"You were God for a moment, even if you didn't realize it."

—Last Days, Brian Evenson

The thing Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival really nails is the light. "A fitful phosphorescence, like the glow of deep-sea fishes: blue, cold, charmless," writes Barker in The Hellbound Heart, the 1986 novella that birthed a thirty-year horror franchise. The series' Freddy-tier-iconic villain Pinhead was credited in the original Hellraiser (1987) only as "Lead Cenobite" and barely exists in the source novella. He's not called "Pinhead" on screen until the transcendently homosexual Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992); no coincidence it's the only other Hellraiser movie to pick up on the themes of fringe sexuality and fetish laid out in the first film. 

Frank Cotton summons the Cenobites hoping for an exaggerated but fundamentally conventional sexual reverie, hoping to fuck his way through a hundred deliquescent women: "oiled women, milked women; women shaved and muscled for the act of love.” Instead he gets the Cenobites, four "sexless things" with "corrugated flesh," devoid of obvious gender, their voices ambiguous and features "willfully disfigured," gray-skinned and obscure. The Cenobite definition of pleasure, as they will tell you ad nauseum, exceeds the human frame of understanding; like the blue lightning that heralds their arrival, their appetites are cold and alien.

It's a joke about the differences between straight and gay sexual practice; Frank may be destructively horny and totally desensitized but he's unprepared for the depravity of real freaks. Only a few can withstand the mortifications of the flesh necessary to enter the Cenobites' ranks, and Frank is fatally unprepared for his grand coming-out. The Cenobites only come when they're called. They are not, in any sense, "evil" or even wantonly violent in a slasher way. Pinhead is all about enthusiastic and ongoing consent; they should get him to do a speaking tour of college campuses. 

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival, which marks the author's return to prepending his name to videogame titles, stars a guy called Aidan Lynch, whose girlfriend Sunny is promptly snatched away by the Cenobites. Aidan is the quintessential stolid, stubborn videogame protagonist: boring to the point of parody. His ability to slide while sprinting makes him uniquely positioned to take on the horrors of Hell! The characters around him—Pinhead, Female Cenobite, the Resident Evil 4 merchant, and the various Cenobite washouts that make up the game's cannon fodder—give him the old "You love the violence, don't you!! Look in the mirror, Aidan!!!" routine, but his goal is unshakable. He must retrieve his girl Sunny by any means necessary, even against Pinhead's best advice. Aidan never even considers his bitch might be playing him…

The game opens on a cartoonish sex scene; Aidan and Sunny are fucking while she pierces him with needles; he reciprocates by gouging a long furrow down her back with the corner of the Cenobites' puzzle box. It's a statement of intent. This game fucks; sex is back; clutch your pearls, normie+. Prepare to wade through dozens of NBC Hannibal corpse-art sculptures, blast gimps with a shotgun, and look at dildoes and stuff. The inclusion of an amateur trans Cenobite is not worth commenting on, except to say she calls a boob job "top surgery"... which is a little three-fingers-meme. Aidan's frequent Bloober Team nightmare hallucinations are crass to the extreme: one prompt, over a dangling noose, reads "End It!" He sees himself strung up in the nude, being licked up and down by Butterball—the fattest and therefore most horrible Cenobite to get top from. One is reminded of the clammy demoniac excess of 2018's Agony.

I submit that it's not the bondage aesthetics or the flying chains that make the Cenobites enduringly weird, although that stuff is cool: it's their system of belief. They operate on a different logic, with religious intensity. Even as the Hellraiser movies slip further into the realm of straight-to-video slasher (and it must be said, even the first film ends up at a loss at how to make them threatening aside from having them chase you around the house), Pinhead, unlike Jason or Michael, can be bargained with, reasoned with. In folklore and demonology, a "true name" carries great power, and entities and spirits come with their own pacts and rituals. And in BDSM, a dominant doesn't simply impose their will unchecked on the submissive. There are negotiations and contracts; it's all about rules and lore, like fetish D&D.

The "murdering artist" who hams up large sections of the game is like an HBOified Sander Cohen. The puzzle box—originally a way to "break the surface of the real”—now allows Aiden to solve Zelda puzzles in Hell and fling sawblades at emaciated ghouls like the Half-Life gravity gun. The more Pinhead talks the more his mannered, particular phrases pile up into caricature; everything is sensation and experience and pain. And as shamelessly as Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival mashes up nu-Resident Evil tropes and 360-era FPS design (double-fisting the puzzle box AND a gun is inspired stupidity), it lifts the Cenobite-cult idea from Hellraiser: Deader (2005) and collates other ancillary Pinheadverse material from the '90s comics run like the Cenobite "Orno," turning the Order of the Gash into a team you can try out for. "Will you join my Gash?" Pinhead asks Sunny, like Bret Michaels asking his paramours to "stay in this house and continue to rock my world." 

Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival gets all the trappings right; the chains, the big Leviathan in the sky, the skinless revenants, but it's more silly than bizarre. In this way it is no different from ten of the eleven Hellraiser movies, and maybe no game that includes a Doug Bradley remix of Peaches's "Fuck the Pain Away" is attempting anything more than splatter entertainment. The Books of Blood collections were massive for me, but we have to be honest: Clive Barker has always been susceptible to the poison of worldbuilding++ (and stage magic). Even in early stories like "Hell's Event" and "The Yattering and Jack" he was enamored with the intricacies of Hell as a bureaucracy. And he's proudly given Clive Barker's Hellraiser: Revival both his name and his stamp of approval. Who am I to deny an old gay his pleasures?

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+ In the 90s, Barker singled out sex as "the last taboo" in horror, which is the kind of career-minded mythmaking you expect from a working author, but also prescient about the exceedingly liebestod direction horror publishing would take almost immediately after his debut with the rise of splatterpunk. Really, there are no taboos left in horror; every horror movie now has kids getting mutilated or blown up, which used to be so rare that the scene in Alligator when a little boy gets eaten by the alligator stuck with me as particularly terrifying…

++ Barker's non-horror work, which to be clear comprises the bulk of his books, is a little watered-down Neil Gaiman; the comics introduce a band of Cenobite hunters (the Harrowers!) formed by Leviathan's sister; and 2015's dreadful The Scarlet Gospels ends with Pinhead battling Lucifer one-on-one for control of Hell. 

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Astrid Anne Rose is a long-time contributor to Bullet Points. Her work can be found in MEGADAMAGE, BOMB Magazine, and The New Lesbian Pulp, as well as on Gumroad and itch.io.