HELLRAISER Interview: Jamie Clayton And Director David Bruckner Tease The Terrifying New Pinhead (Exclusive)

HELLRAISER Interview: Jamie Clayton And Director David Bruckner Tease The Terrifying New Pinhead (Exclusive)

Hellraiser star Jamie Clayton (The Priest) is joined by director David Bruckner to discuss the movie's terrifying new interpretation of Pinhead and the acting challenges that transformation presented...

By JoshWilding - Sep 28, 2022 12:09 PM EST
Filed Under: Horror
Source: FearHQ.com

Hellraiser is a reimagining of Clive Barker’s 1987 horror classic from director David Bruckner that will debut in the U.S. exclusively on Hulu on October 7 as part of the streamer’s annual "Huluween" celebration of fright-filled content.

In the all-new take on the classic horror franchise, a young woman struggling with addiction comes into possession of an ancient puzzle box, unaware that its purpose is to summon the Cenobites, a group of sadistic supernatural beings from another dimension. Jamie Clayton plays The Priest in the reboot, and absolutely steals the show as this new take on Pinhead.

Recently, we spoke to Jamie and Hellraiser director David Bruckner about Pinhead's long-awaited return to the screen, with the former revealing new details about her transformation into The Priest and what the biggest challenges were being decked out in those incredible prosthetics. 

David, meanwhile, talks about how the movie fits into the wider Hellraiser canon and explains his approach to telling this story without being beholden to what's come before. He also teases hidden details that will only be seen on repeat viewings!

Watch our conversation below and be sure to also subscribe to my YouTube channel by clicking here to hear more from the Hellraiser cast.
 


Jamie, there’s such an aura of menace that surrounds Pinhead whenever she’s on-screen; how tough is it to get into the mind of a character like this?

Jamie: It was quite tough. Thank goodness I had David as a director to help me. We had many, many, many conversations around the idea and intention of what The Priest was doing and why she was doing what she was doing. We had many conversations about the posture and the voice and how all of those things would look. As I was doing it, I didn’t even know if any of it was happening. I was like, ‘Am I doing anything that we talked about?’ When something would click, I remember he would come up to me after we would cut and say, ‘When you just did X or Z, let’s do that again. That’s what’s working.’ Those moments were really fun. It was tough. I stayed in therapy the whole time we were filming [Laughs]. The time difference was tough, but I was in therapy! [Laughs]

David, this is a franchise that’s expanded in so many ways over the years, was it challenging to approach this movie with fresh eyes and not need to find ways to very obviously link this movie up with past instalments like other horror franchises?

David: I’m glad you asked. Hellraiser is complicated, you know, and one of the tough things in script development to avoid is long, exploratory passages that try to explain everything away that you’re seeing so it can be easily understandable. We spent a lot of time trying to communicate as much as we could through the imagery and what’s so much fun is that there is so much incredible imagery to pull from in Hellraiser. You start trying to find ways to create an intuitive relationship with what the audience is seeing and what’s happening in the story.

Yeah, the density of it is a bug for crafting it at times, but it’s also a feature for the experience. My experience with Hellraiser is that, especially with that first film, is that it’s so layered. It just hit me different every time I saw it over the years. We wanted to just allow ourselves to find parallels that were fascinating to us and interesting dimensions to it and run with them. A lot of it is probably there on a first watch and I hope people will find things in it during future watches that they didn’t notice the first time.

I’m sure you’ll be asked a lot about the work that went into your transformation, Jamie, but in terms of when you were made up as Pinhead, what about that presented the biggest challenge in terms of still being able to get your performance across?

Jamie: Oh, I love that question! The biggest challenge I think was not being able to move really [Laughs]. I mean, literally, I could barely move my face. My vision was obstructed by the contacts. We figured out a really good routine with the contacts where, if they were going to be setting up a new scene and had more than thirty or forty minutes, I could pop them out. You couldn’t pop them out and put them back in more than three times in a day, so we had to choose moments when I could take the contacts out. 

The neck…once the neck went on, again, forget about it! The neck thing, even if we had two minutes when they were doing something, I was like, ‘Take the neck off, take it off!’ [Laughs] I just had to get it off. It was very challenging. You can’t expand in the suit and I couldn’t take full breaths. It’s moulded silicone and a latex suit that’s painted with muscle and then another suit that’s put on top. It’s very heavy and constricting. I felt very bound the entire time!

Hellraiser premieres exclusively on Hulu on October 7.
 


 

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DCasAhobby
DCasAhobby - 9/28/2022, 12:09 PM
Making Pinhead a woman was an epic fail. I still can't wait to watch this though.

Changing an iconic character's gender like this is BS. Especially considering HR2 shows the origin of the iconic Pinhead. He was a male soldier who traded his life away for pleasure.


