Hellraiser Director David Bruckner on Reinventing Pinhead, Reboots, and More

Initial Connection

ComicBook.com: When it comes to Hellraiser, just in general, before this was even a gleam in Luke and Ben's eye, what was your connection to Hellraiser as a franchise? Whether you absolutely loved it, weren't really a fan, didn't really appeal to you, what was your Hellraiser connection?

David Bruckner: It was some of the most high-minded, hardcore horror that exists. It was incredibly revered. It was something that I had discovered many times over the years. When I was younger, the first one that found me was Hellraiser 3 and I didn't handle horror films very well then. And so, it really terrified me and I stayed away from it for a minute. But then when I got into high school and beyond, I started to look into it more and then went back and saw the original and part two, and then eventually had watched most of the series before I got the job, most of the other films. And I'd read the book a few years back.

This is sacred stuff in the world of horror. It's also really hard to do and really specific and, as we all know, there's nothing quite like Barker. I never imagined I'd have the opportunity to make a Hellraiser movie.

Early Collaborative Stages

You worked with Luke and Ben on The Night House and the origins of that project had some Hellraiser DNA initially, and then it was turned into a new thing. When it came to this idea of doing a proper Hellraiser, did they come to you with a fully fleshed-out script? Was it that they teased the idea and you worked with them and Dave Goyer to try to find the best entry point?

So they were working on this while I was in post on Night House and post-production can be pretty all-consuming, and I don't think the studio was ready to bring me on until they saw how Night House turned out.

I knew that Goyer had written a treatment and I knew that Ben and Luke were working on a draft, and so if it ever came up between us, I would just say, "I don't want to know anything. I'm not going to let this into my heart unless it's real," and then shortly after we premiered Night House at Sundance, it was right around April 2020 that I first got my hands on the script and I read it and I was really blown away and surprised by the work that had been done, because it wasn't a remake, it was a new story. They had found some really, really unique ways in what I thought just had immense opportunities in a lot of the ways that Hellraiser excited me. From there, I jumped on and then we tend to do heavy development. We did a couple more passes of the script over the next nine months, but the essence of it was there from the moment that I jumped on.

A Place in the Franchise

Maybe this is a nitpicky question, it might be coming more from a fan perspective than an actual filmmaking perspective, but I think what I love about Hellraiser as compared to Halloween or Nightmare on Elm Street is every single movie is technically a sequel, but you don't have to see any other movie. Every movie reinvents itself and has its own mythology so long as you have Cenobites and as long as you have the Rubik's cube, that's all that matters. Did you view this as, "This is just another sequel, this is just a reinterpretation of the source material,"? Do you even think of it in those terms or is that just something that fans are going to say, like, "Ah, it's a reboot, it's a remake, it's a sequel," or whatever?

I think from the jump, I understood that, to some degree, it would be a reinvention, to some degree it would have to be and that if we went too far down the path of trying to force it into a particular cannon, it would be far too specific and we'd have to choose which movies were a part of that and which movies weren't. And then we knew we were going to end up going in a different direction with the Hell Priest, and so it suddenly got really, really complicated to necessarily play that game and, at the same time, there were things that we liked about, that we wanted to preserve, about the original films. We didn't want to strictly live in the world of it being a hard reboot either, necessarily, and so one thing -- I appreciate your question -- is you're asking how much does it factor in?

I think for me, personally, as a fan, I'm not quite so concerned about where exactly it plugs into everything that I've seen before, because I'm so aware of the creation process of films. I know this is a new group of artists picking up where we left off and Hellraiser's quite expansive. It exists in literature form, exists in comic books, it exists in movies, and there's an incredible amount of fan art on the web and some of that is quite inspiring. It lives in our imaginations in many different ways, and so we felt like something that was a reinvention that hearkened back to elements of the Hellraiser movies that you saw before, in some ways more specific than others, really, really made sense.

Reinventing "Pinhead"

You mentioned the Hell Priest and I'm sure there's fans who only know Doug Bradley and they don't even know "The Hellbound Heart," so they don't know the implication of feminine qualities of that character in the source material. Were those elements of a female-presenting Hell Priest, were those in the script? Was it a conversation of, "Let's find just the best person to fit that mold," and then it happened to be Jamie?

We started talking about it when I came on, I don't think there had been, I don't think they had gotten to the point yet of figuring out exactly where it would land. Although there were a lot of ideas and what emerged out of those conversations was a desire to go back to the book, to "Hellbound Heart," as a source of inspiration of what could be done. We also understood that if we're not going to do the movie with Doug, those are big shoes to fill. So much of our experience of what Hellraiser is about Doug Bradley's performance and yet, if Hellraiser's going to have a future and there will hopefully be many, many more movies, that we're eventually going to have to see it transform into something else.

