Pinhead is a fictional character from the Hellraiser series. Created by Clive Barker and portrayed by Doug Bradley, Pinhead is a prominent figure in the series, mostly featured as the main antagonist. Pinhead is the leader of the Cenobites, formerly human creatures from an extradimensional realm who travel to Earth through the Lament Configuration, and harvest human souls. Depicted as intelligent and articulate, the character was deliberately presented as a departure from the mute or wise-cracking 1980s horror movie villains who preceded him, being based more on Count Dracula.
In Hellraiser (1987), Kirsty Cotton unintentionally summons Pinhead and the cenobites, but is spared on condition that she lead the cenobites to her uncle, Frank Cotton, who had escaped them. After reclaiming Frank, the Cenobites turn on Kirsty, who manages to banish them with the Lament Configuration.
In Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), it is revealed that Pinhead was born Elliot Spencer and opened the Lament Configuration after becoming disenchanted with human life after serving in World War I. Like other Cenobites, he lost all memory of his human identity following the transformation. He is a follower of the god "Leviathan", an entity that presides over a labyrinth realm called Hell, where the Cenobites live and torture their quarry. Kirsty shows Pinhead a photograph of his former self, causing him to regain his memories. He briefly leads his fellow Cenobites in a battle with the newly created Channard cenobite, who reverts him back to his human form before killing him.
In Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), it is learned that Spencer's reversion to his human form caused the negative attributes of himself to manifest into an independent entity, which takes the form of Pinhead. Without human influence, Pinhead is unbound by the laws of the Cenobite Hell, and engages in an indiscriminate killing spree on Earth, transforming some of his victims into a Cenobite army. Spencer manages to escape Limbo and stops Pinhead by re-merging with him.
In Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) Pinhead allies himself with the demon princess Angelique, in order to force John Merchant (a descendant of the inventor who built the Lament Configuration) to create an unsealable gateway to Hell. The future segments of the film reveal that Pinhead is finally destroyed in the year 2127 by Dr. Paul Merchant, another descendant, who creates the "Elysium Configuration", a space station capable of closing Hell's gateway for good. Pinhead is trapped inside it and is destroyed along with the box.
In Hellraiser: Inferno (2000) Pinhead appears primarily under the guise of police psychiatrist Doctor Paul Gregory, assuming his true form near the end to inform protagonist Detective Joseph Thorne that he has been in Hell for the duration of the film, and is being punished for his corruption and various misdeeds in life.
In Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002) Pinhead serves a role similar to the one he fulfilled in Inferno. Kirsty is now married to a corrupt insurance agent who plots to have her killed in a murder-for-money scheme, using Lemarchand's box to "cleanly" kill Kirsty without the evidence pointing to himself, his mistress, or his conspirators. Pinhead appears at the end of the film to inform Trevor, who had amnesia throughout the film, that he has actually been dead and trapped by the Cenobites for some time: Pinhead had appeared to Kirsty, pleased at the prospect of a "reunion," but Kristy ultimately struck a deal with him: she would be left alone in exchange for killing Trevor and his conspirators thus giving the Cenobites the victims' souls.
Pinhead appears as a fictional character in Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005). In this film the box and the Cenobites have become the basis for a successful MMORPG called Hellworld. Although the Pinhead seems to attack the guests at a Hellraiser-themed party, he is revealed to be the hallucination of five guests who have been drugged and buried alive by the party's host, who blames them for not preventing his Hellworld-addicted son's suicide. In the film's climax, the host discovers that the Hellraiser mythos is based in fact, and that his son had come into possession of a real Lemarchand box. Opening it causes the real Pinhead to appear, praising the boy's ingenuity before ordering a pair of Cenobites to kill the host.
