When I was only nine-years-old, my parents took my sister and I on a vacation to Maine. While there, we stayed in a train station that had been converted into a rental for wayward tourists. During our first evening there, we rented director Frank Marshall's ARACHNOPHOBIA, John Mandis' AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON, and Clive Barker's 1987 classic HELLRAISER. It was that evening when I first met Pinhead, a straight-out-of-hell torturer of the doomed and the damned. I recall thinking that the film was rather intense, but I'd also found myself being inexplicably drawn to Doug Bradley's sadomasochistic villain and leader the Cenobites, a group of humans who'd been transformed into into nightmare creatures that occupy an extra-dimensional realm, and travel to Earth via a puzzle box called the Lament Configuration. The film was quite the head trip for a nine-year-old me, even after being raised on films like A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET, THE SHINING, and JAWS.
Today, it's been confirmed by Deadline that IT producer Roy Lee and READY PLAYER ONE producer Dan Farah have secured the rights to HELLRAISER for the purpose of adapting Clive Barker's dark and dreadfully devious IP into a television series. For the project, Lee and Farah will be joined by producer-rightsholders Lawrence Kuppin, David Salzman and Eric Gardner, who've been keeping the HELLRAISER rights close to their chain-pierced nips since 1989.
The idea is to take the material found in Barker's novella, The Hellbound Heart, and transform it into a series with anthology potential, or a more straight-forward narrative. Writers and showrunners are expected to be attached before shopping the project to networks or streaming services.
Beyond Barker's original film, the Hellraiser property has spurned ten additional films as well as comic books, novels, collectible figures, Halloween costumes, and damn near everything else you can think of. It's been a wild ride for old Pinhead throughout the years, and it sounds as if things are about to get interesting all over again.