The Hellraiser remake train continues to chug its way through the development inferno, and a year after his involvement was first announced, original director and author Clive Barker has revealed a few more details about what might be in store. He's just delivered his second draft of the new screenplay to his cenobite masters the Weinsteins. "I think the phrase is reboot," he says, "though I've never really understood what that meant."
In recent years this new version of Barker's demented S&M demon horror has passed through the hands of Inside directors Alexandre Bustillo and Julien Maury; **Saw **sequel writers Marcus Dunstan and Patrick Melton; Martyrs mentalist Pascal Laugier; The Roommate's Christian E Christiansen; and the Drive Angry / My Bloody Valentine team of Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer.
It seemed to get the most traction in that last period, but Lussier and Farmer then walked, seemingly because Dimension were aiming for a PG-13 certificate.
Barker has since promised that, "Dimension are purely interested in an R-rated picture," and that there's no question of anyone other than Doug Bradley playing Pinhead (after Bradley wisely sat out the wretched **Hellraiser: Revelations).
He now adds that, "I wanted to make sure we sounded some fresh notes. The movie actually begins on Devil’s Island. I wanted to fold into the Hellraiser narrative something about the guy - the Frenchman Lemarchand - who made the mysterious box, which raises Pinhead. I figured, 'Well, what would have happened to him?’ He might well have been taken to Devil’s Island and I thought that would be a pretty cool place to start the movie."
We visited Lemarchand previously in Kevin Yagher's troubled Hellraiser: Bloodline, but that all sounds rather different...
Barker says the current state of play is a waiting game: "We're waiting for Bob Weinstein to come back to us and see when we're actually going to make the movie."
In the meantime the Director's cut of Barker's **Nightbreed **has just been released on Blu-ray in the States, and his much-delayed novel The Scarlet Gospels (pitting Pinhead against Barker's recurring detective character Harry D'Amour) has a current publication date of May next year.