Imagine if in the next Halloween they completely disregard mythos changing Micheal into Michelle Myers. Trash
BruceBanner100
BruceBanner100 - 9/28/2022, 12:25 PM
@DCasAhobby - I think in the book the priest is both.? Or like androgynous or something like that… but Jamie is trans so Hollywood jumped all over that! Lol . It is a good creepy voice tho.. hopefully the other Cenobites are interesting
noahthegrand
noahthegrand - 9/28/2022, 12:58 PM
@DCasAhobby - the character is described androgynously with a feminine voice in the book so I think this casting is perfect. Obviously in a remake you have to shake it up and do something different or it’s just no point. This is different enough people won’t be thinking too much about how it’s not Doug Bradley because it’s it’s own thing
DCasAhobby
DCasAhobby - 9/28/2022, 1:03 PM
@noahthegrand - nope nope nope. [frick] agendas. Horse shit ignorant decision hoping to use current trash and shock value to pull a new viewer or two at the expense of actul fans.

Sick of woke politics
TheyDont
TheyDont - 9/28/2022, 1:11 PM
@DCasAhobby - Technically, it's still a man.
DCasAhobby
DCasAhobby - 9/28/2022, 1:13 PM
@TheyDont - in idiocracy, yes.

In the real world, nope.
TheyDont
TheyDont - 9/28/2022, 1:40 PM
@DCasAhobby - Delusions can't change genetics.
Deklipz
Deklipz - 9/28/2022, 1:46 PM
@DCasAhobby - ‘actual fans’ of Barkers work can clearly see that this is FAR more in line with the original novellas description of the Hell Priest and Cenobites in general than ANYTHING in the previous series.
Humperdink
Humperdink - 9/28/2022, 2:17 PM
@DCasAhobby -

Making Pinhead a woman was an epic fail.


How, when Pinhead's gender was never central to the character and the descriptions in the book more align with this NEW depiction? How will this affect the story in any way?

Please explain and don't just say "cause it's wrong."



@noahthegrand - nope nope nope. [frick] agendas.
@DCasAhobby - Delusions can't change genetics.


Hiring a trans-actress is an "agenda" by default? See, this is why comment sections get turned off. Y'all overreact to inconsequential changes to adaptations to a series of films that weren't even well received when they were released. 🤦

Are you really dire hard Hellraiser fans or just looking for a culture war debate?


noahthegrand
noahthegrand - 9/28/2022, 2:23 PM
@DCasAhobby - you know Clive Barker is gay, right? He got the idea for the look of the cenobites from a New York sex club he went to
HxCorbett
HxCorbett - 9/28/2022, 3:30 PM
@Humperdink - they're not even trying to hide the transphobia lol
TheRose
TheRose - 9/28/2022, 12:30 PM
As someone who has never been remotely interested in watching any Hellraiser film, this new installment looks intriguing to me. I was loving the cinematography in the trailer and I'm not sure I've ever really seen anything like it. I think I might actually check this out.

I know next-to-nothing about the lore, but the Cenobites present themselves as Asexual or even Hermaphroditic to me. Whatever gender they present as has little bearing on their character because ultimately, they are basically aliens/demons looking to cause suffering, right? Sex is just another means of inflicting pain.

In regards to sentiments that it changes lore, I can see how that would be a bummer as a continuation of the original franchise. Again, I don't know anything about the lore, but is Pinhead really that "young"? The Cenobites always struck me as an ageless creature.
Deklipz
Deklipz - 9/28/2022, 1:53 PM
@TheRose - The original franchise changed the lore anyway. So did the comics and stories that Barker created extending the lore later. There is no singular consistent Hellraiser ‘lore’ other than Cenobites are from another dimension and when you open the box they bring pleasure… of which there is confusion between the Cenobites and the box opener as their definitions of pleasure rarely align. Barkers involvement with the original series ended with the fourth and then he continued his story in comics that ignored/changed large parts of the lore introduced in the movies. As it stands the movies would have been wholly different anyway if Barker had his way since Julia, the evil stepmother from the first/second would have taken over as the lead Cenobite except that the actress didn’t want to come back.
bl0odwerk
bl0odwerk - 9/28/2022, 12:39 PM
Coolest thing I've seen Clayton in is still that episode or "Hung".
BigMonkeyBrain
BigMonkeyBrain - 9/28/2022, 1:14 PM
Excited to see this and Pinhead being androgynous / undefined female is closer to the source material. So everybody complaining about this "change" just sounds stupid.

Description of the Cenobites and Pinhead from the original novel:

“Frank had difficulty guessing the speaker’s gender with any certainty. Its clothes, some of which were sewn to and through its skin, hid its private parts, and there was nothing in the dregs of its voice, or in its willfully disfigured features that offered the least clue. When it spoke, the hooks that transfixed the flaps of its eyes and were wed, by an intricate system of chains passed through flesh and bone alike, to similar hooks through the lower lip, were teased by the motion, exposing the glistening meat beneath.”

“Its voice, unlike that of its companion, was light and breathy-the voice of an excited girl. Every inch of its head had been tattooed with an intricate grid, and at every intersection of horizontal and vertical axes a jeweled pin driven through to the bone. Its tongue was similarly decorated.”


^Any real Hellraiser fan would know this.
BillyBatson1000
BillyBatson1000 - 9/28/2022, 1:27 PM
Of course she 'felt bound.'

Hell Bound.
grif
grif - 9/28/2022, 1:45 PM
not watching any more hellraiser movies. bloodline was a fine ending for me. if i want to watch more there are six movies after bloodline before this.
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