What These Hellraiser Villains Look Like Out Of Costume

This article contains references to horror scenes and imagery which some readers may find disturbing.

In 1986, horror writer Clive Barker released the novella, "The Hellbound Heart." A year later he wrote and directed the film adaptation of his fearsome fable, and launched a movie franchise in doing so. The deeply unsettling tale was about a group of pain-obsessed tormenters from Hell who are released from a mysterious puzzle box called The Lament Configuration. These monsters are known as Cenobites, and while they come in a variety of shapes and sizes, they all have one common goal: taking masochistic and sadistic pleasure in eternal torture. As an emotional Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) is told by the tale's Lead Cenobite, Pinhead, "No tears, please. It's a waste of good suffering."

While the series is known for its gruesome gore effects and horrifying prosthetic makeup, not all of its villains are as frightening to look at in real life as their characters are on screen. In fact, some of the faces behind the monsters are even quite attractive. Trust us, you're gonna want to know the Hellraiser villains who are gorgeous in real life. Read on, if you dare, because we have such sights to show you ...

Even though Pinhead is the iconic villain from the "Hellraiser" franchise, Frank Cotton is actually the main monster from the first film. When he discovers and unlocks The Lament Configuration, he is subsequently tortured by the Cenobites. In one of the film's most frightening sequences, his bones, veins, muscles, and flesh re-stitch themselves into a grotesque, skinned shell of a man whose horrifying appearance is sure to terrify viewers. For the rest of the film, he goes on a rampage, clawing his way back to life by killing and feasting upon other people.

In real life, actor Sean Chapman is certifiably handsome. Early on in the movie, prior to Frank's gory transformation, "Hellraiser" shows Chapman to be an attractive man with a strong jawline and glorious 80s-hunk hair. He was even included in a reader-based bracket battle to pick the best-looking 80s Horror Hunk on the film site Not My Mess. Sadly, he didn't win the top honor.

Years later, Chapman reflected on the carnal power of the film's BDSM-influenced scenes. "The horror is based in sexual and erotic needs and I think it explores those themes very powerfully," he noted to Spooky Isles. "People always want to talk about that movie; everyone has a response to it. I never grow tired of it, it was a pleasure to work on."

In addition to the iconic Pinhead, the original "Hellraiser" features a number of monstrous villains, including the Cenobite known as Butterball. The character is renowned for his uncomfortably-moist flesh, bulging bald forehead, sharp teeth and, we must admit, a pair of pretty cool sunglasses. Sure, Butterball looks stylish, but the shades also serve a purpose: hiding his eyes, which have been stitched shut. If that's not enough he also has a gaping wound down the middle of his prodigious belly.

Unlike Butterball, actor Simon Bamford is quite handsome, sporting some charming dimples you'd never get to see buried under his disgusting movie prosthetics. In 2017, the actor shared throwback photos on his Facebook (via Bloody Disgusting) depicting makeup tests and adding some pages of the original script. Originally, the Butterball Cenobite had lines, but he doesn't get to speak in the resulting film — potentially because of the restrictive nature of the prosthetics involved.

"Clive initially said there would be a little makeup involved for Butterball," Bamford recalled to Pop Horror. "The reality was similar to having several pillows taped tightly over my entire head. No eye holes for vision, no ear holes for sound and no nose holes." As a result, he experienced panic attacks and claustrophobia, with the actor noting he had an unpleasant time filming "Hellraiser" and its sequel. Regardless, in 1990 he worked with Clive Barker again on "Nightbreed," and the actor was allowed to be makeup-free and fresh-faced.

Though Grace Kirby played the Female Cenobite in the first "Hellraiser" film, she didn't return for the sequel, "Hellbound: Hellraiser II." Instead, the Female Cenobite in the second film was played by Barbie Wilde, although the character was no less upsetting. The character is bald with a prominent ridge on her head framing deep-set, eyebrow-less eyes. She has a pin through her nose and what seems to be two wires implanted deep in her hollow cheeks. And, of course, the skin on her throat is also peeled back, exposing her esophagus inside. Blecch.

In real life, the Canadian actor is beautiful, with an almost Marlene Dietrich-esque touch of old-school Hollywood glamor to her. On her Instagram, she shares photos of classic film stars like Claudette Colbert alongside selfies of her cool look. These days she wears her hair in a chic shock of white that pairs well with her signature red lip.

