How to be a Hellraiser, according to the newest Pinhead
It’s a Hellraiser kind of Halloween.
Sure, every Halloween is a good Halloween to watch a Hellraiser movie, but this year there’s a brand-new one: The Night House director David Bruckner’s reboot-ish continuation of the Clive Barker series, starring Jamie Clayton as the iconic Pinhead.
Clayton is the latest actor to step into Pinhead’s self-made leather boots. Polygon was lucky enough to catch up with Clayton and Bruckner over Zoom, where they explained what it actually takes to play a Pinhead and gave us a step-by-step guide to becoming a “hellraiser” yourself.
[Ed. note: This interview has been edited for length and clarity.]
Clayton watched Clive Barker’s lauded 1987 film the night before her audition for Bruckner’s version, but Cenobite wannabes should feel free to watch it as many times as they want (on Prime Video, Shudder, or for free with ads on Tubi and Pluto TV). It’s one of the best horror movies ever made, as Bruckner will tell you, it’s a bit of a miracle that it even exists.
“I think about the original Hellraiser and I think it’s a marvel that all of those images were released at once in one movie,” he says. “It came out, and we’d never seen anything like that before.”
After watching the original, Clayton said she had “many, many, many” discussions with Bruckner over the minutest of details, like Pinhead’s posture and voice.
“I was very grateful to David for all of the time that he took,” she says. “He was working in Serbia months before any of us even arrived. David took so much time to schedule with me, late at night on Sundays [...] to sort of help me get to a place where I could really become the Priest.”
For Hellraiser, Bruckner teamed up again with the makeup artists at Russell FX, who worked with
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