I can't believe the Hellraiser series is still going on. 1987-present without remakes/reboots/offshoots. Only the 9th one didn't have the original Pinhead.
Who the fukk keeps making these movies?
Long story short, Clive Barker wrote a novella called "The Hellbound Heart" in 1986. Dimension Films approached him to make it into a movie. At the time he didn't really care about movies, he was a well known author, so he signed the movie rights over to Dimension and wrote/directed the first movie.
He left after the 1st movie, but since they retained the rights they continued to milk the franchise.
Eventually he hoped to get the rights back, but every year or two they make another movie solely to fukk him out of the rights. If a certain amount of time lapses without them producing a "Hellraiser" movie the film rights revert back to Barker. The 9th movie in the series was released to a single theater just so they could say it had a theatrical release.
None of the shyt after the first 1-2 movies is considered canon, and Barker is writing a novel called "The Scarlet Gospels" which is the "real" version of the "Hellraiser" series.
Fred.