Pinhead (Hellraiser)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Hellraiser character
Pinhead
In-story information
Real name:	Elliot Spenser
Gender:	Male
Race:	Cenobite
Primary location:	"The Labyrinth"
Development information
Creator:	Clive Barker
Portrayed by:	Doug Bradley

Pinhead is a fictional character from the Hellraiser series. Created by Clive Barker and portrayed by Doug Bradley, Pinhead is a prominent figure in the series, sometimes featured as the main antagonist.

Pinhead is the leader of the cenobites, formerly human creatures from an extradimensional realm who travel to Earth through the Lament Configuration, and harvest human souls. Depicted as intelligent and articulate, the character was deliberately presented as a departure from the mute or wise-cracking 1980s horror movie villains who preceded him, being based more on Count Dracula.^[1] Wizard magazine rated him the 9th greatest film villain.^[2]

Contents 1 Appearances 1.1 Films 1.2 Literature 2 Concept and creation 2.1 Inspiration and design 2.2 Portrayal 2.3 Name 3 Characterization 3.1 In-universe biography 3.2 Traits 3.3 Powers and abilities 4 In popular culture 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Appearances

[edit] Films

In Hellraiser (1987), Kirsty Cotton unintentionally summons Pinhead and the cenobites, but is spared on condition that she leads the cenobites to her uncle, Frank Cotton, who had escaped them.

In Hellbound: Hellraiser II (1988), it is revealed that the cenobites were originally humans who had lost all memory of their prior human lives. Kirsty shows Pinhead a photograph of his former self, causing him to remember. He briefly battles the newly created Channard cenobite, who reverts him back to his human form before killing him.^[3]

In Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth (1992), Pinhead's human and cenobite sides have been separated: the former is condemned to walk eternity in limbo, while the latter is completely unbound from Hell's laws, killing indiscriminately and creating a small cenobite army from his victims. Pinhead is foiled in his attempt to create a permanent and unsealable gateway to Hell on Earth by his human other, who re-merges with him and returns to Hell.^[4]

In Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) Pinhead is revealed to be finally destroyed in the year 2127 by Dr. Paul Merchant (a descendant of the inventor who built the Lament Configuration) who creates the "Elysium Configuration", a space station capable of closing Hell's gateway for good. Pinhead is trapped inside it and is destroyed along with the box.^[5]

Pinhead makes minor appearances in the direct-to-video installments, Hellraiser: Inferno (2000), Hellraiser: Hellseeker (2002), Hellraiser: Deader (2005), Hellraiser: Hellworld (2005).

[edit] Literature

The character appears in various Hellraiser comics and received his own comic miniseries, entitled Pinhead, published by Marvel Comics' Epic Comics imprint.^[6] In the comic book series, Pinhead is depicted as the latest incarnation of the cenobite spirit Xipe Totec, an entity derived from Aztec mythology. Pinhead's human incarnation, Captain Spenser, has a cameo appearance in the novel The Bloody Red Baron by Kim Newman.

[edit] Concept and creation

[edit] Inspiration and design

"[Pinhead] was basically Clive's design, as seen on the Hellbound T-shirts. There was a lot of discussion with Clive, then I did a few drawings. First we just had spikes coming out of his head. I wanted it to be more geometrical. Originally he had pins all over the head, but Clive and I thought it would be nice to make it look more like a mask with pins around his chin, over his ears and at the back of his head. We modelled it about six times and did loads of drawings. If you look at the first test pictures that came out of Hellraiser there are actually pins in there rather than nails and the pins got lost - you couldn't see them. So we clipped the ends of the pins off and made our own hollow brass nails that inserted over the top and they were much more visible."

— Games Without Frontiers By Brian J. Robb, Fear, No.6, May/June 1989.[1]

According to Clive Barker and Doug Bradley, the earliest incarnation of Pinhead appeared in Hunters in the Snow, an original 1973 play with Doug Bradley in the rôle of the Dutchman, an undead inquisitor and torturer.^[1]

After being disappointed with the way his material had been treated by producers in Underworld (which included a scene in which needles burst out of a character's skull), Barker wrote The Hellbound Heart as his first step in directing a film by himself.^[1] Within the novella, Pinhead only appears in the story's beginning, and is portrayed as a sexually ambiguous follower of the "Engineer":

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.

