Pinhead's Entire Backstory Explained

Hellraiser had no right to build such a rich universe. The English horror flick, written and directed by scare-master Clive Barker, is a campy and grotesque exploration of sadomasochism. The first film, in fact, is built entirely around Julia Cotton's obsession with an affair she had with her husband's dead brother, Frank. Their late-night liaisons were so memorable, she is willing to sacrifice her husband to demons, in order to bring Frank back, piece by piece. Moreover, Hellraiser spends much more time lingering on the goopy, half-dead body of the semi-revived Frank Cotton than on the franchise's monster, the now-iconic Pinhead. Believe it or not, Pinhead isn't even named in the film, and those who remember the first film well will recall that he plays a background role to the murderous psychosexual drama at the movie's fore. Regardless, he's become a touchstone of cinematic horror.

It took further films to flesh out Pinhead, much as Hellraiser pieced together Frank Cotton's body. Across ten Hellraiser films, the most beloved cenobite of all has actually developed a deep backstory worthy of his striking design. This is his story in its gruesome entirety.

It might not surprise you to learn that the backstory of the box that leads to Pinhead's world is nearly as detailed as the creature's own origin myth. The so-called Lament Configuration is a puzzle box created by architect, mass murderer and all-around pervert Philip LeMarchand. When he wasn't creating intricate cathedrals or killing indiscriminately, the French artisan would build puzzle boxes meant to reveal deeply held secrets or satisfy dark desires for anyone who could solve them.

The Lament Configuration is just one such box, created while LeMarchand was working as a toymaker. He made the box for a rich duke with a penchant for murder and an extreme interest in occult practices. The box plays a more and more complex tune to let players know they are getting closer to solving the puzzle, ultimately killing them when the Cenobites are set free to enact their elaborate tortures. As The Hellbound Heart puts it, "LeMarchand, who had been in his time a maker of singing birds, had constructed the box so that opening it tripped a musical mechanism, which began to tinkle a short rondo of sublime banality ... Each segment presented a fresh challenge to fingers and mind, the victories rewarded with a further filigree added to the tune." 

Pinhead's story grows far more fleshed out in Hellraiser III: Hell On Earth. This installment spends much of its time exploring human misery and war. Naturally, Pinhead shares how he felt as a human soldier, watching so many of his fellow countrymen perish on the front lines. In a monologue about the lasting effect of the war on the men of the early 1900s, Pinhead plainly states that his disrupted faith in people and God led him to experiment with torture: "We'd seen God fail us; so many dead. For us, He too fell at Flanders. The war destroyed my generation. Those that didn't die drank themselves to death ... I went further. I was an explorer of forbidden pleasures. Opening the box was my final act of exploration — of discovery."

According to Pinhead, the underlying sound of human history is the noise of a blade meeting skin. "The suffering of strangers, the agony of friends," he muses, "[the sound is] a secret song at the center of the world." Pain, to Pinhead, is truth — all else is noise. The degradation of war is the final discovery, the endpoint of civilization, the only real thing in a world full of falsehoods. Everyone will figure it out, in the end — he just got there a little faster.

Clive Barker himself has made the religious elements of Pinhead's story explicit. If naming their dimension Hell and having Pinhead deliver a treatise against God wasn't enough, several of the movies refer to him as a priest and leader of the Cenobites. "That character is a priest of Hell," Barker said in an interview, "In [Hellraiser III], he's actually called on screen the Pope of Hell, which I guess came about later in the scripts."

Pinhead himself is a little more humble about the whole thing, calling himself an explorer "in the further regions of experience." He does admit, however, to encouraging holy connotations and says that depending on temperament, people view the Cenobites as angels or demons.

If Barker had his way, the character would be known as a leader of Hell first and a guy with pins sticking out of his face last. "In my original script, [Pinhead] didn't even have a name. Pinhead was the name that the special effects guy used actually. I was like 'Wait a second, you just named my villain Pinhead?' because I didn't think that sounded very dignified. But it ended up on the call sheet, and it just stuck."

2005's Hellraiser: Hellworld, the eighth installment of the Hellraiser franchise, put a 2000s twist on its story of interdimensional murder pervs. Hellraiser: Hellworld features a computer game based around the mythology of the Cenobites and Philip LeMarchand's notorious puzzle boxes. Though viewers are initially led to believe that attendees are being murdered by Pinhead at a themed party based around the video game, the film reveals that these are actually hallucinations. These human victims have, in fact, been drugged and buried alive. This intense punishment comes at the hands of the party's host, who wants to punish the people behind the Pinhead game after her gaming-addicted son commits suicide.

In a final twist, the host learns that her son came into possession of a real life LeMarchand box. The box opens and the real-life Pinhead orders his Cenobites to kill the host. Let that be a lesson: Leave the murdering to the master.