‘Hellraiser: Judgment’ Director Details Why His Film Does Something No Other ‘Hellraiser’ Has

Over the past 30 years, the Hellraiser series has earned 10 installments of stories featuring gruesome violence, masochism and sexuality. The latest chapter of the franchise, Hellraiser: Judgment, features the demonic Pinhead suffering an unexpected fate, taking the character into uncharted territory for the series. Writer/director Gary J. Tunnicliffe recently shared exactly why it was important for him to take the familiar foe to new realms.

***WARNING: Spoilers below for Hellraiser: Judgment***

After Pinhead administers his punishment to various characters, the Cenobite is confronted with a representative of God, challenging this angel and her methods. Pinhead is then stripped of his supernatural abilities and sent back to earth as a mere human.

“I got to a point where I was writing the end of the film, and I thought, ‘I’m not gonna have somebody hold the box up, close it, and say, ‘Go to Hell,’” Tunnicliffe told ComicBook.com. “I couldn’t do it. I just couldn’t do it again. And it’s like, ‘Oh, so what do you do? Do you tear them apart with hooks and chains?’ Well, I kind of did that in [the short film] No More Souls. I went down that road and tore Pinhead apart, even though it was only a fan film that obviously got more attention and became kind of a little canon of its own.”

The filmmaker drew inspiration from the second film in the saga to help motivate Pinhead’s path.

“It’s like one of those what ifs where you go, ‘Well, he came from being immortal. We saw him birthed in Hellbound,’ which I really loved, and I thought, ‘If you’re the king, then the very worst thing that can happen to you is you get stripped and thrown out with the paupers,’” the filmmaker pointed out. “It was really a little bit of an homage to, the weirdest of things, the Chamberlain in Dark Crystal. When they strip him and rip him, and had I the money and the budget that’s would I would have done. We would have had his pins ripped out, his clothing would have been shredded away from him.”

Even though the film introduces new elements into the series’ mythology, Tunnicliffe pointed out that he had no plans for a sequel in mind with his film’s ending.

“I had no concept of a sequel, a spinoff, nothing at all,” the filmmaker confessed. “People suggest, ‘Oh, you’re trying to write a sequel for the auditor and stuff like that.’ It’s like, ‘Are you f-cking kidding?’ I was just trying to swim to other bank and survive without being eaten by the sharks.”

While there’s no official plans for a sequel, in the time since making the film, Tunnicliffe has toyed with some directions he’d be interested in seeing the series explore.

“I have thought about it afterwards, what I think would be great fun,” Tunnicliffe shared, “Maybe a new Cenobite ruler comes in, or takes over, and a new head priest comes in, and it’s not working out and clearly this person, this Cenobite’s not doing a great job. And underhandedly, the Auditor is leaving a trail of breadcrumbs for the guy who is Pinhead to find his way back, and he gets pulled in. And then it’s like, he turns up, and it’s like a showdown between the newly born Pinhead and this guy who’s taken over his mantle. It’s like, and we do a bit of a standoff, and it’s like battle of the Hell priests.”

You can check out Hellraiser: Judgment now, available on Blu-ray, DVD and VOD.