Clive Barker is 'proud as f**k' of a new Hellraiser — and it's not a movie
The franchise has ten films and a reboot, and its creator just gave his warmest review in decades to the entry you hold a controller for.
The new Hellraiser that has Clive Barker talking is Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, a video game from Boss Team Games, out now on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, PC, and Switch 2. Barker's verdict, in an interview with Dread Central:
"I'm proud as f**k at the end result."
— Clive Barker, to Dread Central
He went further than pride. Barker said he'd feared the game would be "overly censored" and was instead "genuinely astonished by how far they've been able to push it," calling its quality and defiance "extraordinary." The game also brings back Doug Bradley as the voice of Pinhead — the role Bradley last played in 2005, before two decades of replacement casting — and Barker, who has known him since Bradley was 14, put their reunion simply: "Doug is Pinhead and Pinhead is Doug."
Fans are saying the thing sequels never earned
The player response lines up with the creator's, and the comparison fans keep reaching for skips thirty years of movies:
"It feels like Hellraiser. It's the best thing in the franchise outside of the first movie and novel."
— a commenter on r/horror (51 upvotes)
A second comment goes straight at the films' history:
"Feels like the sequel to Hellbound that never came to be. Instead the franchise went steadily down hill with a slight peak at the 4th movie."
— a commenter on r/horror (11 upvotes)
That downhill run has a documented cause. Barker told Dread Central many of the sequels "were made by the Weinstein brothers" to hold the rights, with budgets shrinking film by film, and that "a lot of amazing creative people got worked over as a consequence." He only regained his US rights to The Hellbound Heart and the original screenplay in December 2021, and the 2022 Hulu reboot — the one post-rights film — came and went without a sequel.
Barker spent decades watching Hellraiser sequels made to keep the rights away from him. The first entry he calls extraordinary arrived four years after he got the rights back.
What the game changes for the movies
Barker himself is treating Revival as more than a licensed spin-off. In a second interview, he called what the game achieved "a wake-up call to anyone who's been involved in the making of a franchise" — proof you can "go back into existing worlds in a brand new way" — and said he has ideas "waiting in the wings" and would "love to go further in the movies," naming the Inquisition, Black Sunday, and Suspiria among the inspirations he's been collecting.
To be precise about what wasn't said: nobody announced a film adaptation of the game, and the "wake-up call" line was about franchises, not a specific project. The rest is my position — after nine sequels and a reboot, the first Hellraiser in decades that its creator, its fans, and its reviewers all endorse is sitting right there, and whoever makes the next movie should treat Revival as the blueprint. Barker is 74, holds his rights, and is openly auditioning ideas; the window where all three of those things are true won't stay open forever.
Previously we wrote: The Cyberpunk 2077 movie is taking the Fallout road, not the Halo one