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

| Original Score: B+ | Oct 14, 2019

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

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

Barker's vision cribs equally from the mythos of vampires and zombies, but Hellraiser's overriding ridiculousness (and nagging budgetary shortcomings) can't disguise the fact that the movie is at least unwittingly a product of the AIDS crisis.

| Original Score: 2.5/4 | Apr 20, 2009

Minor grisly fun, but don't expect the movie to linger when it's over.

| Jan 11, 2008

[Writer/Director Clive] Barker's dazzling debut as a director creates such an atmosphere of dread that the astonishing visual set pieces simply detonate in a chain reaction of cumulative intensity.

| Feb 9, 2006

[A] skillfully creepy film.

| Mar 10, 2003

This is a movie without wit, style or reason, and the true horror is that actors were made to portray, and technicians to realize, its bankruptcy of imagination.

| Original Score: 0.5/4 | Jan 1, 2000

It's a dark, frequently disturbing and occasionally terrifying film that suggests Barker's vision hasn't quite made the conversion from paper to celluloid.

| Jan 1, 2000