She told Pop Horror that she adores her horror legacy. "I love going to conventions, meeting the fans, and hooking up with my Cenobite chums," she reflected. "... It's like the intervening years never existed. We all have a great time with each other." She also frequently shares behind-the-scenes photos from "Hellraiser II" on Instagram, showing her legions of still-devoted fans what it was like to have the Female Cenobite's makeup and prosthetics applied to her face.

In "Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth," one of the film's main monsters starts the movie as a human named Terri. The character is a down-on-her-luck woman with an ex-boyfriend so terrible he tries to feed her to Pinhead. Instead, she becomes entranced by the power of the puzzle box and is transformed by the Hell Priest into what fans call a Pseudo-Cenobite. When Terri becomes the Dreamer Cenobite, she looks reliably horrifying. Her face features an almost makeshift facelift wherein her bald skin is pulled back by visible hooks, and a metal rod protrudes from her bleeding throat. Still, the monster at least looked chic, finishing her frightening facade with a set of red leather gloves fashioned from her own exposed muscles.

In real life, the character is played by the very attractive Paula Marshall — an actor so beautiful that she played the romantic lead in the single-season Jeremy Piven-starring 90s sitcom "Cupid," depicting a psychologist who was an expert on love. While Marshall looks back fondly on her time in Hell — the "Hellraiser" franchise, that is, not network television — she told the "Happy Horror Time" podcast that the Cenobite makeup process took around two hours, and she wasn't too keen on the result. "It was gross ... I'm very vain." she explained. Thankfully, she noted Terri's time as a monster was brief, proudly noting, "Most of the movie, I looked gorgeous."

In "Hellraiser III: Hell on Earth," Terri's hideous ex-boyfriend, J.P. Monroe, works at a nightclub. Naturally, once Pinhead is released into the joint he makes it his business to terrorize its staff and patrons. One such staff member is the club's DJ, who is turned into a Pseudo-Cenobite. The creature he becomes is fittingly full of techno-panic for a film released in 1992. He makes electronic beeping noises when he moves, CDs are embedded in his head, and his mouth is merely a slash across his face. In a charmingly silly sort of way, he's frightening to look at — or as frightening as a monster who fires CDs as weapons can be, anyway.

In real life, CD the DJ is played by Brent Bolthouse, an incredibly handsome dude who looks nothing like his monstrous counterpart. Curiously, the guy is an entrepreneur and restaurateur who appeared on five seasons of "The Hills" — you might remember him from having famously fired Heidi Montag from his events company. He is perhaps now best known as the proprietor of The Bungalow in Santa Monica. He frequently shares pictures of his family life on Instagram, including his wife and kid. 

He is also involved in running the Neon Carnival at Coachella. When the event returned after several years off due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Bolthouse told "On Air with Ryan Seacrest," "We're so excited to be back."

"Hellraiser: Bloodline" introduced a new monster, Angelique – the Princess of Hell who became a Cenobite and served Pinhead. To do so, she rocked a bald and eyebrow-less skull, peeled back and bloody, with her shoulders stitched to her head by painful-looking hooks. In other words, she's a fright. So it's surprising to discover that her design was actually inspired by a beloved Whoopi Goldberg classic. Gary Tunnicliffe, the makeup artist who designed Pinhead among numerous other villains, explained his strange point of reference to Back to the Movies. "I have this thing for designing sexy Cenobites," he said. "'Sister Act' was on TV. And I saw these nuns with the wimple on and I thought, 'How cool would it be if it was like wires peeling down skin instead and she's got an exposed skull!'" ... Sure.

When she's not playing a Hell Princess, actor Valentina Vargas is a very striking woman. The Chilean-born star has also been in films like "The Name of the Rose" and a movie called "The Tigress," a German erotic thriller where she played a sex worker. The star still posts regularly about Angelique on her Instagram, and she is happy to attend horror conventions where she meets fans of her work in the "Hellraiser" franchise. She told The Horror Nerd that the makeup for the character took five hours. "It was not easy," she recalled. "...We had strikes, we had fires, we had a lot of dark forces going through the movie."

