Warning: This article contains spoilers for Hellraiser: Revival.
The first five minutes of Hellraiser: Revival will make your eyebrows high-five the ceiling. It opens with a BDSM-flavored sex scene complete with piercing and blood and a veritable buffet of sex toys scattered around the room, then evolves into a gory example of what hooks and chains can do to flesh. If you're sweet and innocent you might want to clutch some pearls, but to Clive Barker fans like me it's a signal that Revival is committing to the spirit of the author and director’s sexy subversion rather than watering it down. And I'm not an easy woman to please. The original Hellraiser movie rewired my brain when I saw it as a teenager (yes, I have a therapist), and Barker's Books of Blood volumes are in my top five reads of all time. I was bracing for disappointment, but that opening proved that Revival wasn't going to shy away from the body horror or sex that runs through Barker's work. The Hellraiser world is one of horrible and hedonistic extremes, so trying to avoid either would be like trying to swap Beyond Meat patties for prime rib. And the deeper I got into Hellraiser: Revival, the clearer it became that the game's understanding of those extremes went beyond pure sex and gore.
Expanding on any existing fiction, especially one as iconic as the Hellraiser series, is a challenge for anyone. Luckily, developer Saber Interactive was able to work with its creator directly, with Nenad Tomic, Revival’s executive producer, telling Xbox Wire that Barker was "deeply involved with the game from the very beginning" and shaped everything from "visual style and story motifs to the lore and character personalities." From a player experience perspective, it's key that the game stars the OG Pinhead, Doug Bradley, because no one wants a bad impersonator ruining the party.
Some parallels are obvious. Saber Interactive has explicitly said that Revival’s protagonist, Aidan, was inspired by Julia from Barker’s novella The Hellbound Heart and its film adaptation, Hellraiser, and you can see the game playing with the same themes of obsessive attachment, sexual need, and total simp behavior. Julia is willing to act as a honey trap to secure victims for her oozing lover, while Aidan is ready to make a deal with Pinhead and then go on a killing spree to bring back his girl. It's at once beautiful and twisted, and if nothing else a step up from a man who rolls his eyes when you ask him to share his fries. Never settle, ladies.
"Like Julia, Aidan is a character experiencing a fundamental dissatisfaction with life,” Antony De Fault, Hellraiser: Revival’s narrative director, tells me. “His heart yearns for feelings of purpose and vitality, and like Julia, the object of that fixation is a person with an even deeper dissatisfaction, who accelerates his self-destructive tendencies. In Aidan’s case, that’s his girlfriend Sunny.
"The most significant difference between the two is that Julia has suppressed her yearning for a long time, attempting to play the ‘good housewife,' whereas Aidan has pursued it,” De Fault continues. “This history of troublemaking and criminality makes him more worldly, and in particular, more equipped for violence.
"This was a deliberate departure from Julia’s mold, since Aidan is a player character in an FPS horror game. We wanted to give the player a variety of gameplay experiences, which included stealth, exploration, and enemies you can’t directly fight (the experiences of Kirsty in the movies), but also ‘game-y’ experiences like combat challenges and resource management. For those, a more competent character like Aidan made sense."
Throughout Hellraiser: Revival’s story, we get to see flashbacks of Sunny and Aidan’s relationship and better understand how a devotion strong enough to send you into the Labyrinth, the Cenobites’ hellish dimension ruled by Leviathan, develops. The ties that bind you need to be stronger than meeting at a work Christmas party and sharing a love of Netflix reality shows for that sort of errand. Aidan was a drug addict, now Sunny is his fix – she changed his life and he's not sure what trying to go on without her would even look like. We also get a little glimpse at what happens when only one half of a couple is on board with worshipping at the altar of pleasure and pain thanks to a couple called Sean and Charlotte, whose story we learn through letters scattered around the world. Spoiler: It is not a happy ending.
سەرچاوەی فەرمی بە زمانی ئینگلیزی: https://www.ign.com/articles/it-was-an-unofficial-goal-of-the-team-to-be-banned-unrated-or-restricted-how-hellraiser-revival-expands-cenobite-lore-while-staying-true-to-clive-barker
