When it comes to the biggest and best horror films of the last 40 years, there are definitely a few movies and villains that stand out from the crowd. Freddy Krueger and Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason from Friday the 13th, and then there are some question marks as to who slides into the slots in the top five biggest and baddest of the era. Certainly, Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre is right up there. Although he might actually be considered to be from the previous era.
Actually, one of the biggest and baddest villains from the 1980s and 1990s horror movies is someone that people often forget when they're ticking off their favorite monsters. However, when they are reminded of Pinhead, he rather quickly joins the discussion for a number of different reasons. Not the least of which is that this particular character isn't like Freddy and his cartoonish joy of killing. Nor is he the big dumb lummox that is Jason Voorhees. He's quite erudite in his own way. He's someone who has a personality. He's someone imbued with intelligence. And he's among the most monstrous of the group because he's not going to just kill his victims right away.
Pinhead has his own little corner of the horror film genre precisely because he doesn't really fit into a grouping of the rest. So who exactly is this particular character and where did he come from? It turns out that his backstory is also one of the most interesting in the genre because when he got his start, he was mostly a normal person who took a very wrong turn at some point. Now, he spends his existence helping others take the same kinds of wrong turns. It's also one of the reasons he's become as iconic as he has, especially to those who are truly horror movie fans.
How Pinhead Got His Start
The man-monster that would eventually become Pinhead got his start in the first Hellraiser movie. Because he became the man with the needles in his face, he was known as Elliott Spencer. He was a British captain in the armed forces once upon a time, tho he became disillusioned with life and humanity during his experiences during World War I. That disillusionment led him to summon a demonic race known as the Cenobites.
This particular group of monsters are people who were once relatively normal until they died and went to hell. Once there, they devoted their afterlife to pain and sadomasochism. Once Spencer was able to summon the group to him, he was able to become one of them. At some point, he also became known as the Hell Priest and became the leader of the Cenobites. There is even some lore behind the role of Pinhead's hell priest. Some of the canon that was created both in the Hellraiser movies and the accompanying comic books imply that Spencer was not the first Hell Priest. He also may not be the last. If he ever decides to leave the Cenobites or is somehow destroyed, there will be another Hell Priest to take his place.
Pinhead Through The Years
It's important to note that, unlike Jason or Freddy, Pinhead is not really the monster's name. In fact, he wasn't known by that moniker for quite a while. In the first Hellraiser, he didn't really have a name, or at least it wasn't really said in a way that caught on with fans of the film. In fact, over the years, he's gone by a number of different names, all coming before the one that's really stuck with the viewing public. Outside of Spencer, which isn't known to most of the characters in the movies, he carried the name of Hell Priest. He's also simply been referred to as Lead Cenobite, as well as the Pope of Hell, the Engineer, and perhaps the most ... chilling name he's gone by is The Cold Man.
It wasn't until the third Hellraiser movie that the character was officially called by Pinhead. There was some foreshadowing that Clive Barker and the rest of the people behind the films were embracing the name that fans of the series had already dubbed him. It was hard not for him to earn the name, considering his appearance. Quite frankly, the man looked like he had a pin cushion on top of this neck. It didn't help that not only did he have needles poking out of what seemed like every inch of his face, but there were also lines drawn into his skin. Or rather, they were carved into his skin. it wasn't much of a leap for fans of the films to call him Pinhead, especially considering that the movies didn't really give him a name that could stick very easily.
While Pinhead was first referred to as Pinhead in Hellraiser 2 in the credits, Hellraiser 3 is when he officially started going by that name, even if it was a bit of a derogatory name handed to him by one of his eventual victims. It was later established by Barker that the demonic presence who thought of himself as the Hell Priest didn't actually like the nickname. In fact, there are several books and comics that were supposed to go along with the movie franchise that showed the creature getting quite angry whenever anyone referred to him by the name. It should surprise no one that Pinhead turned out to be someone that it wasn't smart to anger.
One of the most interesting things about one of the biggest baddies in horror movies is that he wasn't the same kind of irredeemable monster that so many other villains of the day were. At one point, the man who was once Elliot Spencer finds his humanity again. After years of leading the Cenobites, Pinhead had mostly become a cruel and depraved creature, but he does get his soul back at one point. This particular turn allows him to show once again there's a bit of separation between the Hellraiser character and so many of the other popular "big bads" of that era.