—The Hellbound Heart ch. 1

^[7]

Barker drew inspiration for the cenobite designs from punk fashion, Catholicism and by the visits he took to S & M clubs in New York and Amsterdam. For Pinhead specifically, Barker drew inspiration from African fetish sculptures. After securing funding in early 1986, Barker and his producer Chris Figg assembled a team to design the cenobites. Among the team was Bob Keen and Geoff Portass at Image Animation and Jane Wildgoose, a costume designer who was requested to make a series of costumes for 4-5 'super-butchers' while refining the scarification designs with Image Animation. Lighting-wise, Pinhead was designed so that shadows would swirl round his head. By July 1986, the shooting script positively identified the single pinheaded Cenobite from the earlier draft as clearly the leader.^[1]

[edit] Portrayal

According to Clive Barker, as the writing of the script took place during the height of the Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th and Halloween film series, his intended portrayal of Pinhead as an articulate and intelligent character was initially not well received by the producers: some suggested that Pinhead act more like Freddy Kruger and crack jokes, while others suggested that he be a silent character like Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers. Barker insisted that Pinhead's personality be more evocative of Christopher Lee's portrayal of Count Dracula: "Part of the chill of Dracula surely lies in the fact that he is very clearly and articulately aware of what he is doing – you feel that this is a penetrating intelligence – and I don’t find dumb things terribly scary – I find intelligence scary, particularly twisted intelligence; it’s one of the reasons why Hannibal Lecter is scary, isn’t it? It’s because you always feel that he’s going to be three jumps ahead of you."^[1]

When Doug Bradley asked Barker how he should play Pinhead, Barker told him to "[think] of him as a cross between an administrator and a surgeon who’s responsible for running a hospital where there are no wards, only operating theatres. As well as being the man who yields the knife, he’s the man who has to keep the timetable going." The two also decided early on that Pinhead was formerly human:

A line from one of Clive's plays swam into my mind: 'I am in mourning for my humanity.' At this point there was no back story for the character, but I had discussed this with Clive and we had agreed that he had once been human. But whether this was yesterday, last week, last year, ten, a hundred, a thousand years ago, I didn't know. I didn't need to. Sufficient to have that idea lodged into my brain. A perpetual, unconscious grieving for the man he had once been, for a life and a face he couldn't even remember. And a frozen grief. I felt now that Pinhead existed in an emotional limbo where neither pain nor pleasure could touch him. A pretty good definition of Hell for me.”

—Hellraiser From Chapter Seventeen of Sacred Monsters: Behind The Mask Of The Horror Actor by Doug Bradley, 1996

When Bradley first donned the Pinhead makeup, he spent a few minutes alone in his room getting into character by looking at himself in the mirror. During rehearsals, Barker told Bradley, who at the time was more used to working in theatre, to subdue his movements and gestures, in order to give Pinhead an aura of complete control.^[1]

[edit] Name

In the original film, the character was simply credited as the "Lead Cenobite". The name "Pinhead" was coined by the makeup crew that applied the prosthetics on Bradley to distinguish the Cenobites. In the films, the character is only ever referred to as Pinhead by protagonist Joey Summerskill in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth and Chelsea in Hellraiser: Hellworld.

[edit] Characterization

[edit] In-universe biography

"[Pinhead] was an English army officer in an unspecified place and time, though roughly in the Far East in the late 20's or early 30's. He was a very pucker Englishman, a public school type who went straight into the army. He felt terribly out of place and unfulfilled because he was only there through family tradition. So from his sterile viewpoint, what he hears of the Lament box is very appealing. I see him alone in his Nissen hut trying to solve the puzzle - which he obviously does, and is transformed into Pinhead. "I don't see him as the first Cenobite. Of the four we know about, he is the leader, but the Cenobites have been around for centuries. To me, Pinhead is the chief Cenobite of the 20th Century..”

— Quoted from Doug Bradley in The Pride of Pinhead By Philip Nutman, Fangoria, No 82, May 1989.[1]

The character's past, which is alluded to in Hellbound: Hellraiser II, is expanded upon in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth where it is revealed that Pinhead originated as Elliott Spenser, a captain in the British Expeditionary Force suffering from post traumatic stress disorder and survivor guilt. After having participated in the Battle of Flanders in 1914, Spencer lost faith in humanity after witnessing its cruelty to itself and lost faith in God, whom he believed had failed humanity. The disillusioned and jaded Spenser wandered Earth indulging in a hedonistic lifestyle, turning to the baser methods of gratification for satisfaction and pleasure until finding the Lament Configuration.^[4]

Pinhead's role has varied with each Hellraiser installment. In the original film, Pinhead was simply part of a collective group giving pleasure and pain to those who opened the Lament Configuration. They were not evil as such, simply a force or group of tragic characters that existed to explore experience.^[8] The second film followed this^[3], but the third film radically changed the original concept, making Pinhead into a purely evil demon of chaos.^[4] In the fourth film he is presented as a megalomaniac bent on world domination,^[5] and by the fifth he acts as a judge, punishing those who open the box for their sins by making them face their personal demons.^[9] The seventh film reverts closer to the original film, with the Cenobites responsible for pleasure and pain, but the characters seem more demonic as in later installments.

