Out doing the Drive Angry rounds, writer/director team Patrick Lussier and Todd Farmer have dropped some hints about their upcoming Hellraiser rejig. And while the word on everyone's lips so far has been "remake" (along with "why?"), it seems that may not actually quite be the case.
Clive Barker's 1986 original focused on Kirsty Cotton, her stumbling upon the puzzlebox that summons the demon Cenobites, and the deal she made with them regarding her murdered father and her dastardly Uncle Frank. It was, says Farmer, "a very personal story, and a difficult one to re-tell."
"To go in and tell the story of Frank and the family wouldn't be right," continues Lussier. "What we pitched at Dimension was a different angle. We're keeping it within the world of the box: what the box is and what the box does. We'll go into that same world, but see things we haven't seen in the other movies." They have such sights to show us... although they're enigmatic enough to suggest that characters like Kirsty and wicked stepmother Julia may still appear.
The box itself is not much explained in Hellraiser, but Barker's original novella and subsequent comics and movie sequels name it The Lament Configuration, constructed in a Faustian deal by toymaker Philip Lemarchand (the box is actually The Lemarchand Configuration in the book) in 18th century France. The mangled Hellraiser: Bloodline (the third sequel, disowned by director Kevin Yagher as an Alan Smithee film) traced the Lemarchand family through three generations, ending up on a space station.
While Doug Bradley's Pinhead became the most recognisable Hellraiser icon, the comics in particular latched on to the box as the way to tell further stories and expand the mythology. It took a while, but some of the later films attempted that angle too, so it seems as if Lussier and Farmer have been paying attention, although they acknowledge the problem of "how to make this one different."
But early fears of a teen-focused, watered-down Hellraiser are thankfully unfounded, to the extent that the filmmakers have had the paperwork legally altered: "We had the contracts changed to specifically say that we were delivering an R-rated film. The treatment we submitted was like, 'if you're expecting a happy ending, stop reading now!'"