On one of my favorite horror movies.

In honor of Halloween, I'd like to discuss one of my favorite horror movies.
While "Hellraiser," written and directed by Clive Barker, may have always been cinematically under-appreciated by most, I consider it a work of genius.  "Hellraiser," released in 1987 from New World Pictures and now hailed as a cult classic, is a horror picture I have loved for years.  It's the kind of existentialist fright-film that has been done the right way by Barker.
I say "existentialist" because the story is all about the borderline between pure pleasure and pure pain blurring, on an inter-dimensional scale.  It has to do with Larry and Julia moving into the house once resided in by Larry's brother Frank, who—little do they know—has gone out in a horrific way, thanks to an ominous puzzle box he sacrificed perhaps his soul, but definitely his flesh, to.  Later, courtesy of Larry losing blood in a moving accident, Frank is partially resurrected...and that's when things really start getting weird, and slick.  Especially when you consider Julia and Frank had been romantically partial to one another...and then there's Larry's young-adult daughter, Kirsty, and...of course...the CENOBITES.
While its sequels have mainly gotten a bum rap, the original "Hellraiser" is truly awesome.  It's a positive mark of Clive Barker's admirably demonic intellect, and frames well how his mind works, pondering carnal desires and how they relate to the human spirit, and to the concepts of afterlife too, and how that makes for a mind-blowing fright story.  The main Cenobite in the movie has become legendary as well, with the frame of pins embedded in his head and his horrifically rasping voice ("The box.  You opened it.  We came").  As horror goes, "Hellraiser" definitely one-ups in intelligence all the old slasher venues of the 1980s, taking fright-cinema in a new and imaginative direction for its time.  There wasn't anything like it from Barker until 1990's "Nightbreed," based on his novel Cabal.  I'd recommend "Hellraiser" to any modern horror connoisseurs, not least for the pin-faced main Cenobite's most memorable line in the whole picture, as a warning against disobedience of his kind: "WE'LL TEAR YOUR SOUL APART!"