Each "Hellraiser" entry tries to up the Cenobite ante, and in "Hellraiser V: Inferno," that included the addition of the fearsome Cenobite duo known as the Wire Twins. As noted by Screen Rant, the twins were once a model and her jealous sibling before being transformed into Leviathon's sisters of tormented pleasures. As their name would suggest, the pair have painful-looking wires digging into their faces along with symbols carved onto their cheeks and hollowed-out, empty eye sockets.

The actor who played one of the Wire Twins is named Patricia Kara. In addition to her other acting work, Kara was a briefcase model on 226 episodes of "Deal or No Deal," alongside future well-known names like former game show glamour girl, Meghan Markle, and "Selling Sunset" star Amanza Smith. She even provided the model for a figure based on herself in the 2006 "Deal or No Deal" video game.

Kara frequently pays homage to her "Hellraiser" past online, including sharing one snap of herself holding up her own action figure on Twitter. "Yep, that's me!" she wrote alongside the photo. She added the hashtag, "#Pinhead's sister." While many women were briefcase models, not many people have that claim to fame.

"Hellraiser: Hellseeker" is a confusing film that sees Kirsty (Ashley Laurence) from the first two films turned into a serial killer while making a deal with Pinhead — a cheating husband is involved and it's a whole thing. One of the new Cenobites introduced in this installment is Stitch — a monster who slyly seduces and kills Kirsty's duplicitous hubby during a hellbound hallucination. The character's disfigured appearance was instantly iconic for fans, sparking, among other things, an action figure.

Though the character's face is covered in a scary amount of gauze-like stretched skin, the actor who plays her is Sarah Hayward, a woman who is much better-looking than her Cenobite counterpart, to say the least. In the book "Welcome to Our Nightmares," Hayward reflected on her character's horrific looks. "We spent hours deciding how to make my skin look distressed," she recalled. "One of the most challenging things was when I saw my costume headpiece, I realized I was going to feel claustrophobic." The costume was so intense, in fact, that Hayward had to seek therapy to handle her newfound fear. "Just know that you can still breathe," her therapist told her, and gave her breathing techniques with which to take her mind off the confines of the prosthetics.

In 2010, Doug Bradley announced that he would not be reprising his role as Pinhead for the then-upcoming ninth installment of the franchise, titled "Hellraiser: Revelations." The iconic horror star criticized the alleged shoddy nature of the production, telling Dread Central, "The ink is barely dry on the script, and it is scheduled to be in front of the cameras in two weeks time and in the can by the middle of next month. The minuscule shooting schedule is more than matched by the budget." Series creator Clive Barker was upset with the resulting film, going a step further than Bradley with a profanity-filled rant about the flick on Twitter. "​​I have NOTHING to do with the f***in' thing," he wrote. "If they claim its from the mind of Clive Barker, it's a lie. It's not even from my butt-hole."

Because Bradley had refused to participate in the project, the role of Pinhead was instead played by Stephan Smith Collins. Although the Hell Priest looked much the same as the character had looked for the past two decades — pins in his head holding together a grid of flesh — Smith Collins himself is much easier on the eyes than his character. However, the actor's off-screen handsomeness certainly didn't help sell the movie, and it received largely negative reviews, per Rotten Tomatoes.

Stephan Smith Collins wasn't the only one adopting a human pin-cushion look in "Hellraiser: Relevations." Nick Eversman also played a similar-looking villain called Pseudo-Pinhead in the unpopular movie. He spends most of the flick as an unpleasant human named Steven Craven, who gets murdered by his friend and transformed into a Cenobite. For his Hell-form, he becomes a much grimier-looking version of Pinhead with criss-crossing slices of skin on his skull held on by nails that jut out from his head.

When he's not playing a devoted follower of the Hell Priest, Eversman has enjoyed a solid and steady career as a romantic interest, likely thanks to his real-life attractiveness. In "The DUFF," he played Toby, the crush of Mae Whitman's character in the teen comedy,  and he was one of the leads in James Franco's remake of iconic made-for-TV romance-horror movie "Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?"

In 2013, Eversman clapped back at "Hellraiser: Revelations'" haters on Twitter. When a user casually said that the much-maligned sequel made him lose faith in humanity, the actor responded, "I'm sorry, but did you watch Hellraiser to gain faith in humanity? #facepalm." 

