Is This the New Pinhead from the Hellraiser Remake?

I have always had strong beliefs that the design for Pinhead (courtesy of creator Clive Barker and also Geoff Portass, the first Pinhead makeup artist) is a brilliantly conceived and executed piece of character prosthetic work, brought to life like no one else could by actor Doug Bradley. I hung my head and sighed, "They just don't get it, do they?" I looked up at the full-size figure of Doug in the makeup in my studio and said to my guys, "Look, it's perfect, how and why would you want to 'reimagine' that?"

I headed to my office annoyed, angry and pissed off. A couple of days later, one of my crew from Two Hours in the Dark approached me and asked me, "If you had to redesign a new, more hardcore Pinhead-what would you do?"

"But, I wouldn't; it's perfect..."

He interrupted. "But if you had to, gun-at-your-wife's-head type of thing...what would you do?"

I thought about it, and then the reality of the situation hit me. If I didn't redesign it, someone out there probably would. And even though I have been involved with HELLRAISER since 1993, it's no guarantee I would be invited back for the possible remake. Here was talk of French directors and, hey, that probably means French makeup FX designers, right?

I figured, I'm damned if I do and damned if I don't, I may as well at least try to create something, throw my version out there to see if it sticks. At the very least, it might end up on YouTube and people would know that I tried. Maybe tried and failed, but at least tried. So we embarked on "Project Angel: Recreating an Icon."

My design idea was to create something that still felt like Pinhead but that stepped away from the "order" of the original design, something that was more painful, more chaotic. Several times over the years, Clive has approached me on various Hellraiser sets and commented that the makeup looked very "clean" and that it had lost some of "the decay, the filth." I decided to amp up the dirtiness of Pinhead's visage, make it more self-inflicted, bloodier and more brutal.

I still wanted to use pins, and so I set about creating new versions: square-shafted pins/nails with square heads, very rusted and almost handmade, like miniature railroad spikes. Then I roughed out the sculpt on a bust of Mike Regan (one of my crew), basically a layer of clay all over with a crisscross of intersecting gashes that were deep. Very deep.

Will I be involved in the Hellraiser redux? Truthfully, I have no idea. Maybe I will be deemed "too close to the material," maybe they will want a "fresh take," but maybe they will realize that as well as a makeup FX designer, I am a fan, and more than that a champion of the Hellraiser mythos.