Love it or hate it, Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth is the last almost-direct sequel we have to the original pair of Hellraiser films.

Me? I love it. There was something magical about the third entries in slasher series at this time. There’s an element of dark humor that began to take over series like Hellraiser and A Nightmare on Elm Street in their third entries. It won’t work for everyone, but it works for me.

For example, Hellraiser III features my favorite cenobite designs in all the sequels. Are they absolutely ridiculous? Yes. Yes they are. Does that make them any less impressive from a design perspective? Nope.

There’s like a Twilight Zone-twist style of irony in the new character designs. Dreamer, the smoker, has a hole in her throat that she uses to smoke from. Pistonhead, the spoiled owner of a nasty night club with a domineering attitude, is driven as a cenobite by a piston in his head. Camerahead, a former camera operator for the local news channel, has a permanent camera installed in his head used to spy on proceedings. CD, the former DJ at the night club, has holes for a multidisc CD player in his head. The only design to go against this rule is Barbie, the bartender with barbed wire around his head. He does permanent carry cocktail supplies as a weapon, so I look past the weaker connection.

Most of these Cenobites are what we call Pseudo-Cenobites. Pinhead does not actually have the authority to turn the living into Cenobites. In Hellraiser III, he does it as an attempt to grasp for power he’s not entitled to. The Pseudo-Cenobites are his victims. Their form is defined by how he murdered them, not by some greater cosmic design. Most of these Pseudo-Cenobites do not maintain these forms by the end, though their deaths for dealing with Pinhead’s Leviathan are irreversible.

Like Hellraiser and Hellbound: Hellraiser II, our villains and heroes are pulled into this predicament through curiosity and a quest for something more. If they didn’t follow the influence of the emerging hot shot artist, if they didn’t chase the Leviathan, or if they didn’t fight for more power, they would’ve survived unscathed. They fell to curiosity and desire and were justly punished under the rules of this universe.

The new, emerging thread in Hellraiser III is doubt. Taken out of the context of the film, Pinhead’s blasphemous play with the priest is pure camp. In the film, it’s the clearest example of doubt being as dangerous as curiosity. Doubt, in this world, means not believing what you’re seeing. It means not being open to the possibility that the world is bigger than we know. What it really means is an opening for the Cenobites to lure you to them and exact their influence upon you. You don’t believe in them? They’re still there.

From here, the Hellraiser series shifts to a showcase of Pinhead rather than a continued narrative (however tenuous) of Kristy’s experience with the Cenobites and the puzzle box. It’s a great shift for some, a challenge for others, and we’ll be exploring them all.