Posted in: Interview, Movies | Tagged: david bruckner, hellraiser, hulu, Jamie Clayton

Hellraiser: We Talk To Jamie Clayton & David Bruckner About New Film

Hellraiser is now live on Hulu for all to watch as the franchise is reborn for a new generation. Jamie Clayton is now in the role of the Hell Priest, and director David Bruckner adds to the mythos of one of the first examples of elevated horror we have. This new film is as close to the Clive Barker source material as we have ever gotten, and recently we got to sit down with the pair to talk about their contributions to the franchise, which Cenobites scared them, and more.

Hellraiser Is A Fantastic Watch

Jamie, I enjoyed your performance in the film, and I wanted to talk to you about the Hell Priest. The Priest is such an iconic character. I was wondering if anything about the filming process and production changed how you performed as The Priest as you went along? When you went into it, did you have it going a different way in your head? Then as you were performing it, did it change at all?

Jamie Clayton: David and I had a lot of discussions about what her intentions would be, what she would be feeling. With every different scene, interacting with Riley, interacting with Nora, and so on, I wasn't sure even if anything that I was doing was working! As an actor,  I'm always like that, even when reading. But David would give me really interesting, amazing direction, and he did from the moment we met in a callback, which is why I wanted to work with him. And I wasn't sure, with all the prosthetics on the scene's context, if any of it was actually reading. But I remember there were moments when he would come up when we would do a take, and he would come up to me, saying, "Oh my God, that's really working. Let's do more of that."

Did you have a lot of experience with the Barker material going into this?

Clayton: I did not, no. I watched the first Hellraiser film the night before I auditioned just to give myself an idea of the universe, the characters, and the world. And I was incredibly blown away with how sexy it was. I had no idea that it was so sexy and so queer. And I knew about Clive and his background, but I didn't know that he wrote the film, how about half his time spent in a really intense club in New York, I think. So I found all of that very intriguing, very right up my alley.

David, how much experience did you have with the Barker material going into this?

David Bruckner: I have been a Hellraiser fan for a long time. Hellraiser 3 was my gateway drug; it found me in the nineties as a kid. It was the first time I experienced…someone has described it as graduate-level horror, and I think that is appropriate. The more I dug into it, the more I loved it. So I think it was really revered material for me when I was a teenager. And I read The Hellbound Heart actually two years ago. But yeah, I've studied all the films, and we took a little bit from everything. You know, it's a lot to expand on.

Hellraiser is one of the longest-running franchises in horror. Was it always your intention to re-imagine it like this when you came on the project?

Bruckner: When I came on board in April 2020, there was already a script. So there were some deviations from what I thought would qualify as canon at that time. Just stepping back and kind of taking a snapshot of where the franchise was and knowing that we were going to go in a different direction where the Hell Priest was concerned, it just felt appropriate to allow ourselves some measure of reinvention. And I think for me as well; it was a question of how we best demonstrate our reverence for the material that has come before us. It's not always the best thing to try to emulate something, especially something as sacred as Hellraiser. The idea was to allow ourselves to run with it a little bit and follow our passions and put up something that's a reinvention to some degree, maybe only with the designs, maybe a little bit of an update with the mythology, but that the conversation that we're having with the material should be very much in the spirit of Hellraiser, through and through.

How important to you was keeping everything practical?

Bruckner: That was absolutely essential to us. Not only is Hellraiser celebrated for its practical work, but also I'm a big believer that horror, more than any other genre, benefits from doing it for real. There's something about that extra effort that really invites you into the world that I think you need when dealing with concepts of fear, revulsion, and terror. You've got to believe it. So I think the artists that came before us threw down the gauntlet, followed in their footsteps as best we could, and made this as practical a horror film as we can muster.

Jamie, are you going to continue working in the horror genre? Because you certainly have a knack for it. 

Clayton: Listen, I want to do anything that anybody will let me do with cool people that are dope [Laughs].

Taking the priest out of it, which was your favorite Cenobite design in the production? 

Bruckner: Well, I kind of feel like they are all our children. It's a really tough question. I was joking that I went through a phase with each of them. I think they're all beautiful. They're all beautifully repulsive. It's challenging to say…

Clayton: I will have dinner with each and everyone [Laughs]

Personally, I thought, besides The Priest, that Chatterer was an exceptionally well-done design. 

Bruckner: Thank you. He's beautiful, isn't he? [Laughs]

The other thing I want to talk about was the puzzle box itself. Did either of you get to keep one?

Clayton: David just gave me one!

What was it like adding more mythology just to the puzzle box itself? It's such an iconic piece of horror paraphernalia. 

Bruckner: Yeah, the six configurations were something that was in the script when I came on board, and I was always excited by the idea conceptually and what it would mean to expand the franchise and provide a fresh conversation about the pursuit of ideas from that. It also was just a delectable creative challenge, and most of the transformations are practical or partially practical. There are real puzzles to be solved. It's a tactile, interactive series of objects. I think we had something like 30 or 40 boxes in various states of transformation at the end.

If given the opportunity to jump back into this universe, would you want to do more of a prequel to Cenobites, or would you want to continue pushing the story forward? 

Bruckner: No idea. I think there's just so many different directions you can go in with Hellraiser. So we have barely scratched the surface with this film at this point. But yeah, given the right story and a path forward that makes sense, I would love to play in this world again.

Hellraiser is now streaming on Hulu. Go watch it.

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