This article contains spoilers for Clive Barker's Hellbound Heart novella, and the film HellraiserThis week saw the long-anticipated trailer for Hulu's Hellraiser. An updated take on Clive Barker's Hellbound Heart collection of books and Hellraiser film series, the new trailer promises trademark horror by way of pain, and otherworldly dark visuals.
The biggest talking point of this upcoming film has been the recasting of the villain Pinhead. The series' de facto antagonist, originally played by Doug Bradley (throughout the trilogy, and beyond), is no longer in the driving seat as one of the most iconic villains of film horror. He has been replaced (or reimagined, if you will) by trans actress Jamie Clayton (who was so excellent in Sense8 and Roswell, New Mexico), who looks right at home in the role: updated, gnarly, scary, menacing... and hungry.
The Reaction to Jamie Clayton
A small minority of the internet is, naturally, up in arms about this change. But this is actually an alteration that should be welcomed. First off, we can thank all involved that this trailer and everything leading up to its release looks suitably gruesome; the new Hellraiser looks to be fully embracing its forefather's legacy of gallows humor and a Biblical aesthetic — if illustrated by Francis Bacon.
But any fan complaining about a gender swap in a series that hasn't really been relevant since the 1980s has only forgotten just what the original novella and original film (and to some extent its sequels), lived and breathed.
Born and Raised in Hell
The original Hellraiser is a highly sexualized feature that is all about the human body. If the characters aren't screwing with their own, then they're harvesting another's for their own needs, or being physically torn apart for what their fingers have touched. Skin, blood, and flesh are so prominent in this series that it powers every sentence.
Through a mishap with a stray nail in the original film, Frank has returned to the living and requires blood to survive and become whole again. Julia, a cheat and a horrible stepmother, heads to a bar with the promise to seduce some guy she meets — to bring him back to the house to murder him for a re-composing Frank. Sex, or in this case the promise of it, leads to death. Sex and gender relations are the life force of Hellraiser and always have been. This is an out-and-out horror film that is consistently flirtatious, grinning in the dark with an ulterior motive underneath every new line of dialogue. It is a film that has remained lusty and covered in all manner of liquids.
The first film is minimalist in comparison to where the rest of the Hellraiser franchise heads, but it has a poetry in its own dank vileness. Its unforgettable images of pain being dispatched (helmed by an incredible mix of makeup and practical effects) remind one of the kind of anti-smoking adverts adorned on cigarette packaging in some countries: contorted bodies all ruined by one's own decision-making in something so toxic.
Roots & The Hellbound Heart
So preoccupied with enacting suffering to those they deem deserving of, the Pinhead character itself is so grossly ethereal that gender as a concept feels like the least of this particular monster's worries.
Looking further into the story, Hellraiser IV: Bloodline depicted a story taking place in both the past (18th Century France) and simultaneously in a futuristic spaceship, showing how the Cenobites as an entity transcend time and place. And whether 2022's version will be a new variation on the exact same character or will retcon what had come before, a Doctor Who style regeneration perfectly fits this grim world and its malevolent beings. Arguably, this is a movie and a character that actually warrants a sex change. Qualms about favorite characters or series swapping race or gender for a current market do exist and can certainly feel like appeasement at times, no doubt about it. But in a series like Hellraiser, this swap (for what it is) actually feels right at home.
Even citing the origins of the original 1986 book, The Hellbound Heart, would back this up. In their introduction, the writing specifically goes out of its way at first to not assign the Cenobites a gender, with only the fourth creature finally being designated as female — "Not a he now saw: but she. The hood it had worn had been discarded, as had the robes. The woman beneath was gray yet gleaming, her lips bloody, her legs parted so that the elaborate scarification of her pubis was displayed." The Pinhead character (titled merely "The Engineer") doesn't show up until halfway through the book and then again at the end. The story describes the beings as a whole as simply: "Only these sexless things, with their corrugated flesh."
The point is that these characters were originally written as 'none of the above,' merely devilish things - both gothic and cosmic. The only reason that there is any outcry whatsoever is that Bradley's performance across the Hellraiser series is so iconic, with every word from his mouth delivered with so much gravel and hatred, that to see anyone else in the role comes as a shock.
Lest these people forget, however, that Doug Bradley gave up the role by the ninth film in the series, Revelations, where Pinhead was played by an entirely different actor. Also, Bradley thinks the casting decision makes sense. "I do like to point out that I did wear a skirt as Pinhead," the actor told Bloody Disgusting. "We say ‘female Pinhead’ like we know what that means, but there are a million shades of femininity [...] Everything about Hellraiser has always been transgressive." Admittedly, Clayton does have huge leather boots to fill regardless, and whether she can match Bradley's first performance as the character is another debate entirely, but if she fails it won't be because of gender.
Pinhead: Queer Icon?
A transition of one sex to another for this character — if Clayton's character is in fact Pinhead themselves, as IMDB suggests they are — also falls in line with the outside effect of Hellraiser's own queerness and its placement in time as an icky fan favorite for gay horror fans young and old.
Pinhead and the Hellraiser world of books, comics and, yes, films remain inherently gay. With the antagonists' black leather clothing and unconventional piercings, it only leans in to the S&M/BDSM and queer worlds. Author and director of the original film, Clive Barker, is also openly gay and directly cites an S&M club by the name of Cellblock 28 for the Cenobites' look.
In Riley Wade's excellent piece for Horror Obsessive, they write:
In the cosmic and calamitous place where the Cenobites come from, the place where they became Cenobites, gender is a performative choice—part and parcel with self-pleasure, the enacting of sex onto the skin. Sex is performed onto the body, it is a form of gendered performance at its most extreme: Pinhead’s phallic pins embedded in the skull, Deep Throat’s vulva a cavity in her neck, voices augmented to be supernaturally deep or scratchingly high-pitched. It’s difficult not to see a trans reading emerge: utopian ideas of the pleasurable where the body becomes a canvas for true pleasure unbound by normative ideas of sexuality and gender, unbound even by the confines of the flesh itself.
If this film hits in the way that Hellraiser fans are hoping, then it will prove that pain and pleasure is universal — regardless of what gender is dispensing it.