Overview
In the original Hellraiser (1987), Frank Cotton (Sean Chapman) escapes from the Cenobites when his brother Larry (Andrew Robinson) spills his own blood on the spot where Frank died opening a puzzle box that opened a gateway to the Cenobites. With the help of Larry's wife Julia (Clare Higgins), Frank begins regenerating his body with the blood of victims that Julia supplies him. Larry's daughter, Kirsty (Ashley Laurence), accidentally unleashes the Cenobites, but makes a deal to deliver Frank to them in exchange for her own life. After taking Frank, the Cenobites go back on their deal and try and take Kirsty as well. Solving the puzzle box, Kirsty sends the Cenobites back to Hell. In 1988, a sequel titled Hellbound: Hellraiser II follows Dr. Philip Channard (Kenneth Cranham) as he resurrects Julia, who was stuck in Hell with the Cenobites. Kirsty is pulled back into the Cenobite world, where the demons decide to keep her, but, having discovered the human identity of the Cenobites early, Kirsty appeals to their latent humanity, specifically the Cenobite leader Pinhead (Doug Bradley). Pinhead decides to release her, but he and his followers are killed by Channard, who has become a Cenobite himself. With help of a teenage girl, Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), who unknowingly assisted Channard in opening the box, Kirsty and Tiffany escape the Cenobite world and close the gateway behind them.
In Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), the revelation of Pinhead's humanity has resulted in a schism, splitting him in two—his human self, World War I veteran Elliot Spencer, and Pinhead, now a living embodiment of Spencer's id. While Spencer is trapped in limbo, Pinhead is trapped, along with the puzzle box, in the surface of an intricately carved pillar, a relic of the Cenobite realm. The pillar is found by a night club owner, J.P. Monroe (Kevin Bernhardt), who begins assisting Pinhead in his resurrection. A television reporter, Joey Summerskill (Terry Farrell), begins to learn about Pinhead and the puzzle box, which leads her to Monroe's night club. Pinhead is eventually resurrected, and begins creating new Cenobite followers in an effort to establish Hell on Earth. Joey manages to reunite Spencer and Pinhead, fusing them back into one entity, and is able to use the puzzle box to send Pinhead back to his dimension; afterward, Joey submerges the box into freshly laid cement at a construction site. Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) tells the story of the creator of the puzzle box, referred to as the Lament Configuration. A toymaker named Philip Lemarchand (Bruce Ramsay) is commissioned by the Duc de L'Isle (Mickey Cottrell), a wealthy Aristocrat and master of the dark arts, to create the box as a gateway to Hell so that de L'Isle can enslave a demon. Beginning in the distant future, and tracing the history of the box from its creation in 1784, Bloodline shows how the Lemarchand family attempts to close the box forever after learning what L'Isle uses it for. Eventually, Dr. Paul Merchant creates the Elysium Configuration, a space station capable of closing the gateway for good, and he traps Pinhead inside and destroys him and the box.
Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), the first of the succeeding sequels to be direct-to-video, follows corrupt police Detective Joseph Thorne (Craig Sheffer) as he discovers the puzzle box while investigating a series of ritualistic murders. As time goes on he begins to uncover clues that suggest that he is the killer. Eventually, Pinhead appears and informs Thorne that the events of the movie have been transpiring in Thorne's own personal Hell, and that he will be reliving the same series of events for eternity. In Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), Ashley Laurence returns to play Kirsty Cotton. In the opening moments, she and her husband, Trevor (Dean Winters), end up in a car accident that kills Kirsty. One month later, Trevor wakes up in a hospital, but because of a head injury, his memory is uncertain and he cannot distinguish between fantasy and reality. As he begins to uncover evidence that he was having a series of affairs, he also comes under suspicion for orchestrating the crash that killed his wife. Pinhead appears in the end, and informs Trevor that he was the one that died in the car crash: His own plot to murder Kirsty for her inheritance backfired when Kirsty offered the Cenobites the lives of Trevor, his mistresses, and his co-conspirators in exchange for her own.
In Hellraiser: Deader (2005), reporter Amy Klein (Kari Wuhrer) is sent to Bucharest to investigate an underground suicide cult founded by a descendant of Philip Lemarchand, who claims to be able to bring back the dead and who believes that it is his birthright to open the puzzle box and control the Cenobites. She is gradually drawn into their world and eventually sees no way out other than to join them. In the end she opens the puzzle box, summoning up Pinhead and the Cenobites, who kill everyone for attempting to invade their world. To prevent Pinhead from taking her soul, Amy kills herself. Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005) is set in the "real world," in which the Hellraiser franchise has spawned a successful MMORPG. Five friends mourning the death of one of their fellow players—who committed suicide after becoming obsessed with the game—receive in-game invitations to a party at the Leviathan House. At the house, the host of the party (Lance Henriksen) takes them on a tour of the many layers of the home, after which they are picked off one-by-one by the host or Pinhead. The final two victims ultimately realize that most of the events of the movie have been a hallucination, after the host—the father of their deceased friend, who blames his son's fellow players for not breaking his addiction to the game—drugged them and buried them alive. The police rescue the surviving teenagers, Chelsea (Katheryn Winnick) and Jake (Christopher Jacot), while the host escapes to a decrepit motel with a suitcase of his son's belongings. The host discovers a real puzzle box inside, and upon opening it is killed by Pinhead and a pair of cenobites.
In 2011, a ninth film was released to a single theater in California for a crew showing that was ostensibly open to the public. Hellraiser: Revelations is the first film not to feature Doug Bradley as Pinhead and was shot in two weeks for $300,000. It was suggested by Bloody Disgusting that the film was only shot so that The Weinstein Company would not lose its rights to the franchise before it could produce a more profitable remake of the original. The film was released on DVD on October 18, 2011.
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