The eponymous Pinhead is a supernatural horror movie monster far removed from his peers – a group that would normally include slasher-killers like Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees. His lowly beginnings from a disenfranchised human World War I vet to his eventual ascension as a High Priest of Hell are well known to fans, but there are a lot of story elements about the character that have remained shrouded in relative mystery over the years.
Though the Hellraiser film franchise has waned, the original trilogy remains a staple of good old-fashioned, blood-soaked horror cinema. It’s time to put a microscope on this scintillating Cenobite and break down some facts about the character, just in time for a Halloween Hellraiser binge.
Pinhead Wasn’t Supposed To Be A Poster Boy
The movie poster for Hellraiser had Pinhead front and center, but that is not what it was supposed to look like. Instead, actor Doug Bradley said that director Clive Barker didn’t want the Cenobite on the poster. He wanted the skinned version of Frank to be on the poster and then leave the reveal of the Cenobites for the movie itself.
However, while Clive Barker wanted the skinned Frank or the puzzle box on the poster, Bradley said he personally felt it was better to have Pinhead’s face on there. He mentioned that the iconic Pinhead was the selling point, and helped the movie poster standout, while anything else would have looked like any other horror movie.
Doug Bradley Remained Hidden
Doug Bradley wanted to make Pinhead the focus of attention, so he did a couple of things to keep the mystery. While filming the movie, he remained mostly hidden from the rest of the cast. While Pinhead was the main draw of the movie, not even his fellow cast members knew who he was. He even showed up at a wrap party, and the rest of the cast ignored him because they had no idea who he was.
He kept the secrecy after the movie was released, as well. He said that the filmmakers and production crew only talked about Pinhead. They never mentioned Doug Bradley by name, and he said in a later interview that no one knew who he was or that he played Pinhead for a long time.
Pinhead Wasn’t Really Male
One of the things about the new Hellraiser movie that has many fans concerned is the new approach to Pinhead. However, even Doug Bradley feels the controversy is silly because this is Pinhead that fans are talking about. Bradley said in an interview with Bloody Disgusting that “there are a million shades of femininity.”
Bradley mentioned that his Pinhead wore a skirt, and asked if Pinhead even has a gender. Bradley called the entire Hellraiser series “transgressive” and that casting a transgender actor in Jamie Clayton is an “interesting piece of casting.” When looking at the source novella, Barker described Pinhead, “the character had the light and breathy voice of an excited girl.”
Pinhead Was Not The Original Leader
When Hellraiser arrived in theaters, Pinhead quickly became the new Jason, Michael, and Freddy, but with a brand-new look. He was an intelligent and well-spoken demon who offered torture and punishment to those who called him. However, in the beginning, Pinhead wasn’t the leader of this group known as Cenobites.
In the novella The Hellbound Heart, Pinhead was just a minion to a more powerful master, known as the Lead Cenobite. This leader had chained hooks across his face, stretching out all parts of his head. He also had chains from his eyes to his mouth, causing his eyes to move when he spoke. Pinhead was just a blank slate in the novella, but he took the center of attention in the movie.
He Precedes Hellraiser
Many fans believe that Pinhead’s first appearance was in Clive Barker’s Hellbound Heart novel and the Hellraiser film that would follow. In fact, Pinhead was present in one of Barker’s plays known as Hunters In The Snow involving a character called The Dutchman, an undead torturer. Though The Dutchman was not the real Pinhead, the character concept would later evolve into the Cenobite audiences know and love to this day. The fact that The Dutchman character was played by Doug Bradley in the play way back in 1973 is just icing on the cake.
The use of nails and pins evolved out of one of Barker’s short stories called The Forbidden, which featured a board hammered with nails at specific intersections of laid out squares. This aesthetic would resurface for the Pinhead character years later.
Novel Origins
The Pinhead of the Hellraiser film franchise is not quite the same as the character in Clive Barker’s The Hellbound Heart novel. The only recognizable feature is the patterned grid tattooed into the character’s head which serves as a guide for the jeweled pins that have been driven into the bone.
Also, Pinhead’s gender is not fully established, with the novel describing its voice as “light and breathy – the voice of an excited girl.” In the novel, Pinhead follows instructions from the Lead Cenobite and is not featured as the prominent boss of Hell’s elite.
The Foreshadowing
Hellraiser crossed over with the ever-popular Sherlock Holmes tales in the 2016 novel Sherlock Holmes and the Servants of Hell, which saw the titular detective investigating a series of missing persons cases centering around a man who mysteriously vanished from inside a locked room.
