Hellraiser

Hellraiser began with Clive Barker's 1987 film and the now-iconic image of a puzzle box that, once solved, summons the Cenobites, otherworldly beings who treat agony and ecstasy as the same thing. The original and its first sequel built a genuinely strange mythology around desire, pain, and a hell you choose to open, anchored by the lead Cenobite who became one of horror's enduring faces.

The franchise sprawls across eleven films, a 2022 reboot, and an upcoming first-person survival-horror game built around the same box. The quality curve is steep: the early entries are inventive and disturbing, while many of the later direct-to-video sequels strain to attach the Cenobites to unrelated scripts. The core idea, a box that grants what you most want at a terrible price, remains the reason it endures.

The Hellraiser franchise spans 1 games, 11 movies in the CrossBinge catalog.