Works in this franchise with their own YMMV pages:
- Hellbound: Hellraiser II
- Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
- Hellraiser: Bloodline
- Hellraiser: Inferno
- Hellraiser: Deader
- Hellraiser: Hellworld
- Hellraiser: Revelations
- Hellraiser: Judgement
- Hellraiser (2022)
The Franchise in general:
- Complete Monster: here.
- Draco in Leather Pants: Clive Barker famously quipped about how much fan mail Doug Bradley gets from women and how they love Pinhead, even though he hasn't done a good, benevolent thing over the course of the entire film franchise.note
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Chatterer, who's the second most recurring Cenobite after Pinhead.
- Pinhead himself started as this in the first film before being promoted as a Breakout Villain. Julia was intended to be the Big Bad.
- Evil Is Cool: Pinhead is the face of the Hellraiser series. Also, the other Cenobites who appears throughout the franchise also qualify, mainly due to their and Pinhead's unique physical appearances and creative supernatural kills.
- Fanon: Event Horizon is considered by many as an unofficial Hellraiser film.
- Fan Nickname: Pinhead was originally listed in the first film's credits as "Lead Cenobite," and Barker himself has been known to say calling him "Pinhead" makes him sound stupid. Which didn't stop the sequels from adopting the fan nickname as the official one.
- Foe Yay Shipping: Between Kirsty and Pinhead. Especially in the deleted scene in Hellseeker.
- I Am Not Shazam: Though not as common as other examples, there are a few works that reference Pinhead by calling him Hellraiser.
- Les Yay: In the first two movies, the female Cenobite seems more intent on getting her hands on Kirsty than the others.
- Magnificent Bitch: Kirsty Cotton, daughter of Larry Cotton, begins the series as a kindhearted young woman whose hedonistic, monstrous uncle Frank was taken by the Order of the Gash, aka the Cenobites. Upon the undead Frank's return to the land of the living, Kirsty inadvertently opens the Lament Configuration and bargains with the Cenobites to offer Frank to them in her stead. Tricking him into exposing himself, Kirsty later banishes the Cenobites and demonstrates her penchant for planning when she wears the skin of her revived evil stepmother Julia to outwit the Cenobites' God, Leviathan. Years later, Kirsty's husband plots to kill her for her money and forces her to open the Lament Configuration again, but Kirsty turns the tables and bargains with the Hell Priest. Killing her husband's co-conspirator and mistresses, Kirsty then murders him and makes it look like an accident to hand his soul to the Cenobites.
- Nausea Fuel: It's Clive Barker. Hellbound is the worst, with the maggot-infested corpses and the inmate shredding himself with a razor, but all of the movies have it to some extent.
- One-Scene Wonder: Pinhead has very little screen time in most of the films. He generally shows up around the end after very short appearances earlier on, sometimes as a Jump Scare.
- Inferno: Pinhead turns out to be Joseph's psychiatrist. When he reveals himself as such during the climax, he explains why things have gone the way they have for Joseph, and the behavior he's indulged in to warrant such consequences.
- Hellseeker: Turns up at the end as we learn Kirsty made a deal with him to take her husband.
- Deader: During the climax, Winter and the Deaders fail to take over the Cenobite's realm/purpose, and Pinhead takes great pleasure in making them pay for the attempt.
- Hellworld: It turns out the brief glimpses we get of Pinhead aren't even real, just the main characters hallucinating. It appears that Pinhead doesn't even exist and is only a character for an online RPG based on the Lament Configuration's mythos... until the very, very end, when he turns out to be quite real after all.
- Revelations: This film's plot is patterned after the first one's, but the Cenobites have their biggest on-screen summoning much closer to the end.
- Only the Creator Does It Right: The first two films that directly involved Clive Barker are not coincidentally the most positively received entries in the series.
- Sequelitis:
- The first two films are worth watching. The others are all over the place, with Hell on Earth, Bloodline, and Inferno being the only generally-well-liked ones.
- One interesting aversion is that Inferno and Hellseeker operate on similar formulas. Whichever one the person sees first might makes them favor that one over the other. Hellseeker bringing back Kirsty also helps, while Inferno uses an actor from Nightbreed giving it another connection to Clive Barker’s work. Inferno precedes Hellseeker historically, but given the later sequels don't number anymore, plenty of people may not have watched in order.
- Squick: Again, it's Clive Barker.