[edit] Traits

This article may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. (September 2007)

A major difference between Pinhead and other film killers, supernatural or otherwise, is his need to have been purposely summoned, as The Lament Configuration must be opened for the Cenobites to enter the (real) world. Pinhead does not kill indiscriminately, nor for vengeance; he kills or tortures due to being summoned from his other-dimensional realm by the opener of the puzzle box. Pinhead can be reasoned and bargained with. In both Hellraiser and Hellraiser: Hellseeker, the Kirsty character bargains with Pinhead to offer him more "souls" in exchange for her own (in particular, her human adversaries), thus resulting in her life being spared. Pinhead does not kill quickly, as he and the other Cenobites are well-versed in torture. Death does not end the suffering of his victims either, as they are brought to Hell/The Labyrinth, where, Pinhead says, "We have an eternity to know your flesh." Sometimes he stands back as the other Cenobites under his command do the actual killing. Pinhead is obsessed with pain and exploring the limits of the flesh, calmly observing his "experiments" as they suffer under the ministrations of both he and the fellow members of his order.

The act of opening The Lament Configuration is not always sufficient reason to be killed: in Hellbound: Hellraiser II, Pinhead stops the Cenobites from killing Tiffany, an emotionally traumatized girl who opened the box only after being manipulated by Dr. Channard. Pinhead remarks, “…it is not hands that call us, it is desire…”

He very rarely speaks to his subordinates and usually does so only when issuing an order. Only Cenobites of comparable ranking to himself, such as the Cenobite Princess Angelique, are spoken to as equals.

[edit] Powers and abilities

Pinhead is an extremely powerful being, and as such, has several supernatural abilities. His preferred method of attack is by summoning hooks and chains to mutilate victims, often pulling said victims in several directions to tear them apart.^[8][9][10] These chains are subject to his total mental control and he may direct them at will. The chains may even change shape after having attached to a victim.^[10] Pinhead is highly resistant to damage and direct assault, able to shrug off all but the most potent attacks.^[4][5] He tends to move at a slow walk.

His magic is also used for creating objects out of thin air, teleporting, creating explosions at distances and deceiving opponents with illusions. Pinhead is also familiar with the Occult and magic, with an ability to read minds.

In Hell on Earth and Bloodline, Pinhead creates Cenobites from his victims, which tend to be physically manipulated to resemble an aspect of their human lives with special abilities granted in the process. Pinhead is rarely without an entourage of such beings.

When the Pinhead character's inhuman evil (Unbound Pinhead) is fully separated from his human side in Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth, he seems to have nearly unlimited and highly versatile powers: he could telekinetically control vast areas, transfer matter to different forms whether it be living or non living, create and control fire and animate objects. Towards the end of the film, Pinhead's human side suggests that he is no longer bound by the rules governing other Cenobites.

[edit] In popular culture

The character has been spoofed in a number of television series, including Robot Chicken episodes "That Hurts Me" (voiced by Scott Adsit) ^[11] and "Slaughterhouse on the Prairie" (voiced by Seth Green),^[12] The Simpsons episodes "Treehouse of Horror V" ^[13] and "Stop, or My Dog Will Shoot!",^[14] South Park episodes Imaginationland Episode II ^[15] and Imaginationland Episode III,^[16] and Family Guy episode "Meet the Quagmires".^[17]

Doug Bradley appeared as Pinhead in a Motörhead music video for the song "Hellraiser",^[18] a number of segments during MTV's 1996 Spring Break programming,^[19] and the television talk shows, The Arsenio Hall Show and The Jay Leno Show.^[20]

[edit] References

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Pinhead (Hellraiser)

[edit] External links

• Pinhead (Hellraiser) at the Internet Movie Database
• Official site for Doug Bradley

v • d • e The Hellraiser series Films Hellraiser • Hellbound • Hell on Earth • Bloodline • Inferno • Hellseeker • Deader • Hellworld Characters Pinhead • Kirsty Cotton • Cenobites • Other characters Related Lemarchand's box • The Hellbound Heart • The Scarlet Gospels