One of the most recognizable characters from horror films, and a wildly popular Halloween costume to boot, is The Hell Priest, better known as Pinhead, from Hellraiser. Pinhead is a tall, bald, pasty white being decked out in a long black leather getup, with what appear to be finish nails stuck all over his head. It's one of the most arresting sights in the 1987 film adaptation of Clive Barker's 1986 novella, The Hellbound Heart. Based on this character's lasting popularity in pop culture and starring role in the upcoming reboot of the franchise, you might think that Pinhead featured prominently in the book—but that’s not the case.
It’s just one of the many differences between The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser. While the plot of Hellraiser follows the same basic outline as The Hellbound Heart, there are several changes, made all the more interesting by the fact that author Clive Barker also wrote the screenplay for the film version and directed it. (He's the rare author who can't complain about the adaptation making changes to his work, since he was responsible for the edits.)
What happens?
The Hellbound Heart was originally published by Dark Harvest in the third volume of its Night Visions anthology series. The book runs about 164 pages or, in its audio version, three hours long. It's about a hedonistic criminal named Frank Cotton, who is continuously scouring the globe for the utmost in pleasures. Never satisfied, he seeks out a puzzle box that he has heard will bring forth beings who can offer him unspeakable pleasures.
Frank finds and obtains the box, and hides out at his late grandmother's empty home in England to figure out how to open it. But when Frank manages to open it during the ceremony and the beings known as Cenobites appear, he discovers that his idea of pleasure and their idea of pleasure are worlds apart. The Cenobites literally rip Frank to pieces and imprison his soul in unending, hellish agony.
A year later, Frank's brother Rory and his wife, Julia, move into the seemingly empty home. What Rory doesn't know is that Frank and Julia had a brief, intense encounter just before the wedding—one she can't forget. While inspecting the house, Julia discovers a cold, empty room upstairs—the very room where Frank had performed his ceremony—which she is drawn to for reasons she doesn't understand. One night, while standing in the room, Rory comes in with a serious cut on his hand, which bleeds all over the floor. That blood is absorbed by Frank, wherever he is in the universe, and starts to reanimate his body. Frank later reveals his very weak corporeal form to Julia, asking for her help. He needs more blood to regain his full body, and she agrees to supply it.
Julia lures unsuspecting men from the local pub up to the room and kills them so Frank can feed. They have almost succeeded in getting Frank back to his original state when Kirsty, a friend of Rory, stops by to check on Julia at Rory's request. She discovers Julia and Frank mid-murder. Narrowly escaping being killed herself, she flees with the puzzle box. Later, she is found wandering the streets aimlessly by the police and taken to the hospital.
When Kirsty wakes up in a hospital bed, she worries she may have imagined seeing a skinless Frank and Julia murdering someone in the house. But she still has the puzzle box. After examining it for a long time, she manages to open it, and a Cenobite appears, ready to whisk her soul away. But Kirsty strikes a bargain with the Cenobite and arranges to swap her life for Frank's. People don't usually give Cenobites the slip, so they are eager to retrieve Frank and agree to the deal.
Back at the house, Kirsty encounters Rory and Julia. They explain that they killed Frank, and as soon as Rory is feeling able, they will go to the police and tell them what happened. They show Kirsty a skinless corpse upstairs, which they claim is Frank. But then Rory uses a phrase which Kirsty recognizes as one of Frank's favorites, and she realizes they have killed Rory, not Frank. Kirsty tricks Frank into admitting his identity, and the Cenobites chain him up and pull him apart again—but not before he accidentally stabs Julia while trying to get to Kirsty. Kirsty flees the house, where she runs into a pedestrian, who shoves something in her hands. The pedestrian is actually The Engineer, one of the Cenobites, and has given Kirsty the puzzle box. It's now hers to do with as she pleases.
What happens in Hellraiser?
Hellraiser, the film version of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, was released in 1987. Barker decided to direct it because he was unhappy with earlier adaptations of his work. While the basic plot—Frank seeking unrelenting pleasure and the puzzle box bringing forth the Cenobites, followed by the mayhem when his brother moves into the home—remains the same, there are major differences between The Hellbound Heart and Hellraiser. They include:
• The ages and relationship between major characters: In the book, Rory and Julia are in their mid-20s, as is Rory's friend Kirsty, and Frank is 29. For the film, Rory became Larry. He and Julia are older, and Kirsty is now Larry's daughter from his previous marriage. The only details the audience knows: Kirsty's mother died, and Kirsty and Julia do not like each other.
• The puzzle box: In The Hellbound Heart, the box is known as the Lemarchand Configuration, and Frank acquires it from a criminal acquaintance in Düsseldorf, who also tells him a lot about the ceremony he needs to perform in order to summon the Cenobites. The box in the book is described as being almost entirely black, lacquered and shiny, with very little decoration. In the film, we see Frank buy the box at a bazaar in Morocco. The puzzle box is gold and decorated with an intricate design.
• Frank Cotton: In both the book and film, Frank is characterized as a selfish, sadistic criminal who has tired of the pleasures of the flesh and seeks to explore otherworldly delights. In the book, Frank is reanimated but trapped in the wall of the house until he receives more blood from Julia, and he doesn't talk much at first. But probably for simplicity's sake, in the film, Frank reanimates in the room and talks a lot right away. He explains everything to Julia about his condition and his escape. He meets the same horrific ending in the book and the movie.
• Kirsty: In the novella, Kirsty is a friend and co-worker of Rory, who also harbors a crush on him, which is why she agrees to check on Julia when he asks her. In the film, Kirsty is the daughter of Larry. She is followed by a mysterious unkempt figure with piercing eyes, who shows up at her job at the pet store and eats crickets from a tank. After she moves to town to be close to her father, Kirsty is plagued by nightmares. She hears a baby crying and sees a figure drenched in blood on a bed. She worries on multiple occasions that something bad is going to happen to Larry. Kirsty also has a boyfriend named Steve in the movie.