Hellraiser: Revelations (2011), portrays Pinhead as he was presented in the original Hellraiser. Here, he appears to teenagers Nico and Steven, who open the box during a nihilistic vacation in Mexico. Nico accompanies Pinhead to the Cenobite realm, but, like Frank, discovers that the "pleasures" offered to him are too painful to bear. Nico manages to escape and convinces Steven to help him kill prostitutes in order to regenerate his body and successfully flee the cenobites; when Steven finally decides to stop killing, Nico skins him and assumes his identity. A dying Steven summons Pinhead, who, sensing the extremity of Steven's inner darkness, makes him into a cenobite
Concept and creation
According to Clive Barker and Doug Bradley, the earliest incarnation of Pinhead appeared in Hunters in the Snow, an original 1973 play with Doug Bradley in the role of the Dutchman, an undead inquisitor and torturer. A later film titled The Forbidden, which was shot in 16 millimetre and in black and white, included a prop in the form of a wooden block with six nails in it, which gave distorted shadow formations under different lighting angles. Years later, during the scripting of Hellraiser, the same design would be applied to Pinhead's face to give the same effect.After being disappointed with the way his material had been treated by producers in Underworld (which included a scene in which needles burst out of a character's skull), Barker wrote The Hellbound Heart as his first step in directing a film by himself.
An early Pinhead design by Clive Barker.
After securing funding in early 1986, Barker and his producer Chris Figg assembled a team to design the cenobites. Among the team was Bob Keen and Geoff Portass at Image Animation and Jane Wildgoose, a costume designer who was requested to make a series of costumes for 4-5 'super-butchers' while refining the scarification designs with Image Animation. Lighting-wise, Pinhead was designed so that shadows would swirl round his head. By July 1986, the shooting script positively identified the single pinheaded Cenobite from the earlier draft as clearly the leader.
| "[Pinhead] was basically Clive's design, as seen on the Hellbound T-shirts. There was a lot of discussion with Clive, then I did a few drawings. First we just had spikes coming out of his head. I wanted it to be more geometrical. Originally he had pins all over the head, but Clive and I thought it would be nice to make it look more like a mask with pins around his chin, over his ears and at the back of his head. We modelled it about six times and did loads of drawings. If you look at the first test pictures that came out of Hellraiser there are actually pins in there rather than nails and the pins got lost - you couldn't see them. So we clipped the ends of the pins off and made our own hollow brass nails that inserted over the top and they were much more visible." |
| — Games Without Frontiers By Brian J. Robb, Fear, No.6, May/June 1989 |
Portrayal
When he read the script for the first time, Bradley stated on interview that he saw Pinhead as a cross between Oscar Wilde and Noël Coward. Upon asking Barker how he should play Pinhead, Barker told him to "[think] of him as a cross between an administrator and a surgeon who’s responsible for running a hospital where there are no wards, only operating theatres. As well as being the man who wields the knife, he’s the man who has to keep the timetable going." The two also decided early on that Pinhead was formerly human:
A line from one of Clive's plays swam into my mind: 'I am in mourning for my humanity.' At this point there was no back story for the character, but I had discussed this with Clive and we had agreed that he had once been human. But whether this was yesterday, last week, last year, ten, a hundred, a thousand years ago, I didn't know. I didn't need to. Sufficient to have that idea lodged into my brain. A perpetual, unconscious grieving for the man he had once been, for a life and a face he couldn't even remember. And a frozen grief. I felt now that Pinhead existed in an emotional limbo where neither pain nor pleasure could touch him. A pretty good definition of Hell for me.”The Pinhead makeup took six hours to apply. When Bradley first donned the Pinhead makeup, he spent a few minutes alone in his room getting into character by looking at himself in the mirror. During rehearsals, Barker told Bradley, who at the time was more used to working in theatre, to subdue his movements and gestures, in order to give Pinhead an aura of complete control. New World Productions originally considered overdubbing Bradley's voice with that of an American actor, though this was reconsidered when the producers watched him perform.
