Several critics have taken the time to examine the place of the Hellraiser films in the tradition of horror cinema… Several pointed out the Faustian elements of the first movie (a deal with the Devil; an attempt to escape final judgment that ends in bloodshed); others noted the domesticity of that film and ascribed the power of the piece to its Freudian subtext; still others saw the influence of sado-masochistic imagery in the piece and believed the film’s potency was sourced there. I offer these opinions in particular because I can certainly find signs of all three influences up there on the walls of my skull.
But let’s put subtext aside for a moment, and consider the creature that cavorts at the centre of any horror movie: the monster. Recent years have seen a host of new nominees for the pantheon: the maniac murderers of the Halloween series and the Friday the 13th pictures; the ithyphallic Alien; Wes Craven’s bastard son of a thousand maniacs, Freddy Krueger. And there, somewhere in the pack, is the fellow who stares out at you from the cover of the book: the leader of Hell’s Sadean order of Cenobites, ol’ Pinhead himself. He gained that name by default; in the credits of the first movie he’s simply referred to as the “Lead Cenobite”. But it quickly became clear to all of us that he had made a mark on the consciousness of the audience out of all proportion to his screen time. The credit for this lies both with the actor behind the pins, Doug Bradley, and to the sometime team of Bob Keen and Geoff Portass. Together, they made the nightmare breathe…
His very loquaciousness marks him out from his peers. Many of the monsters who stalked the screens of the 1980s were mute – the Alien was wordless; so were Michael Myers and Jason Vorhees. Some were given to peppering their murderous sprees with bad puns, like the post-Craven Krueger. But Pinhead glided through his movie appearances dispensing pseudo-metaphysical insights with as much enthusiasm as he did hooks and gouges.
In that sense he harks back to the perverse elegance of Dracula, particularly as incarnated by Christopher Lee… Persuasive as his performance is, Bradley’s Pinhead is just a part of the whole ambience, of course, and that ambience is essentially Gothic in tone.

Clive Barker, in The Hellraiser Chronicles, edited by Stephen Johns, Titan Books, London 1992