Cenobites are a demonic order who serve as the primary villains of the Hellraiser movies, but how are they created? Author Clive Barker first rose to fame in the 1980s thanks to the success of Books Of Blood and The Damnation Game. He also penned the screenplays for two low-budget movies like cult Irish horror Rawhead Rex, but after being unhappy with the end result of both, he set about making his own film. He adapted his novella The Hellbound Heart, where a man in pursuit of the ultimate experience opens a puzzle box that unleashes demons known as cenobites.
The resulting adaptation Hellraiser was a startling, unique horror experience that is now considered a classic. It also introduced audiences to Doug Bradley’s Pinhead, the lead cenobite who was terrifying and eloquent in equal measure. Hellraiser – which was once planned as a straight-to-video release – became a surprise success and thus launched a franchise. Sadly, following the underperformance of the 1996 prequel/sequel Bloodline – which also killed Pinhead – the series was relegated to STV, with the most recent being Hellraiser: Judgment, the tenth installment.
Luckily for fans, a Hellraiser movie reboot and HBO TV series are both on the horizon and promise to restore the franchise to its former glories. Despite being a major part of the series, the cenobites don’t tend to get much screentime or development in later sequels, and some viewers aren’t entirely clear on how they’re created. Hellbound: Hellraiser 2 sheds some light on this (gruesome) process, revealing they were all once human and showing how Pinhead himself was made, in addition to new villain Doctor Philip Channard.
![Hellraiser: How Cenobites Are Created](https://static1.srcdn.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/hellraiser-bloodline-cenobite.jpg)
Viewers got to see Channard’s journey from a sociopathic doctor obsessed with the puzzle box and cenobites to his transformation into one. Around the midway point of Hellbound: Hellraiser 2, villain Julia Cotton leads Channard into the Labyrinth – basically the cenobite version of Hell – and introduces him to her “God” Leviathan. She then nudges Channand into one of Leviathan’s transformation chambers, with the God of the Labyrinth deeming him worthy of serving its needs. In Channard’s case, this involves being injected with tubes, one to siphon out his blood and one that replaces it with some demonic blue fluid, which turns his skin a greyish blue color.
He’s also garroted with wire around his face and some kind of phallic tubing is forced down his throat. The Cenobite transformation process looks nightmarish, and their physical appearances alter depending on who they were in life. Since Channard was once a brain surgeon, Leviathan attaches a drill tentacle to his head that is constantly cutting into his brain. There’s also Hellraiser: Bloodline’s cenobite twins, who were twin brothers in life that were terrified of being separated, so in a cruelly ironic fashion, Pinhead fused them together with a machine.
Hellraiser III also saw Pinhead create his own set of cenobites such as the infamous Camerahead, though the exact process remains a mystery. It also appears cenobite transformation removes the humanity and memories of the humans who undergo it, including Pinhead, though this doesn’t seem to happen to Channard. Not everyone who opens the Hellraiser puzzle box undergoes the process, so it’s hard to know which fate is worse; being tortured for eternity or turned into a cenobite serving Leviathan.