Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hellraiser: Revival.
The first five minutes of Hellraiser: Revival will make your eyebrows high-five the ceiling. It opens with a BDSM-flavored sex scene complete with piercing and blood and a veritable buffet of sex toys scattered around the room, then evolves into a gory example of what hooks and chains can do to flesh. If you're sweet and innocent you might want to clutch some pearls, but to Clive Barker fans like me it's a signal that Revival is committing to the spirit of the author and director’s sexy subversion rather than watering it down. And I'm not an easy woman to please. The original Hellraiser movie rewired my brain when I saw it as a teenager (yes, I have a therapist), and Barker's Books of Blood volumes are in my top five reads of all time. I was bracing for disappointment, but that opening proved that Revival wasn't going to shy away from the body horror or sex that runs through Barker's work. The Hellraiser world is one of horrible and hedonistic extremes, so trying to avoid either would be like trying to swap Beyond Meat patties for prime rib. And the deeper I got into Hellraiser: Revival, the clearer it became that the game's understanding of those extremes went beyond pure sex and gore.
Expanding on any existing fiction, especially one as iconic as the Hellraiser series, is a challenge for anyone. Luckily, developer Saber Interactive was able to work with its creator directly, with Nenad Tomic, Revival’s executive producer, telling Xbox Wire that Barker was "deeply involved with the game from the very beginning" and shaped everything from "visual style and story motifs to the lore and character personalities." From a player experience perspective, it's key that the game stars the OG Pinhead, Doug Bradley, because no one wants a bad impersonator ruining the party.
Some parallels are obvious. Saber Interactive has explicitly said that Revival’s protagonist, Aidan, was inspired by Julia from Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart and its film adaptation, Hellraiser, and you can see the game playing with the same themes of obsessive attachment, sexual need, and total simp behavior. Julia is willing to act as a honey trap to secure victims for her oozing lover, while Aidan is ready to make a deal with Pinhead and then go on a killing spree to bring back his girl. It's at once beautiful and twisted, and if nothing else a step up from a man who rolls his eyes when you ask him to share his fries. Never settle, ladies.
"Like Julia, Aidan is a character experiencing a fundamental dissatisfaction with life,” Antony De Fault, Hellraiser: Revival’s narrative director, tells me. “His heart yearns for feelings of purpose and vitality, and like Julia, the object of that fixation is a person with an even deeper dissatisfaction, who accelerates his self-destructive tendencies. In Aidan’s case, that’s his girlfriend Sunny.
"The most significant difference between the two is that Julia has suppressed her yearning for a long time, attempting to play the ‘good housewife,' whereas Aidan has pursued it,” De Fault continues. “This history of troublemaking and criminality makes him more worldly, and in particular, more equipped for violence.
"This was a deliberate departure from Julia’s mold, since Aidan is a player character in an FPS horror game. We wanted to give the player a variety of gameplay experiences, which included stealth, exploration, and enemies you can’t directly fight (the experiences of Kirsty in the movies), but also ‘game-y’ experiences like combat challenges and resource management. For those, a more competent character like Aidan made sense."
Throughout Hellraiser: Revival’s story, we get to see flashbacks of Sunny and Aidan’s relationship and better understand how a devotion strong enough to send you into the Labyrinth, the Cenobites’ hellish dimension ruled by Leviathan, develops. The ties that bind you need to be stronger than meeting at a work Christmas party and sharing a love of Netflix reality shows for that sort of errand. Aidan was a drug addict, now Sunny is his fix – she changed his life and he's not sure what trying to go on without her would even look like. We also get a little glimpse at what happens when only one half of a couple is on board with worshipping at the altar of pleasure and pain thanks to a couple called Sean and Charlotte, whose story we learn through letters scattered around the world. Spoiler: It is not a happy ending.
Like a Prayer
As well as ensuring fans get to see all their favorites – Pinhead, Butterball, and my personal nightmare fuel, Chatterer – Hellraiser: Revival makes its own contribution to the lore by diving deeper into the idea of an organized religion, The Scarlet Church, developing around the Cenobites. The films have played with the idea before (check out Hellraiser: Deader), but Revival goes all in on a doctrine, some seriously intense interior decor choices, and a brutal path to ascension. In its teachings, pain is a gift that can be given and received, and even a kindness, though it's not beyond exploiting people when it comes to recruiting new members.
"In a practical sense, we knew that the player couldn’t fight the Cenobites, and that simply running away from them wasn’t going to support an entire game,” explains De Fault. “So we had good cause to invent some sort of force that would often oppose the player in their stead, while still evoking the Cenobites and feeling like it belonged in the world of Hellraiser.
"From there, the leap to a Cenobite-inspired cult seems pretty logical, especially given the religious themes present in Clive’s work," he says.
The church's congregation is the mutilated faithful, whose hobbies include sticking knives in people and wearing latex. De Fault explains that, like the parallels between Aidan and Julia, the church in some ways represents Frank from the original Hellraiser.
"They’re people who are so dissatisfied with life, so numb to it, that they will go to incredible extremes in their pursuit of intense experiences that make them feel vital,” he says.