Holmes would eventually square off against the Cenobites, but Pinhead was not among them. Instead, his human father Howard Spencer is mentioned as one of the missing persons, which may have damned his son Elliot to pursue solving the Lament Configuration many years later.
He Was Driven By PTSD
Pinhead in human form was originally known as Elliot Spencer, a British soldier who participated in World War I to fight for a noble cause. His personality was warm and compassionate, with high regard for mankind and its well-being. These sensitive traits would be his undoing after he witnessed the inhumane carnage that took place at a Battle of Flanders in France.
The incident so shocked Spencer that he fell victim to a massive bout of PTSD, and forced him to flee his pain by pursuing base pleasures wherever he could find them. He would eventually settle on British-ruled India during the 1920s where he came across the puzzle box and solved the Lament Configuration, sealing his fate.
The Name
Clive Barker constantly referred to Pinhead as “The Hell Priest” in his novels, and “Lead Cenobite” in the first Hellraiser film. The name “Pinhead” came about after the Hellraiser crew and fan community came to a consensus, but Clive Barker hated it and has never expressed any support for it. He did however lampoon the use of the name for his follow-up novel The Scarlet Gospels, by which the Hell Priest reacts negatively to the title.
Originally a term meant to insult, “Pinhead” quickly took on a secondary meaning in direct reference to the Cenobite character. Ironically, the character of Joey Summerskill would utter the word as a direct insult to Pinhead in the script for Hellraiser III. Barker has stated that Pinhead does have an actual Cenobite name, but it has yet to be revealed.
The Look
The Cenobites at large were inspired by a mixture of Catholic outfits, S&M gear, and punk fashion all rolled into one. It’s the signature trademark of Hell’s denizens – a hodgepodge of these different elements which give the films their pseudo-sexual aesthetic.
Barker took things a bit further with Pinhead who was heavily influenced by African fetish sculptures where the concept of pins and nails hammered into the human form is a common theme.
He Wasn’t A Villain
One would be forgiven for gazing upon Pinhead and thinking he was a tried and true villain, but the character is much for complex and multi-layered than that. Like all Cenobites, Pinhead isn’t necessarily evil or benevolent, but a twisted mesh of the two locked somewhere in between light and dark.
For instance, Pinhead adheres to Hell’s code not to torture or kill anyone who does not actively seek them out for the pursuit of dark pleasures. He can distinguish between honesty and dishonesty in people, and recognize the state of their sins in order to actively judge them as worthy of Hell’s torments. Only when Elliot Spencer’s personality was separated from Pinhead did the character become a sheer force of destruction and evil.
He Almost Faced Freddy & Jason
The long-rumored Freddy Vs. Jason film took years of baking in the oven before it was finally released in 2003. The impetus for the film was born from horror fans who wished to see the two titans face off against one another – a fact spurred on with great enthusiasm after Freddy’s glove is revealed to grab Jason’s mask at the end of Jason Goes To Hell.
A similar idea involved Pinhead in early drafts of the Freddy Vs. Jason script. While the final film left things unresolved, it was originally supposed to feature both characters arriving in Hell where they would be greeted by Pinhead to set up a new cliffhanger. Sadly, the concept was dropped, but it could have played further into the origins of Pinhead and how the Hell dimension functions, especially with demonically infused beings like Freddy allowed to run amok.
Painful Piercings
The sight of a character with large pins driven through his face and skull would make anyone cringe, but few fans realize just how far his mutilations truly go. Early concepts for the character showed Pinhead with some interesting piercings that proved to be too much for the final cut.
These include a naval piercing with chains that descended downwards into Pinhead’s nether-regions, suggesting a form of genital mutilation. This would keep largely in step with the S&M-inspired madness that permeated the film, but it’s probably better that this tidbit was left out.
Doug Bradley Almost Passed On The Role
Originally, actor Doug Bradley was resistant to the idea of playing the role of Pinhead because he believed his career would suffer if audiences could not recognize his real face. He chose to act as one of the furniture movers shown briefly in the film, rather than take on the role of lead villain.
Eventually, a change of heart would lead to him assuming the Pinhead role, and the rest is history. Ironically, Bradley was seemingly shunned by his co-stars at a post-launch party because they did not recognize him out of his makeup, which probably confirmed his greatest fears. Nevertheless, Bradley would soldier on, eventually becoming so familiar with the character that he was credited as a makeup artist.
