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Hellraiser

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United Kingdom · 1987
Rated R · 1h 33m
Director Clive Barker
Starring Ashley Laurence, Andrew Robinson, Clare Higgins, Sean Chapman
Genre Horror

From horror master Clive Barker comes this chilling nightmare featuring the first appearance of the hideous, demonic Pinhead. When Kirsty Cotton's family moves into their ancestral home, they are terrorized by the resurrected corpse of her uncle, who requires the flesh of murdered innocent victims in order to become whole and alive again...

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What are people saying?

Summer Goldstein Profile picture for Summer Goldstein

Imaginative, visceral – with emphasis on the viscera – and an incredibly fun ride. HELLRAISER blends a dark mythology of sadism and souls with grotesque practical effects.

What are critics saying?

40

The New York Times by

Mr. Barker is no more successful in making the big leap from literature to film than Norman Mailer. He's cast his film with singularly uninteresting actors, though the special effects aren't bad - only damp.

63

Slant Magazine by Eric Henderson

Barker’s vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser‘s overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can’t disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.

80

The A.V. Club by Keith Phipps

Pinhead barely appears in Hellraiser, a film that, with its intense and uncomfortable family drama, might have even worked without him. With him, however, it becomes one of the most innovative and memorable horror films of the '80s.

78

Austin Chronicle by Marjorie Baumgarten

This skillfully creepy film tells the story of some housemates who experience unwelcome visits from a partially decomposed former resident who rises from beneath the floorboards. Seems he wants the flesh and blood of the new residents in order to settle some old scores.

80

The Guardian by Peter Bradshaw

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous – and yet effective, an imaginative Guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

12

Chicago Sun-Times by Roger Ebert

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.

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