- Villain Decay: Pinhead is a rare inversion. In making him more evil (and usually the main villain) after the second film, the writers also made him less interesting. He's also an odd case in that how malevolent he is goes back and forth across the films. He's pure evil in the third and fourth films; the fifth, sixth and seventh installments feature Pinhead about as much as the first two and in the eighth, the real Pinhead only shows up at the end.
The first film:
- Adaptation Displacement: The number of fans unaware there was ever a book is astounding. The fact that the book and the film have distinctly different titles doesn't help.
- Awesome Music: The film has not one but two awesome scores — the Creepy Awesome rejected score by Coil and the terrorizing, brooding orchestral music score by Christopher Young that appears in the completed film.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: When Kirsty first opens the puzzle box, you would expect the Cenobites to appear. And they do...after a scene where a door to a hallway opens, Kirsty enters it, and is promptly chased back down it by a horrifying monster.note When she gets back to the hospital room, the hallway disappears, then the Cenobites appear, with the previous chase sequence not being spoken of again and the monster itself only showing up in the climax to provide the movie with one last scare, which also comes off like a Big Lipped Alligator Moment.
- Common Knowledge: There are quite a few videos on Youtube that claim the Cenobites welsh on their deal with Kirsty during the climax. However, Pinhead never actually agreed to her deal. When Kirsty offered to return Frank to them in exchange for her life, he answers with a “maybe.”. Even if you assume the "maybe" means some kind of agreement was struck, Kirsty is the one who (unknowingly) backs out first by telling the Cenobites they can't have "her father" (who's actually Frank in disguise, something she didn't know at that point) and the Cenobites explicitly noted that if Kirsty tried to cheat them, all bets were off. So no matter how you cut it the whole thing was moot.
- Complete Monster: This duo also appears in the second film:
- Frank Cotton is a cruel hedonist, who was taken by the Cenobites in his search for ultimate pleasure. After escaping, he manipulates Julia Cotton in to helping him murder several innocent people in order to complete his return to normal world. After murdering his brother and disguising himself in his skin, he tries to rape his own niece Kirsty. When he killed Julia by accident, he just tossed her aside to continue his hunt for Kirsty. When he's taken by the Cenobites again, Frank languishes in a private hell and sends Kirsty letters begging for help, pretending to be her father so she'll come to save him, solely so he can keep her as a Sex Slave.
- Julia Cotton is Kirsty's Wicked Stepmother who helped Frank accomplish his murders and was trying to help him rape her own adopted daughter Kirsty. After she is revived, she gleefully drains people at a mental hospital of their life while relishing in their pain and suffering to restore herself. She feeds her rescuer Dr. Channard to her master to turn him into a Cenobite and tries to kill her stepdaughter and an innocent, mentally handicapped girl. When she encounters Frank again, she murders him by ripping his heart out.
- First Installment Wins: Far and away the most positively received entry in the whole series and the most iconic as well.
- Jerkass Woobie: Julia, when we first see her, she's clearly miserable and in an unhappy marriage. Not to mention she's completely obsessed with a manipulative Jerkass who clearly doesn't care about her and treats her like an object. Her initial attempt to restore Frank also left her shaken to the point where she begged Frank not to make her do it again. She quickly loses any and all sympathy points, however, when she continues to kill for Frank and starts to enjoy it.
- Love to Hate: Frank may not be as iconic as the Cenobites but he still makes an impression as a creepy, slimy scuzzbag who's horrifying all his own and provides some of the movie's most memorable quotes.
- Memetic Mutation: "Jeeeeesuuuuuussss wept....."
- Narm:
- When Frank says "Come to daddy!"
- Pinhead's attempt to express fear, in his deep, monotone voice: NO. DON'T DO THAT.
- Special Effects Failure:
- There was no budget left to complete the special effects in the first film, so Clive Barker and "a Greek guy" hand-drew them on the film over the course of a weekend. Barker was impressed with the results, considering how much alcohol the two of them had consumed.
- During the scene with the Engineer, you can clearly see the tracks the puppet is riding on. Harder to catch in VHS copies, but in HD it's more than visible.
- Visual Effects of Awesome: The scene where Frank crawls out of the attic floor features some amazing Body Horror effects that could rival that of David Cronenberg.
- The Woobie:
- Kirsty, who endures trauma no girl should have to endure.
- Larry. The poor guy never really had a chance.
