Sunday, February 15, 2009

Clive Barker Praises New Hellraiser Director, Trashes New Pinhead Design

Ryan Rotten over at ShockTillYouDrop has an exclusive up with Clive Barker that is pretty interesting. Kudos to Ryan for getting the notorious opinionated Barker on the horn.

The writer/director had much to say about the upcoming remake of his most famous work, Hellraiser. Firstly, he commented on the addition of another writer/director, Pascal Laugier (nominated for a Cyber Horror Award for his work on Martyrs), who replaced Alexandre Bustillo & Julien Maury of Inside fame:

"I fuckin' love Martyrs... it's a movie that has courage and commitment. [Pascal] is someone who really, really cares about horror movies. I'm supposed to be seeing a treatment soon. I'm not certain, but I believe he is going to back to the first movie, but not with an obsessed loyalty. He's taking the first movie as a launching board, a rock model, but there are things you can obviously do now both visually and sexually... It's a different time, so I'm excited."

Conversely, when the topic switched to the controversial redesign of lead cenobite Pinhead that surfaced on the web a few days ago, Barker was a little less enthusiastic/complimentary:

"The whole point about Pinhead is that he is geometrically severe. Very measured, and the energy of the character comes out of the fact that you have surgical precision which is part of a much larger, sadistic, maybe masochistic, design. Turning the bloodless cuts or scarifications into bloody, irregular gashes removes the point of what made the character interesting in the first place."

Ironically, the new design was created by Gary Tunnicliffe, makeup artist for the sequels to the original Hellraiser.