I Don’t Think Straight Men Ever Had a Lock on “Hellraiser”

The 2022 reboot turns the franchise’s queer subtext into text, and shows the power of claiming your monster.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle

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Someone in fishnets and a black miniskirt. Their wrists are bound with cuffs and there’s a chain or leash leading down between them.
Oh, no, chains and black leather outfits. Surely, a sex demon is at work. Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash

Every day, traditional masculinity becomes more endangered. This week, we lost one of its last great icons: Pinhead from Hellraiser.

Pinhead is a Cenobite, which is to say, a sex demon. He lives in a parallel dimension that can be accessed through a magic puzzle box. If you solve his magic puzzle box, he pops out and tortures you sexually. The torture is sexual for him, by the way, not you: You’re mostly getting mutilated and having your limbs pulled off. Most of the people to whom this happens seem pretty unhappy about it. As a dom, Pinhead’s ability to establish consent and respect his partners’ boundaries needs work, but you cannot deny that he’s super into mutilation, sexually. All Cenobites are.

Yes, it was important for red-blooded American boys to have Pinhead as a role model. In him, all the manly virtues (torture; mutilation; sexual gratification…

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Jude Ellison S. Doyle

Author of “Trainwreck” (Melville House, ‘16) and “Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers” (Melville House, ‘19). Columns published far and wide across the Internet.