"Hellraiser: Revelations" was not particularly well-received, to say the least, but it offered yet another iteration of the iconic Female Cenobite who serves as Pinhead's right-hand woman. This time, the Female Cenobite was patterned after the member of her brethren known as the Chatterer. Her skin is peeled back with hooks and wires to reveal a terrifying grin full of chattering teeth that threaten to bite and tear at any poor soul who gets close enough. She also wears a restrictive collar around her neck, showing off her subservient position to the Hell Priest. Naturally, her eyes are missing.

Off screen, the actor behind the monster makeup is Jolene Anderson, a perfectly pretty woman whose short, vibrant red hair stands in contrast to her "Hellraiser" character's trademark bald skull. She has guest starred on shows like "Agents of SHIELD" and "The Affair," and she frequently does voice acting, including voiceover dubs. She also works as a motion-capture artist for video games such as "Rise of the Tomb Raider" and "Resident Evil," according to National Records Studios. So just as in "Hellraiser: Revelations," she's used to doing her best work in an unseen way.

Though "Hellraiser: Judgment" was better received than its predecessor, it still only garnered a 40% Fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes – but hey, that means nearly half of its critics liked it. Turning the franchise into something of a detective story, the film is more about the hunt for a serial killer than it is the story of Pinhead and pals damning a soul to Hell. Still, there are indeed new Cenobites for fans to latch on to, including the Stitch Twins, two monsters whose appearance is reminiscent of Stitch from "Hellraiser: Hellseeker." Like the previous version of the character, their faces are stretched and sewn together in a grotesque approximation of a face.

Actor and filmmaker Jilly Blundell played one of the Stitch Twins in the 2018 film, as well as The Surgeon, a masked character who functions almost as a bureaucrat for eternal suffering. When she's not buried under all that makeup and rubber, the actor is much better-looking than her character. She frequently shares snaps of her set life on Instagram, showing the actor and stuntwoman working on films like Disney+ musical hit "Better Nate Than Ever" and "Children of the Corn: Runaway." In 2018, she posted a picture of herself in her Surgeon costume alongside the caption, "Call me an angry elf, one more time!!!" The actor is surprisingly small in size with her Instagram bio reading, "4'11 is the new 5'7." 

Once there had been a movie filmed without him, Doug Bradley was out and he didn't return for "Hellraiser: Judgment," either. Still, neither did his replacement,  Stephan Smith Collins. Instead, Paul T. Taylor took over the role of Pinhead in "Hellraiser: Judgment," becoming the third actor to play the character. The version of the character in this, the tenth "Hellraiser" film, returns the fearsome creature's appearance to the bloodied, stuck-together, skin-square vision of the Hell Priest's flesh, making him frightening again.

In real life, Taylor is much more handsome than his horror-movie villain would suggest. In selfies shared on his Instagram, he looks like a nice guy, not the sort of demon who would trap you for eternity in the Labyrinth. Unlike many of the people behind "Hellraiser" villains, Taylor has had a prolific career in a variety of films, and not just within the horror genre ... which perhaps tells you something about his fairly wholesome and attractive looks.

In an interview with Dread Central, the actor said that he got great feedback for his version of the character, which was a huge relief. "I'm getting some really good reactions from the hardcore fans, and that was one of the major things that I was worried about, and I honestly couldn't be happier," he said.

In Hulu's "Hellraiser" reboot, "Sense8" star and model Jamie Clayton gender flipped Pinhead. The character is described as androgynous in original writer/director Clive Barker's novel "The Hell Bound Heart," but the Hell Priest was played by Doug Bradley in the first film, and he has been coded as male ever since. Not anymore! At a screening of the film in Los Angeles, Barker told the crowd (via Twitter),  "Jamie looks like the Queen of Hell. She's not Doug's stand-in." He added, "What she is, is a whole new beast."

The "Hellraiser" franchise has always been about the thrilling discomfort that lives at the intersection of pain and pleasure, and in crafting her take on the Hell Priest, Clayton brought her own touch to the role. "There's a sensuality to her," she explained to Bloody Disgusting. "There's a grace, there's a beauty. And a hunger and a desire."

When she's not wearing the villain's iconic pins, Clayton has appeared in such television shows as "The L Word: Generation Q." She also appeared in Netflix's documentary "Disclosure," discussing her experience as a trans woman who acts. "Having Nomi [her 'Sense8' character] be so many people's 'First Time I Saw Me,' it's a thrill," she said. "I'm so proud that I've been able to bring her to life in a way that resonates with people."