You're not going to get a Hellraiser movie made at this point without the Hell Priest, nor did we want to. Because there was precedent, because there was also, I think, an energy among the fans to imagine Pinhead as a woman, we thought that that would be an appropriate way to go forward and also to take the burden off the audience of endlessly having to compare. Along those lines, we also thought, given the queer context of the original film and the way that's been embraced over the years by the queer community, that we would really be missing out if we didn't include everybody in that conversation. We read everyone for the part and Jamie blew us away, that's how we got there.

But I will also say that, look, I spent some time in the theater before I was making films and in the theater world, text is sacred. The themes and ideas behind a piece of work is what you carry forward. But when you put up a play, part of the reason you put it up is because you have something new to bring to the conversation. If we're going to remount Macbeth, we're going to do Macbeth, but we're going to do it with these new added qualities in a way that we haven't seen before. The spirit of that, to me, is a reason to remount a piece of work and look at it in a different way, it's an exciting endeavor to me as both a filmmaker and a fan.

Unsettling Environments

Another super specific side note, and you might have a good answer for this or it might be nothing, but as someone who grew up in western Massachusetts, when the film opens and I see that there's a house in the Berkshires, there's this mansion, I was immediately like, "This is not something I see every day." How did that element of this narrative come about, that that's where this story's going to unfold?

Well, we wanted to tether it to a major city that was an urban environment. Something about Hellraiser, to me, feels appropriate in an urban environment. Maybe it's just some of the later films, it also is the fact that Cenobites work really well in apartments, in geometric structures. I don't think anybody's ever imagined a rural Hellraiser and we had to shoot in Serbia. That's what our budget would allow. Some of it was just the logistics of how can we combine these locations to a certain city, and we had talked about Boston, which made sense given the first movie and we thought that was a story that we'd tell, but we also had this, had to tell the story of this elite that lived at some remove. That naturally took us into the hills, but this is often the case in filmmaking, you're matching your opportunities with what makes sense in other geographic palettes. But that's how we got there.

Cenobite Selection

The Cenobites you have, as you mentioned earlier, you can't get a Hellraiser movie made without the Hell Priest. When it came to the other Cenobites that were involved, what was that process of selecting from Hellraiser lore versus wanting to introduce your own unique Cenobites? Were there Cenobites that you considered from other realms that just didn't translate well to screen?

Well, we definitely wanted to reference Chatterer. As fans, how can you not? But we needed an idea of how to do Chatterer and there's been some pretty rad Chatterers over the years. We had a Chatterer dog in part four, we had a torso-only Chatterer in Inferno. So we were really excited about the idea of a very, very tall Chatterer who had a pretty interesting body modification that, again, flesh and body modification as a replacement for our concept of what had been leather in the original movies. We like to say our Cenobites are their own leather. I think the fact that we had a different design approach allowed us to take concepts from the original films that maybe referenced other characters in some ways. Now, whether they are specifically intended to be those Cenobites or this is a new Cenobite with a similar modification, I dare not say. Obviously, there are similarities in some of them and some of them are brand-new creations for us.

I think every Hellraiser movie should have the obligation to introduce you to new a Cenobite or several that you haven't seen before. They're too fun. They all have a bizarre regality. They're both beautiful and terrifying to look at and I love the idea that all of their modifications and wounds are eternally fresh. They're feeling everything all the time, but they have gone so far in the pursuit of human experience, that those sensations are now desirable to them and they're able to ride on this with this principled zen. Hence, all the monastic qualities, so it's just too much fun, I think, for creators to not find new things to show us.

Navigating Nuanced Carnage

Every other Hellraiser movie was rated R and every other movie has been able to get away with super grotesque and disturbing and hideously beautiful elements. Were there times on set where things did get pushed a little bit further, where you did go into a more brutal or a more violent realm that you had to pull things back a little bit to get an R or did you have a pretty consistent, well-defined tone of, "We can't push these boundaries because then it'll be an MPA nightmare negotiation,"?

There was a bit of negotiation with the MPA in some of the scenes. Not to get into the specifics, but I will say that it surprised me what they had issues with and what they didn't.

But in the creation process, we didn't have to self-edit in any way. I'd say the bigger challenge is that gags are really, really complex and you don't always know where the blood's going to land and you don't always know what prosthetic piece is necessarily going to look good or what piece of flesh is going to hang just right and you're always racing the clock. I have a great admiration for how far these movies historically have been able to push that stuff.

For me, I think that gore or the grotesque employed as a reflection of inner turmoil in some way of a story beat that makes sense can be extremely artistic and it can be, as you say, both beautiful and gorgeous, but also repulsive, and to me that's Hellraiser. We went at it the best we can, but it's something that, to us, it was really challenging and really fun.

I don't want you to spoil anything, but did that just end up being, hanging on this shot for three seconds instead of five seconds? Was it all just finely tuning the sequences or were there bigger gags that just ended up having to be removed completely?

There were a few sizable gags that we couldn't get into the film, either because of scheduling or because of pace. There's always a question of how long to linger with the camera on something, how much to lean into it, how much light to put on it necessarily, how much to revel in it. What's better, your imagination or something that you can see and feel and touch and really dig into the textures on?

