book adaptation is ever going to be 100% accurate, but Hellraiser pretty much translated the novella almost beat for beat. I bet the author directing had something to do with it, lmao.