For many longtime fans of the franchise, David Bruckner’s Hellraiser (2022) was a breath of fresh air. A Hellraiser movie with an actual budget! And new lore! And an incredible parade of Cenobite designs! Dark, grimy, and feverishly violent, Bruckner’s take on the material felt like the kick in the pants that this series needed … but since its release, we’ve heard precious little about a follow-up. What gives?
Well, in a new interview with ComicBook.com, Hellraiser producer Keith Levine confirms that progress is being made on a sequel:
“Yeah. We are trying to do a follow-up and there have been conversations. I can’t exactly say where we’re at in those conversations, but Bruckner is involved in those conversations and we spent a lot of time and energy, I think relaunching that world. A lot of brainpower going into crafting the Cenobite design, figuring out how we’re going to pull them off, and we learned so much.
“And I think moving forward, we love that all that knowledge is sort of banked and that time has been spent. So we think that moving forward and going into another movie is just going to be even crazier and even more awesome. So yeah, that’s something we’re definitely hard at work on, and hope we will have more news soon.”
Reading between the lines here, it sounds as though Levine, Bruckner, and company are eager to get another Hellraiser off the ground and are putting in the legwork to get that greenlit, but nothing’s officially official quite yet. Y’know what? Good enough for us! That’s better than no progress being made at all, and maybe – if we’re very, very lucky and say a few extra prayers to the Hell Priest, we’ll get to spend a bit more time in that world.
Bruckner’s Hellraiser, you’ll remember, was written by Super Dark Times and Night House scribes Ben Collins and Luke Piotrowski. Starring Jamie Clayton as a newly-redesigned Pinhead and Odessa A’zion as a young addict whose brother winds up on the wrong end of the Cenobites’ chains, the film felt very much of a piece with Barker’s writing, and introduced a diabolical new take on the franchise’s iconic Lament Configuration.
Not much else to report on a follow-up to 2022’s Hellraiser at this time, but you can bet your ass we’re keeping our ear to the ground for further updates, and that we’ll have those in front of you just as soon as they cross our radar. Stay tuned, folks, and keep hope alive!
