To save you the time-and sometimes pain-of doing your own due diligence, I’m going to do a quick rundown of each of these films-in order worst to best-to help you make an informed choices as to which ones are worth adding the the queue for your Halloween Hellraiser view-fest if you only have one evening to spare.Ī brief caveat: like many horror series, Hellraiser’s got its cult following. Believe me: they are not all created equal.

Once you add the most recent Hulu reboot, there’s a whopping grand total of ELEVEN Hellraiser films-and yes, I watched all of them. So when I saw there was a new Hellraiser -with a cool lady Pinhead, no less-and discovered my husband had never watched the series either, I felt like it was a good time to edify myself on this weird corner of movie history. And lastly, as big fans of a spooky moment, my husband and I like to do a little scary movie marathon during Halloween to feel festive. It’s also because franchises like Friday the 13th, Halloween, and Nightmare on Elm Street are such a strong part of pop culture it seemed like I ought to get in the know-especially having acted and written a few horror films myself. In some ways, that’s because what passed for gruesome in the 80’s and 90’s is tame by today’s standards-I’m still too wimpy to stomach modern gore films like Saw or Human Centipede. Yet in more recent years, I’ve found myself finally exploring the horror I’d always been too scared to watch during my younger years.

(During college, the artsy social club I was in had a deeply disturbing mural of Pinhead painted on the ceiling of our basement taproom. Even once subsequent straight-to-video sequels came out in the early aughts, I still found just the image of Pinhead too terrifying to consider the bare minimum of finding out what the movie was about. Hellraiser is a deeply gruesome horror series from the twisted imagination of Clive Barker that started in the eighties, well before I was old enough to even consider watching it.

The original hellraiser