As anyone who’s familiar with his bibliography—which includes plays, screenplays, and some shockingly successful YA novels—knows, Clive Barker is not just “the Hellraiser guy.” But also: Clive Barker is totally the Hellraiser guy, and so it’s probably something of a relief to the producers of David Gordon Green’s upcoming Hellraiser TV show at HBO that Barker has just signed on to serve as an executive producer on the series, granting them access to a dimension of infinite pain and pleasure and also of not getting yelled at for trying to do a Hellraiser show without Clive Barker’s input.
Said series was originally announced back in April, with Green—fresh-ish off his successful Halloween reboot from 2018—attached to do a supposedly “elevated” version of Barker’s story and subsequent self-directed film. Per Deadline, the series is being written by Michael Dougherty (Trick r’ Treat) and Battlestar Galactica’s Mark Verheiden, the latter of whom will serve as showrunner. (Green is on board to direct the pilot and the first few episodes.)
Barker, who based his hit 1987 film, which introduced metal detector favorite Pinhead to the world of cinematic horror, on his story “The Hellbound Heart,” has now formally joined the series as an exec. In announcing the news, Barker said that he was “delighted the Hellraiser mythology is seeing a new life. It’s time the stories went back to their roots.” (Having sat through nine of the damn things as the returns increasingly diminished, we’re pretty sure our film team would co-sign that sentiment.) “I’m eager to bring to a new audience the most powerful and ancient elements of horror: the darkest evil invading our human lives and how we must find in ourselves the power to resist it.”
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