—Hellraiser From Chapter Seventeen of Sacred Monsters: Behind The Mask Of The Horror Actor by Doug Bradley, 1996
Characterization
Pinhead's role has varied with each Hellraiser installment. In the script for the original film, Barker describes Pinhead and the other cenobites as "demons" in his notes; the character himself, however, upon capturing Kirsty Cotton, identifies himself as neither explicitly angelic or demonic, stating that he and his fellow entourage are "Explorers in the further regions of experience. Demons to some. Angels to others." The second film expounds on the idea of the Cenobites as demons by depicting them as denizens of a realm called Hell, a maze-like dimension ruled over by an entity known as Leviathan, where they subject their quarry to emotional and psychological torture. The third film radically altered the original concept, making Pinhead into a purely evil demon of chaos, explained by Pinhead losing the human, 'orderly', part of himself during the previous film. In the fourth film he is presented as a megalomaniac bent on world domination,and by the fifth he acts as a judge, punishing those who open the box for their sins by making them face their personal demons. In this film, he goes by the title of "Engineer",a name derived from the lead cenobite in Clive Barker's original novella. The seventh film reverts closer to the original film, with the Cenobites responsible for pleasure and pain, but the characters seem more demonic as in later installments
Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
| "[Pinhead] was an English army officer in an unspecified place and time, though roughly in the Far East in the late 20's or early 30's. He was a very pucker Englishman, a public school type who went straight into the army. He felt terribly out of place and unfulfilled because he was only there through family tradition. So from his sterile viewpoint, what he hears of the Lament box is very appealing. I see him alone in his Nissen hut trying to solve the puzzle - which he obviously does, and is transformed into Pinhead."I don't see him as the first Cenobite. Of the four we know about, he is the leader, but the Cenobites have been around for centuries. To me, Pinhead is the chief Cenobite of the 20th Century..” |
| — Quoted from Doug Bradley in The Pride of Pinhead By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 82, May 1989 |
Personality
According to Clive Barker, as the writing of the Hellraiser script took place during the height of the A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween film series, his intended portrayal of Pinhead as an articulate and intelligent character was initially not well received by the producers: some suggested that Pinhead should act more like Freddy Krueger and crack jokes, while others suggested that he be a silent character like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Barker insisted that Pinhead's personality be more evocative of Christopher Lee's portrayal of Count Dracula: "Part of the chill of Dracula surely lies in the fact that he is very clearly and articulately aware of what he is doing – you feel that this is a penetrating intelligence – and I don’t find dumb things terribly scary – I find intelligence scary, particularly twisted intelligence; it’s one of the reasons why Hannibal Lecter is scary, isn’t it? It’s because you always feel that he’s going to be three jumps ahead of you."
Though described by Pinhead's human half in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth as being "very persuasive and very inventive", Pinhead prefers using coercive methods in order to obtain his goals, a fact which brings him into conflict with his ally, the demon Princess Angelique.
Pinhead can be reasoned and bargained with. In both Hellraiser and Hellraiser: Hellseeker, Kirsty Cotton bargains with Pinhead to offer him more "souls" in exchange for her own (in particular, her human adversaries), thus resulting in her life being spared.In Hellraiser: Revelations, Pinhead is prepared to take Emma to the cenobite realm for having opened the box before other characters explain that she was forced to open it at gunpoint by her boyfriend; Pinhead agrees to let Emma go and take Nico instead.
In his demonic incarnations, Pinhead is irreverent toward Christianity: in the third film, club owner J.P. Monroe exclaims "Jesus Christ," to which Pinhead mockingly replies, "Not quite.", and later on mockingly imitates the stigmata in a church, and states in the fourth "Do I look like someone who cares what God thinks?" In Clive Barker's Hellraiser comics published by BOOM! in 2011, Pinhead has reached a crisis point in his existence and now yearns for spiritual salvation and the opportunity to reach Heaven, and puts into motion a plan to destroy his fellow cenobites as a means of atonement.
Pin Head Quote's
"Do i look like someone who care's what god thinks child!"
"I'm going to tear you soul apart"
"Your suffering will be legendary, even in hell."
"Oh, no tears please, for it's a waste of good suffering."
"We have such sights to show you"
"Pain has a face; allow me to show it to you. I Am Pain."
"Demons to some, Angels to others."
"Burn in Hell" -"Ah, such a limited imagination."
"Down the dark decades of your pain, this will seem like a memory of Heaven." "Just come here and die child, while you still have the option of doing it quickly. "
"You solved the box, we came, Now you must come with us. Taste our pleasures."
"Human dreams...such fertile ground for the seeds of torment. Your're so ripe, Joey. And it's harvest time. Save your tears. We'll reap your soul slowly. We have centuries to discover the things that make you whimper. You think your nighttime world is closed to me? Your mind is so naked. A book that yearns to be read. A door that begs to be opened."
"This is my body, This is my blood, Happy are they who come to my sabbat."
"Oh I'll enjoy making you bleed. And I'll enjoy making you enjoy it."
"Unbearable isn't it? The suffering of strangers, the agony of friends. There is a secret song at the center of the world, Joey, and it's sound is like razors through flesh."
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