"But like Frank, as you’ll discover in the game, the Scarlet Church aren’t actually prepared for the reality of what the Cenobites offer. They seek the Cenobites because they want hedonic pleasure, or power, as opposed to what the Cenobites really are, which is more spiritual (“Explorers, in the further regions of experience”). The only one who really ‘gets it’ is their misunderstood Prophet, Bruno."
Another key player in the cult is an unhinged doctor called Colin Marlowe, who shares an approach to elective surgery that would make even Beverly Hills trophy wives think, "Now steady on." And then there's Charlotte, who gives an insight into why someone might follow the teachings of the church, writing things like, "There is divinity in my wretchedness, splendor in every ugly part of me," and "For the first time in my life, I feel accepted and understood. I can be myself... my true self... the Scarlet Church gave me that truth.” For her, submitting to the church represents acceptance, identity, and a way to see the parts of herself she despises as sacred rather than shameful.
"Without wanting to trigger any lawyering, we looked at real cults and cult-like organizations,” reveals De Fault. “I think that most people who fall prey to these systems do so because they are desperate for belonging, liberation, or to think they’re ‘one of the good people.'
"And in a way, the Scarlet Church does offer those things. There’s an extreme acceptance and intimacy and the promise that they will enlighten others (including by force) to share those ‘gifts’ with them. These ‘attraction’ elements are primarily conveyed to the player through the voices and writing of cult members themselves."
While the cult members tend to run around trying to kill you and promising to jerk you off once you're dead, the environmental storytelling, documents, and audio recordings (horror games are single-handedly keeping the dictaphone trade alive, it seems) help reveal more about the motives different characters have for getting involved in the cult and following its teachings beyond the limits of sanity. For me, it's a worthy extension of the lore without risking trampling the original themes, which is more than can be said for some of the spin-off movies. Yes, I'm looking at you "what if Cenobites but also a cautionary tale about getting too into an MMO," Hellraiser: Hellworld.
Like any self-respecting church, it has a "very arch, Sander Cohen-esque" prophet, Bruno. His character was one area that the development team worked closely with Barker on to stay authentic to the world of Hellraiser.
"He’s an extravagant, unhinged artist, and we went back and forth on quite how campy he could be,” says De Fault. “We knew we wanted him to be a ‘fun’ villain, compared to the very serious Marlowe and the Cenobites, but it was important to Clive that he remained just on the right side of believability.
"It made me realize that despite the inherent campiness and fun to be found in the kinda scrappy B-movie originals, the world of Hellraiser remains a very sincere thing to its creator, and by extension, to us.”
In Da Club
From the earliest trailers, it was very clear that Hellraiser: Revival was going further than most games would ever dare. "It was an unofficial goal of the team to be banned, unrated, or restricted at least somewhere in the world as one barometer of whether we’d done our jobs right,” De Fault reveals.
"But in a video game, it shouldn’t be enough to have the player simply see taboo things; it’s necessary to get them to perform taboo acts too. So we require the player to engage in extreme violence, to engage in sexual play, and just generally to stick their hands in a bunch of very questionable places. This didn’t mean bucking traditional survival-horror mechanics necessarily, but it did mean making them more sensual, or disgusting, or making firm choices like the more intimate first-person perspective."
One of the missions involves a sex club owned by the Cenobite cult, while another has you hunting down sex toys (including a dildo that promises to "rearrange your guts") and a spanking scene. All very consensual and well-mannered, these sequences manage to walk the line between self-awareness and pure titillation, making total sense in the storyline with an unapologetic delight. I mean, of course a group obsessed with the heights of pleasure of pain would have a kink club; it's just good business sense. You know what they say: Do what you love and you'll never truly work a day in your life.
This mission is just one part of the game that allows you to feel like you’re engaging with the "forbidden experience" theme of Barker's work, and De Fault argues that this is why people read (or play) Hellraiser.
Asked if there were any scenes where the team had to hold back, De Fault references a sequence where, in an Aidan flashback, we see someone clearly… petting their trouser snake… to images of Sunny.
"It’s very clear what he’s doing, but if we’d made his actual genitals visible during this act, it would have almost certainly tipped our age ratings over a threshold and eliminated the game from sale in most places,” he says. “So we just arranged the room so that you can’t actually get around in front of him while he’s doing that.
"It’s a tiny tweak that doesn’t take away from the moment at all. In fact, the strong mental image you’re given is probably more unsettling than anything we could have made out of pixels!"
Between pushing boundaries and showing restraint to stay within the realms of a playable game, Saber Interactive has created something that gives the Pinhead partial a real chance to explore a new dimension of the Hellbound world. The fact that Clive Barker was providing guidance to the development team means that, when it comes to the Cenobite storytelling, Hellraiser: Revival honors his vision, rather than just milking his name for clout. It all makes for a satisfying take on what makes the Cenobite mythos so compelling and a worthwhile addition to the canon. Just maybe wait until Grandma has gone to bed before you fire up the console.
Hellraiser: Revival is out now, and you can check out what our reviewer made of it here.