Hellbound: Hellraiser II could have had a completely different ending where Julia became Queen of Hell – here’s what happened. Back in 1987, a new franchise in the horror genre was only getting started with Hellraiser, written and directed by Clive Barker, which introduced a new object to fear and the character that would lead the entire franchise: a puzzle box known as the Lament Configuration and Pinhead, the leader of the Cenobites. Hellraiser made way for a franchise of 10 movies (most of them released as direct-to-video and on digital platforms) and various novels and comic books.
It didn’t take look for a Hellraiser sequel to arrive, and the following year viewers reunited with Pinhead and other characters in Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Set shortly after the events of the first movie, Hellraiser II follows Kirsty Cotton (Ashley Laurence) who is sent to a psychiatric hospital where she meets Doctor Channard (Kenneth Cranham) and fellow patient Tiffany (Imogen Boorman), who has a special talent for puzzles. What Kirsty wasn’t counting on was Channard being secretly obsessed with the Lament Configuration, which unleashed a new wave of violent and graphic events involving the dangerous puzzle, the mattress Julia Cotton (Clare Higgins) died upon in the previous movie, and of course the Cenobites.
Channard brought the mattress to his home and freed Julia, who then seduced him so he continued bringing mentally ill patients so she could feed and regenerate. Later on, and now inside the labyrinth-like world of the Cenobites, Channard was betrayed by Julia and left to be transformed into a Cenobite while Kirsty encountered her uncle, Frank Cotton, who was then destroyed by Julia in revenge for killing her, allowing Kirsty to escape. Julia was killed by a vortex, and Kirsty later used her skin to trick Channard in order to give Tiffany more time to solve the puzzle so they could leave. At the end of Hellraiser II, two moving men were removing Channard’s belongings from his home and came across the mattress – one of them was pulled inside of it, while the other saw a mysterious and terrifying pillar rise from within it, which had the faces of many victims. This ending, however, was originally different and saw Julia’s return as a bigger and stronger character: Queen of Hell.
In the commentary track of Hellraiser II, writer Peter Atkins revealed that the original ending had Julia rising from the mattress as Queen of Hell, as Clive Barker and producer Christopher Figg’s original plan for the franchise was to have Julia as the villain, as a sort of “female Freddy Krueger”. However, what no one was counting on was Pinhead having a strong impact on the audience, and Atkins had already written the Queen of Hell ending for Hellraiser II. Although this made sense given Julia’s role in both movies, Claire Higgins made it clear that she wasn’t interested in being the continuing character in Hellraiser, so the ending was changed and Julia was given a different closure, and Pinhead then became the official face of the Hellraiser franchise.
The ending where Julia became Queen of Hell was shot, and there are stills of her in a black dress floating around online, but it didn’t make it to the final cut of the movie. However, it’s worth noting that Pinhead isn’t technically a villain in the Hellraiser universe, serving more as an antagonist, so Julia’s role in the franchise might have been that of a proper villain and would have completely changed the rest of the movies and other media, but ultimately, Pinhead as the main face of everything Hellraiser allowed the audience to better identify the franchise and its themes.
