Horror films have historically leaned on the genre’s literary history, whether it be simple inspiration or outright adaptation, and there are a few peerless authors in that respect. There are the authors responsible for a work so groundbreaking and influential that its DNA permeates horror cinema: your Mary Shelleys and Bram Stokers. Then there are those with such massive bodies of work that have been sufficiently plundered for adaptation – take your pick between the New Englander who gave us Pennywise the Dancing Clown and Carrie White, or the one who gave us Cthulhu.
But there are also those writers who, although maybe not as canonized or prolific, have struck lightning with specific creations that ended up immortalized and resurrected on-screen numerous times. Liverpool’s own Clive Barker is one of those cases, and his most famous cinematic work – 1987’s gruesome and self-destructively erotic body horror nightmare Hellraiser – has lived on through film in some way, shape, or form for almost 40 years now, including a 2022 reboot that rewrote the series’ canon. But this year the series is set to take a leap into a different medium, with an officially licensed video game (the first of its kind) that revisits the films and sheds the weight of the less-than-stellar sequels that came after Hellbound: Hellraiser 2. But now, the timeline of Hellraiser is getting a suprising continuation, in video game form.
