Makeup Effects Archive: Hellraiser (1987)

Continued from the Part 2 article on Hellraiser which focused on Frank and his victims.

When it came to realizing the Cenobites, Hellraiser's supernatural arbiters of pleasure and pain, Clive Barker stated, 'We've gone out of our way, Bob Keen's team and myself, to design monsters that are not going to resemble anything that has been seen before.'

Bob Keen explained in Fangoria, 'In a way, the Cenobites were the hardest effect to achieve, because they went through so many stages of design. You can create creatures very easily by being elaborate, but we wanted to come up with something simpler, more logical. It's all tied to the pain/pleasure principle, though you're never quite sure why they've done this to themselves. That was why put in the most time and effort designing them.'

'Being an artist, Clive did some initial designs, and we discussed the concept. This was a great help, since he could clearly show me what he was after. At one point we had everyone on the team drawing, so we ended up with around 200 designs. Then Clive went through them, selecting the elements he wanted'.

Keen also explained how even the costumes, which were designed by Jane Wildgoose in collaboration with Barker, were workshopped alongside the makeups, 'There was a conscious effort to steer away from the Mad Max look, that leather punk style. Clive had this image that calls to mind the Spanish Inquisition, and the end result was a reflection of the two; the long coats of the Inquisition, and the leather bondage thing, though much more extreme'.

John Cormican also remembered, 'At first it was the drawings and designs, and doing all this research into material that was shocking and horrific at the time. People weren't pierced in these days, so looking at all these different pictures of piercings was quite shocking.'

While the process of designing the Cenobites was a collaborative one, Cliff Wallace recalled that Barker heavily influenced the design of the Cenobite's leader;

'Keen used to take a group of us to Clive's flat (..) a couple of times a month, and we'd try to come up with ideas for Cenobites. The only ones that Clive had really realized was the one that became known as Pinhead.'

While Pinhead was inspired by Clive Barker's artwork, the realization of his makeup, sported by Doug Bradley, fell to Geoff Portass. Portass explained, 'I'd seen one drawing of Pinhead, and that's all I knew. A man with some scars and spikes sticking out of his head.'

'One of the main stipulations when I was designing Pinhead is that Clive said that he wanted (...) to see Doug through the character. So consquently the makeup is barely 2-3 millimetres thick at the best, as he wanted to keep Doug's face in there'.

Bradley recalled the first time he underwent the makeup application, 'It took about six hours to put the whole thing on. It's a strange experience the first time you go through it. I think I was kind of zoned out and having a mystic experience by the end of it. Not at all inappropiate for playing a part like Pinhead!'

According to Keen, 'The lead Cenobite, the guy with the pins all over his head, had six appliances on his face and four on his body.' These body appliances were designed to be visible through the holes of the leather Cenobite costumes.

Portass explained how Pinhead's makeup was made, 'Pinhead is so called because they were originally pins! When we designed it, I took Clive's original drawing, which had spikes sticking out, more tribal. I changed that to pins (...) and Clive liked the pins, it was very subtle, very thin.

'We got to the point where shooting was going to start, and they took some test photographs (...) and you couldn't see the pins! (...) So we said, we got to go bigger, and we turned them into nails. We found some brass rod (...) from architectural model supplies, so we cut each length rod, and then cut off the tops of lots of brass nails, and superglued them on top of the rods. All we then had to was snip the tiny little pinheads off the pins, and simply insert the rods over the top of the pins. (...) But he was never called Nailhead, he just remained as Pinhead'.

While Bradley would return to the role for several of the sequels, playing Pinhead was originally an uncomfortable experience, 'I've always said that wearing the makeup for me was fine if you were working. It's the killing time that's the issue. Everybody knows that in makeup or out of makeup, the average day on a film set is 10% working and 90% waiting.

'And that's hard enough at the best of times, but you're carrying that makeup around all day, and in the first two movies the costume was not easy to take off, so the costume tended to stay on as well. You just wanted to be able to lift that off and be yourself for a while!'

The first Cenobite under Pinhead's command is the otherwise unnamed 'female Cenobite', whose makeup was designed by Cormican, 'I did a drawing of the female Cenobite in its early stages, which had a spike to its cheek. Clive made some suggestions about bringing down the spike, and opening up the wound in a vagina-like manner!'

The female Cenobite was played by Grace Kirby, who also required a long session in the makeup chair, as Keen stated, 'The female had about eight appliances, requiring approximately three hours to put on'.

Cormican's sculpt for the Female Cenobite appliance.

Between the lengthy makeup application and the heavy leather costume she had to wear, Kirby did not enjoy the Female Cenobite role, and thus did not return for Hellbound: Hellraiser II. Keen remembered her sullen mood on the set;

'I remember the first time the makeup went on, it really upset her to look into the mirror and see the face she'd seen looking back all her life be so different. And I think the other thing that got to her was just how intimidated everybody else was.

It wasn't the makeup effects crew, they knew who she is, and treated her the same, but other people in the crew. It was a hard process for her, but it's quite normal. Female actresses often find, when you turn them into hideous monsters, this is not what they're used to'.

The other two Cenobites were the bluntly nicknamed 'Butterball' and 'Chatterer', both of which were masks and chest appliances. The Chatterer was intended to be hunched over like a chimpanzee - hence the chattering - and in early tests the masks had pointed teeth.

Nicholas Vince, who played Chatterer, recalled why the design was changed, 'In the original makeup he had short pointed teeth, as if they had been filed down. And they were made, but Clive thought that they made him too inhuman, you needed to see that he *was* a human.'

While the Chatterer and Butterball appliances were simpler to achieve, they were worse for the performers to wear as Keen wrly said;

'The Chatterer, whom we nicknamed, 'Poor Bastard', because he can't speak, see or hear, was much easier to sculpt. That was basically an over-the-head appliance, as was the last Cenobite, the one with the shades.'

Vince remembered how exhausting the role was, 'He's probably my best friend and worst nightmare, because I owe so much to having played this part, but the actual physical experience of being put in sensory deprivation was fairly tough!'

The 'Butterball' Cenobite, much like Chatterer, was realized as a full face appliance and a torso appliance to show through the costume. The Butterball and Chatterer appliances were reused in Hellbound: Hellraiser II.

Simon Bamford, who wore the Butterball mask and costume, recalled it as being just as claustrophobic to wear as the Chatterer costume was for Nicholas Vince, with the added embarrassment that it disrupted filming,

'The first time we were led onto the set, the crew didn't know that Nick and I were blind (in the masks). I could only just hear, 'We need you to go over here' and I was going, muffled 'I can't hear!'. Next thing we knew it was 'Action!' and we were like, 'What?''