Only Clive Barker could make something this perverse and grotesque that is also this sensual and poetic. I think HELLRAISER should be studied by anyone who wants to make independent, low-budget horror that is not limited in the scope of its ideas. This film is purely imaginative, high concept and yet expertly limited in its scope. It feels big because it's showing you things you've never seen, and yet the action is pretty much limited to a single house, with Pinhead and the Cenobites being used sparingly, with barely five minutes of screen time, if that. HELLRAISER is a marvel.
Frank Cotton opened a box that took him to Hell, but a drop of blood spilled on the spot where he was taken brings him back—in a manner of speaking. He is barely a husk, and enlists his brother’s wife, Julia, to bring him blood to make him whole again. Julia slept with Frank on the eve of her wedding, it was the most passion she’d ever known, far beyond her hapless marriage, and she is more than willing to kill to put flesh on his bones, so to speak.
In a way, HELLRAISER is a haunted house movie, and in a way, it's a vampire movie, and yet it's those things in a way you've never experienced them before. It's about sexuality and obsession, how normalizing taboos can drive a person to further extremes, and how they can even begin to fetishize normalcy. Sexuality, kink, and obsession run deep in HELLRAISER and every character has a different but vital relationship to each of those things. Julia fetishizes a brief sexual encounter so intense that she is willing to kill to recapture that feeling. Frank plays at hedonism to the point that he found a box that tore him apart and took him to Hell with the promise of pleasures beyond the limits, and yet he incestuously fetishizes his brother’s life, his wife and even his daughter, to the point that he would wear his brother’s skin to have those things for himself. The Cenobites are a passively invested jury with no private obsessions. They wear their kink on every inch of their pale, mutilated bodies.
It's a story so complex, so wildly imaginative and yet so simple, it's basically a Grand Guignol SCENES FROM A MARRIAGE, just about a woman in a loveless marriage who will do anything to rekindle that passion, even if it means killing to put skin back on the bones of the best lover she ever had. One of the most uniquely imaginative horror films from the '80s, from one of the best storytellers we've ever had--making a stunning directorial debut--and purely and simply one of the best to ever do it.