• Pinhead: While Pinhead has become a legendary figure of horror and Halloween, as well as a fan favorite of the franchise, the character has a minor role in the novella. For starters, it doesn't even have a name—"Pinhead" was a nickname given to the character on the set of the film. Pinhead, like all of the Cenobites, is genderless, though described as having a feminine voice. Pinhead's physical appearance in the book is the same, but its actions don't even cover a whole page. Pinhead plays a much bigger role in the film, making several appearances and stealing the famous line from another Cenobite who says it in the book: "We have such sights to show you."
• The Cenobites: In the book, four Cenobites appear to Frank, who has knowledge of them from his discussion with the man who sold him the puzzle box. Like in the movie, they are accompanied by the sound of a tolling bell. Frank says he heard there were five of them, and they tell him that The Engineer only appears when necessary. Like Pinhead, the other Cenobites are similar in their appearance to their movie versions, full of scarifications, hooks, piercings, and gore. They are also referred to with nonbinary pronouns, although Kirsty later refers to the one who visits her in the hospital as "he." And like the Cenobites in the book, they have no way of keeping track of the souls that escape them, so they are delighted when Kirsty says she can deliver Frank.
• Kirsty's hospital stay: In both the book and the film, Kirsty is brought to a hospital after she is found wandering the streets with the puzzle box. In the book, Kirsty is grateful and polite to the staff, and later opens the box, which invites one Cenobite to her room. In the film, Kirsty is aggressive with the staff and tries to escape her room. When she opens the puzzle box, a huge corridor appears in the wall. She walks down it to investigate the sound of the crying baby from her dreams, only to discover a giant scorpion-like creature, with a humanoid head and rows of teeth. It chases her back to her room, where the bells start tolling and the Cenobites all appear. It’s here that she strikes the deal of trading her life for Frank's.
• Julia's demise: In both the book and the film, Frank accidentally stabs Julia while aiming for Kirsty, and, not wanting to waste good flesh, drains her for his own energy. But in the book, as Kirsty is escaping the house after the Cenobites get their hooks in Frank, she comes across a figure in a wedding dress and veil she assumes is Julia, but then sees Julia's severed head in the lap of the bride, who tells Kirsty it is The Engineer. In the movie, after the Cenobites string up Frank, they decide to go back on their deal with Kirsty. She finds the puzzle box in the hands of Julia's now faceless corpse, which has somehow been chained to a bed, and flees the house.
• The ending: In the book, Kirsty is allowed to escape the house after the Cenobites capture Frank, where she encounters the man who gives her the box. In the film, there's a lot more to the ending. The Cenobites go back on their deal and try to capture Kirsty, who recovers the box from Julia's corpse and flees the house, but not before she encounters Steve, who showed up to rescue her. She then uses the box to destroy the scorpion creature on her way out of the collapsing house. Kirsty throws the puzzle box into a bonfire. Suddenly, the unkempt man in the trench coat, who has been following her around throughout the film, shows up and grabs it out of the fire. He then turns into a winged skeleton demon-dragon and flies off. We then see the man from the bazaar selling the box to another customer.
• The Derelict: Though he only appears at the end of the book, The Derelict (who, contrary to urban legend, is not played by Alan Moore) has a large role in the film. He is spotted by Kirsty many times, including eating crickets in the pet store, and shows up at the end of the film, turns into a winged demon, and flies off with the puzzle box. It is thought that he represents The Engineer in the film, though he is not so named.
• Miscellany: The film is set in America, not in England like the book. In the film, Julia finds a box of Frank's pornographic photos, and Kirsty and Steve share a walk and a kiss—neither event happens in the book. Julia kills her victims with a knife in the book and a hammer in the movie. In the film, Frank filets a rat while Julia and Larry have sex, and in general, there are a lot more rats everywhere.
• Cyclical storytelling: Last but not least, Hellraiser raises the possibility that these events have happened before—something not even hinted at in The Hellbound Heart. At the start of the film when Frank buys the puzzle box, the man who sells it to him says, "Take it, it's yours. It always was." Then, after the Cenobites first pull Frank apart, a hand attached to an arm in the sleeve of a brown trench coat, like The Derelict is seen wearing, is shown putting the pieces of a face back together. The face looks like Larry, not Frank, complete with the same hooks in the same places Larry has at the end of the film, when he is ripped apart as Frank disguised in Larry's body. Is experiencing this cycle of events over and over and over again part of Frank's eternal torture?
The Hellraiser Sequels, Comics, and Reboot
After The Hellbound Heart, Clive Barker wrote a literary follow-up, The Scarlet Gospels, and author Mark Alan Miller added to the saga with Hellraiser: The Toll. The popular horror also inspired a Hellraiser comic and 10 (!) movie sequels. In 2020, it was announced that the Hellraiser franchise would get a reboot as a series on Hulu, scheduled for a 2022 release. Jamie Clayton from The L Word will star as Pinhead. Perhaps the new adaptation will incorporate some of the information about Pinhead that has been revealed in the sequels, such as Pinhead's real name: The Hell Priest. Or maybe the fact that Pinhead was once a mortal man named Elliot Spencer, who was born in England in 1887, during the Victorian Era, and fought in World War I.
Whatever the case, there’s no better way to prepare for the reboot (or your next rewatch) than by getting immersed in the audiobook versions of Clive Barker's The Hellbound Heart, narrated by Jeffrey Kafer, and The Scarlet Gospels, narrated by John Lee, as well as Miller's novella, narrated Tom Holland. After all, they have such sights to show you!
