Hellraiser: Inferno (2000): Joseph Thorne, the Box, and Pinhead

Hellraiser: Inferno, also called Hellraiser V: Inferno, went straight to video on 3 October 2000. It is the fifth film in the series, and the point where the series left theaters for home video. It is Scott Derrickson’s feature debut. Craig Sheffer, Nicholas Turturro, and James Remar star. Doug Bradley plays Pinhead again. Earlier entries stayed with family gothic and the box. This one turns inward. Hell is not another dimension reaching into the room. It is a mirror of the lead’s own cruelty. The Cenobites still carry hooks and chains. They also keep a cold ledger in which pain and pleasure are entered as a moral account.

Joseph Thorne is a corrupt Denver detective. Drugs, sex, and cheating are not hobbies for him. They are perks of the job. At what looks like a ritual murder scene, he pockets a Lemarchand puzzle box because he wants the private puzzle, and he ignores procedure. Solving it splits his reality into sadomasochistic hallucination: mutilated women come on to him, and a creature with no eyes and no legs hunts him. He ties the case to a killer called The Engineer, suspected of kidnapping a child. As he hunts, friends and associates die. Each scene leaves one of the child’s fingers. In therapy, Dr. Paul Gregory shows what he really is and tells Thorne that opening the box already put him in the Cenobites’ realm. The hell here is built out of conscience. Every pain they put on Thorne pays back cruelty he dealt to other people. The Engineer is Thorne’s own cruelty given a body. The child stands for the innocence he has been killing with corruption and violence. The child is not a sexual object.

The film’s horror grammar is clinical. It does not throw a leather-club party. It converts pain and pleasure into moral interest. Pinhead promises Thorne that his sins will be settled across eternity. For viewers who know BDSM, the tension is negotiated play against a judgment nobody agreed to. The chains wrap the body, and they wrap secrets and conscience. Buena Vista Home Entertainment released the film. On 15 May 2011, Echo Bridge Entertainment issued a Blu-ray packaged with Hellraiser: Bloodline. Rotten Tomatoes sits at 14 percent positive. Later viewers have treated it as underrated surreal horror. Calum Marsh in Esquire called it closer to a follow-up to Jacob’s Ladder, or a predecessor to Silent Hill, than to a conventional plot: Lynchian hallucination over story. Bloody Disgusting praised the film noir feel and the surreal edge. For adult viewers the useful claim is simple. The box still opens. Pinhead still lectures. The dungeon has moved into the man’s head.

Clive Barker confirmed in 1996 that Dimension Films planned a fifth film. Screenwriter Peter Atkins said reshoots had left room for more sequels. One rejected pitch was Hellraiser: Hellfire, by Stephen Jones and Michael Marshall Smith: Kirsty Cotton against a cult trying to bring Leviathan and the Cenobites into the real world, climaxing in a giant puzzle box around London. The direct-to-video budget killed it. Bob Weinstein and Harvey Weinstein hired Paul Harris Boardman and Scott Derrickson to write the script. Derrickson was first paid ten thousand dollars to direct a single scene, then hired as director. Doug Bradley later said the draft was not originally a Hellraiser sequel and was rewritten to attach the name. Derrickson said it was always a Hellraiser film. Bloody Disgusting later treated that origin dispute as rumor. Beyond the leads, the cast includes J. B. Gaynor as young Thorne, Nicholas Sadler as Bernie, Noelle Evans as Melanie Thorne, Lindsay Taylor as Chloe, Matt George as Leon Gaultier, Michael Shamus Wiles as Mr. Parmagi, Sasha Barrese as Daphne Sharp, Kathryn Joosten as Mary Thorne, Jessica Elliot as young Mary Thorne, and Carmen Argenziano as the captain.