Pinhead (Hellraiser)

""Trick us and we shall tear your soul!""

- - Pinhead

Pinhead is the main antagonist of the Hellraiser film series. He is the leader of The Order of the Gash, a sadomasochistic religion whose adherents are the demonic torturers known as the Cenobites. Aside from the iron pins jabbed in his skull, Pinhead is renowned in the slasher movie genre for being one of the very few villains who is eloquent and highly intelligent. He usually kills his victims by means of tearing them apart with hooked chains, but has also commanded an arsenal of demonic powers and is a master of torture who often prefers to drag his victims into an eternity of suffering rather than outright death. While in the first film he was largely neutral, Pinhead, as the series progressed, became a more standard horror villain and murdered more frequently.

Creation and Influences
While designing the setting for the Hellraiser universe, Clive Barker had openly expressed great dissatisfaction with the slasher genre, claming it to be dull and boring. His asumption was that villains such as Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, and others where not frightening since he believed them to be "dumb things" and that to him such characters could not get him to fear them. Instead Barker had claimed to have inspired Pinhead's overall attitude from Count Dracula, most notably the Cristopher Lee version: ''"Part of the chill of Dracula surely lies in the fact that he is very clearly and articulately aware of what he is doing – you feel that this is a penetrating intelligence – and I don’t find dumb things terribly scary – I find intelligence scary, particularly twisted intelligence; it’s one of the reasons why Hannibal Lecter is scary, isn’t it? It’s because you always feel that he’s going to be three jumps ahead of you." ''When describing Pinhead, actor Doug Bradley compares him to Oscar Wilde and Noel Coward. When discussing the character over with Barker, Bradley was told to play the villain as he would " a cross between an administrator and a surgeon who’s responsible for running a hospital where there are no wards, only operating theatres. As well as being the man who wields the knife, he’s the man who has to keep the timetable going."

Barker had designed the Cenobites based on punk fashion, Catholicism and S & M clubs from Barker's own visits in New York and Amsterdam. Pinhead was directly inspired off of African fetish sculptors, with Barker initially intending for Pinhead to have a navel piercing which in turn would have implyed that the character had genital piercings.

The credits for the first movie identified the character as Lead Cenobite, while earlier drafs of the script had intended for him to be called Priest. The name "Pinhead" was first coined by the Hellraiser makep crew that applied the prosthetics on Bradley in order to identify the actor's character. Clive Barker had never intended to name the character thusly as he claimed the name was undignified. Within the movies, the character has only been refered to as "Pinhead" by Joey Summerskill, the protagonist of Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth. Also of note, in Hellworld the name was used to refer to an MMORPG boss villain based around the mythology of the actual cenobites.

Early life
Pinhead was once a man named Captain Elliot Spencer, who discovered the Lament Configuration after the World War I. When he solved it, he was transformed into Pinhead.

Hellraiser
In Hellraiser, Pinhead appeared when Frank Cotton solved the Lament Configuration. He tore Frank apart and took him to Hell, torturing him an an area called the Labyrinth. Frank escaped when his brother Larry's blood fell on the spot where he died. When Larry's daughter Kirsty found it, she solved it and Pinhead appeared to her, but she decided to exchange her soul for Frank's. In the end, Pinhead tore Frank apart again with the hooked chains. He and his Cenobites - Chatterer, Butterball, and the Female Cenobite - went after Kirsty, but she used the Lament Configuration to send them all back to Hell.

Hellbound: Hellraiser II
When Dr. Channard and Julia (who was killed by the Cenobites, and whom Channard resurrected using the blood of one of his patients) made a girl named Tiffany solve the Lament Configuration, Pinhead decided not to kill Tiffany, as Channard was the one who wanted the box solved and wanted to experience Hell. He was eventually turned into a Cenobite by Leviathan. When Kirsty discovered that Pinhead was Elliot Spencer, she reminded him of this, and he and his Cenobites defended Tiffany and Kirsty from Channard Cenobite. After killing the other Cenobites, Channard Cenobite turned Pinhead back into Elliot Spencer and slit his throat with one of his tentacles, killing him.

From here, his light and dark sides were separated; Elliot Spencer became a spirit while Pinhead's soul became trapped inside the Pillar of Souls.

Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth
For the first time, Pinhead takes the role of main antagonist in Hellraiser III. He was resurrected when JP Monroe was bitten by a rat and his blood landed on the Pillar of Souls. He absorbed a girl named Brittany Virtue before killing JP and absorbing enough of his energy to return to power, no longer trapped inside the statue. He killed around 150 people at a bar, and tried to take the Lament Configuration from Joey Sommerskill so he could keep the door to Hell open, but was unable to take it; it had to be given to him for him to get it. He turned the corpses of many of his victims into Cenobites and tried to kill her, but she sent them all back to Hell. Disguised as her dead father, Pinhead tricked Joey into giving him the box, but was confronted by Elliot Spencer, who merged with him again. Joey stabbed Pinhead with the Lament Configuration (in the form of a sharp object), and he was sent back to Hell.

Hellraiser: Bloodline
Pinhead returned when the demon "princess" Angelique summoned him. They planned to have John Merchant (descendant of the 17th century toymaker Phillip Lemarchand who built the Lament Configuration) use his new design, the Elysium Configuration, to keep the portal to Hell open so he could come and go at will. However, it did not work, and Pinhead killed him before his wife Bobbi sent him, Angelique, Chatter Beast, and Twin Cenobite (two twin security guards turned by Pinhead) to Hell.

In year 2127, John's descendant Paul Merchant summoned Pinhead with the Lament Configuration on Space Station Minos (which the Elysium Configuration was built into as a trap to kill Pinhead). Pinhead, Chatter Beast, Twin Cenobite, and Angelique (now a Cenobite) killed most of the guards, but Paul and the remaining guard, Rimmer, escaped in a shuttle. After tricking Pinhead with a hologram, Paul activated the Elysium Configuration. Reflecting off mirrors and closing the space station/Configuration into a box, the perpetual light began to decay Pinhead, pinning him to a wall, before it exploded, completely destroying Pinhead and the other Cenobites.

In other media
Pinhead appeared in an episode of Family Guy where he unscrewed a salt shaker.

He also appeared in Robot Chicken. In one episode, he got the pins in his head arranged into a mohawk. In another, he was competing in the Big Brother show alongside Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, Ghostface, and Leatherface. Michael pulled pins out of his head. Pinhead said that if he won the chance to call home on a cell phone, he would have called his mother, as it was her birthday.

A parody of Pinhead appeared in the spoof movie Stan Helsing. He wears a black Matrix style robe and he is named Needlehead. He was killed when Stan grabbed two of the needles on his head (his main weakness), disintegrating him.

Some fans would compare him to Mesogog from the Power Rangers franchise. Both their appearences hides most of the anatomy with long black leather (with the exception of the hands and head). Their personality's both show a cold, nononsese demenore and when they seperate from their humanity, become more sadistic and unruly.