A lot of those choices are intuitive in the process and a lot of them come down to pace. You also have to keep the story moving. So I think what emerges, when you make thousands upon thousands of choices around said matters, is style. It's not something you decide upon at the outset. It's something that your sensibilities as a filmmaker, and I don't just mean me, I mean my editor or my other collaborators, are the end result of how we weathered and navigated that journey.

Doug Bradley Cameo

I know I saw one of your interviews recently that, as a symbolic passing of the torch, there was the idea of having Doug Bradley do a cameo and he passed on that. Was that something that was like, "This is a role that we have for Doug, that we want him to come in and do," or was it just a fleeting, even if he is just a guest at a dinner party, we just want him involved in some capacity?

No, it was something that was pretty specific that would communicate the idea that you're describing. But I also, and I have to say, all the respect in the world to Doug and his point, as I understand it, was, "It's better for me to leave my legacy with the Hell Priest," and who in the world can argue with that? So he was generous to even consider it.

Future Projects

Looking to the future ... Funnily enough, the example I was going to use is, since David Gordon Green found success with Halloween, he was handed The Exorcist and has his own Hellraiser thing. For you, The Night House is awesome, Hellraiser is going to find its audience, so I'm sure there's going to be some offers coming your way for other beloved franchises. Is that something that is exciting for you? Is there a franchise that you're like, "Now I'm going to get to go into this world," or do you think it'll be more, you've had this huge, name-brand recognition and you're going to deviate and maybe explore a little bit more in your own original stories, more indie stuff, smaller scale projects?

Honestly, there's an appetite for both. Filmmaking's a hustle, so to some degree, it's about what I can get done. Look, we're in an interesting time where it's harder and harder to retrieve your financing, recoup your financing when you're making a movie. We are all, our tensions are spread very, very thin. The Internet is eating our entertainment world in so many different ways, so having a vision of something that's come before us, a piece of IP that people recognize is more and more becoming the norm for movies. It's always been the case. It's just getting harder and harder and harder to get original content made.

I will always try to push my own projects and there is a lot of great work out there that I'm lucky to come across that I feel like should be movies and I would love to work on, but also I'm sure, I hope, there will be other conversations of existing properties, so we'll see. But also for me, I have to be able to share a vision with the fans and with the studio, whoever's presenting it for how this can succeed, and it has to be personal to me on some level.

Friday the 13th's Fate

I can't help but think about how excited fans were and how excited I was when there were talks of a Friday the 13th movie that you were trying to get made, trying to develop and working on. That franchise has just been in litigation Hell for years, so nobody's getting to make a Friday the 13th movie. For you, is there at least some part that's a little bit relieved knowing that nobody is making any of those movies that you're not seeing a new Friday the 13th announcement and you're thinking, "Damn, I wish that was me," or are you still holding out hope that once that dust settles, you're still going to be the first one knocking on doors to try to get that made?

I think for me, personally, it would be hard to find my way back into that now just because it's like the actor's approach to an audition, you have to just walk away at a certain point and put it behind you. Also, I spent a lot of time there. I worked with some wonderful writers, I think, and I've changed. Those ideas aren't interesting to me quite the same way they were with the work we did in particular, but I'm a fan of the franchise.

I think if you're working on IP, whether it be Hellraiser or Friday the 13th, this doesn't belong to me, it belongs to everybody. This is not the ultimate Hellraiser movie, it is one Hellraiser movie. There will be others, there will be other Friday the 13th films. They will figure it out, the IP is too valuable. The fans want it too much. So no, I'll be the first person in theater to figure out what they did. Of course, I'll think a lot about what we had, but no, and it goes the same for any of the stuff that we work on; I'm game, as long as I get to keep making stuff that I'm passionate about, I'll be as grateful as I can be.

Returning to the Past

Since we've talked about these big franchises, but your own original work that you've done, like The Ritual and "Amateur Night" in V/H/S and The Night House, are any of those worlds ones that, now that you might be able to get a little bit more funding after the success of Hellraiser, do you have any world from earlier in your career that you feel you have more to say in and you'd like to return to?

I appreciate the question. There's a few things that I wouldn't mind opening back up. We've tried to get something related to The Signal going for years, which was our movie from 2008, different from the 2014 Signal. We're very fortunate to be a small part of the V/H/S team moving forward. We're still making V/H/S movies and those are always a blast and I get to work with a lot of other filmmakers and just watch them run away with found-footage shorts in the best way they can.

It's good to see that some of that stuff is still alive. But no, I think what is often the case like a lot of filmmakers, I have a briefcase of unfinished ideas or projects we took out that never quite came to fruition. You spend a lot of time working on things that don't become, that audiences never get to share, so there's a few things there that have never seen the light of day that I will definitely be fighting for.

Hellraiser debuts on Hulu on October 7th.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You can contact Patrick Cavanaugh directly on Twitter.