DID YOU KNOW?
1. The film was originally supposed to be called 'The Hellbound Heart', named after the novella it was based upon. However, the studio decided that the title sounded too much like a romance and asked Barker to change the title. Barker offered 'Sadomasochists from Beyond the Grave', which was rejected for the overtly sexual content. They ultimately opened the floor to the production team to offer up their own suggestions, prompting a sixty-year-old female crew member to offer up, 'What a Woman Will do for a Good Fuck'.
2. During a post production party when filming had ended, Doug Bradley was dismayed to be ignored by the other members of the crew. He thought to himself that he found it a pity as he though he got along with people rather well. It wasn't till later that he realized that none of the crew had actually ever seen him without his makeup when playing Pinhead and therefore did not recognize him.
3. Many viewers have commented about the poor quality of the FX at the end of the movie. Clive Barker has explained that, due to a very limited budget, there was no money left to have the FX done professionally after the primary filming. Instead, Barker and a "Greek guy" animated these scenes by hand over a single weekend. Barker has also commented that he thinks the FX turned out very well considering the amount of alcohol the two consumed that weekend.
4. Doug Bradley's character was named the "Priest" in the earliest drafts of the script and ultimately became simply "Lead Cenobite" in the shooting script. "Pinhead" originated as a nickname for the character that simply stuck and began being used in the sequels. Barker disliked the name, finding it undignified, and in his Hellraiser comic series produced for BOOM! in 2011, he had characters refer to Pinhead as the "Priest". He also maintains that the character has a "true Cenobite name" that he intends to reveal in a forthcoming work. Similarly, the Female Cenobite was designated "Deep Throat" on set, though the overtly sexual nature of the moniker led to her simply being billed as "Female Cenobite" again in the sequel.
5. The concept of a cube being used as a portal to hell has basis in the urban legend of 'The Devil's Toy Box', which concerns a six-sided cube constructed of inward facing mirrors. According to the stories, individuals who enter the structure and then close it will undergo surreal, disturbing phenomenon that will simultaneously grant them a revelatory experience and permanently warp their mind.
6. Andrew Robinson convinced Clive Barker to replace the scripted line, "Fuck you," with the line actually shot, "Jesus wept".
7. It took six hours every day to apply the prosthetic Cenobite makeup on Doug Bradley.
8. The Chatterer and Butterball Cenobites had dialogue in the original script. However, when their make-up made coherent speech impossible, their lines were given to the Female Cenobite and especially Pinhead, which helped to cement his reputation as the film's trademark character.
9. The budget of the movie was $1 million, and it earned about $20 million in box office receipts. It was the directing debut of Clive Barker, who had made only two short films prior to this.
10. Doug Bradley was originally offered the choice of roles between one of the mattress movers and the Lead Cenobite. He originally thought it important that, as a new film actor, the audience should see his face, and nearly turned down the Lead Cenobite role for the much more minor role.
11. The scene where Frank is being spun around upside-down covered in blood was a camera test and the very first thing shot of the film. Afterwards, Sean Chapman (Frank) couldn't stop vomiting.
12. The studio had planned on casting stuntmen as the Cenobites to save on production costs. However, director Clive Barker however insisted on hiring actors, reasoning that even if the characters did not speak and appeared under heavy make-up, their body language would still convey a personality.
13. At the time of the movie's release, the MPAA had an agenda on "intensity of tone". As a result, director Clive Barker had to make several cuts to the film, including consecutive hammer blows, fingers entering flesh, S&M spanking between Julia and Frank, and additional "thrusts" during the sex scene- all with the intention of watering down the overall impact of the piece.
14. For the video release, the film had one of the most unusual pieces of bonus material that has ever been offered: a Home Shopping Network show where merchandise from the movie could be purchased. The show was hosted by a giddy old lady claiming to be a hardcore fan of the movie.
15. Nintendo developed a video game based on the film, but it was scrapped at the last minute. It was planned as one of the first to feature the capacity to save a player's game and let the player return later to that point in the game. However, it was discovered that the Nintendo console could not correctly interpret the saved game codes, so it was never released.
16. Industrial band Coil originally did the original soundtrack for the movie. Clive Barker was a fan of the finished product, saying, "[Coil was] the only group I've heard on disc whose records I've taken off because they made my bowels churn." However, the studio ultimately decided to have the film re-scored by Christopher Young. The score that Coil recorded, a total of nine tracks, can be found on their compilation CD titled, "Unnatural History II: Smiling in the Face of Perversity" and on another album, "The Unreleased Themes for Hellraiser". Both are very rare.
17. The film is based on the novella "The Hellbound Heart", written by Clive Barker.
18. In his DVD commentary, Clive Barker explained that filming the movie in an actual house forced him to be creative in his cinematography. There was often only room for a single camera and this explains why many of the shots are from only one angle. In particular, vertical movement was often the only movement available to the camera operators, which explains many of the overhead and zoom shots. Only one room in the house, the attic, was shot on a soundstage, but only the effects shots used the attic set.
19. Over the years, the film was released numerous times on DVD in Germany. However, all of these releases were bootlegs because the uncut version is on the youth protection index. It took until 2011 for the film to be released for the first time officially on DVD by Kinowelt (now StudioCanal).
20. The uncut version of the film was released only in Austria to circumvent sale restrictions. A cut version was released, too, available everywhere (this cut version runs about 30 seconds longer than the previously cut VHS version).
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