Clive Barker's original adaptation of his Hellbound Heart novella, Hellraiser, remains a tightly-paced genre classic, despite its narrative flaws.

| Original Score: 8/10 | Feb 7, 2025

The acclaimed young fiction writer turned filmmaker, Clive Barker, here wears his heart on his sleeve -- along with his brains and his intestines... By pushing his horror gimmicks to the limit, Barker becomes a pain for the audience.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Sep 21, 2022

Sexy, gooey and filled with imagination, Hellraiser is Clive Barker's magnum opus.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 20, 2022

...a demystifying experience, especially if the movie’s Pinhead poster was a staple of your youth.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Jun 10, 2022

Hellraiser [is] one of the most gruesome, visually horrific fantasy films you will ever see. Written and directed by Clive Barker, the film is a relentless, unflinching foray into a netherworld of monsters, murder and the supernatural.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Aug 19, 2021

The conclusion is pat and predictable, an amateurish effort at showing the advantages of good over evil.

| Original Score: 1.5/4 | Aug 17, 2021

A heady combination of sadism, grubby under the counter porn shop erotica, '80s glam and visceral, viscous body horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Feb 14, 2021

It's gross! It's unenjoyable! And I can't stop thinking about it!

| Dec 1, 2020

One of the most original and unequaled horror films of the decade.

| Original Score: 9/10 | Sep 6, 2020

More than with terror, the movie plays with revulsion. And that is its (relative) novelty. [Full Review in Spanish]

| Jun 25, 2020

The reason the movie works as well as it does is because of its human characters.

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 14, 2019

Arriving in a decade in which most movie monsters were monotonous slashers, the Cenobites were truly exciting, original, and unsettling characters.

| Original Score: 3/4 | Oct 13, 2019

Part of the film's excellence comes out of its taboo-ness, depicting everything from abusive love to the sometimes dangerous links between sex and death, pain and pleasure.

| Original Score: 5/5 | May 1, 2019

Rightly considered a horror classic for pushing boundaries around sex and horror, Hellraiser is a flawed film with forgettable characters and gaping plot holes in the second act.

| Nov 25, 2018

Horror is at its best when it's relentless. Clive Barker knows this, and his debut feature as director is so gleefully vicious, so relentlessly grim that it's going to be very hard for fans of the genre not to like it.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 13, 2017

With Hellraiser, Clive Barker created one of the most genuinely disturbing movies of the last 20 years.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Nov 13, 2017

The film is for the most part a return to the cutting edge of horror cinema, and in its inventively gruesome moments a reminder of the Grand Guignol intensity that has recently tended to disintegrate into lazy splatter

| Oct 17, 2017

Utterly bizarre and entirely ridiculous - and yet effective, an imaginative guignol festival, like the goriest of soap operas, in which one wrong move opens a portal to hell.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 11, 2017

Some of the FX haven't aged well, and nine more Hellraiser movies flayed the franchise, but this is a key '80s horror.

| Original Score: 4/5 | Oct 10, 2017

There are some intriguing special effects in the movie, but a limp script and unconvincing performances don't help. Worse of all, it isn't scary. I only jumped once during the entire film.

| Original Score: 2.5/5 | Sep 13, 2017