There have been some incredible, innovative horror movies made in the past ten or fifteen years (along with plenty of forgettable ones and some truly godawful ones), so it's a little too easy to forget how bad the vast majority of horror movies used to be. A movie like “Hellraiser,” which I would now grade as a B, got a solid A from me when I first saw it.

Why? Because the mythology of the cenobites (in Clive Barker's mythos, a race of beings that can grant ultimate pleasure and ultimate pain in the same moment, making them “angels to some, demons to others”) is a creative and very welcome departure from the more typical semi-Christian pseudo-theology of so many horror movies. Barker's conception of horror is more poetic. The actual meaning of the word “cenobite” is “a monk who lives in a community” as opposed to a hermit. I'm not sure what this says about the movie, if anything, but there is something vaguely monastic about Pinhead and his brethren, despite their hedonistic nature.

The movie is not truly on the same level as the very best horror films out there, because Barker's fascination with sadomasochistic sexuality seems mundane and prosaic on some level. We are told the cenobites are explorers of consciousness, but they don't come across that way if you pay attention to what they're saying. They come across as demonic perverts playing ever-more-elaborate sex games.

This is not to say they aren't creepy, because they are. Pinhead's one-liners alone are worth the price of the movie. It's just that there have been some fascinating developments in horror cinema since this movie was made, so it hasn't aged as well as it should have. This may be why I find myself in the unusual position of looking forward to the remake.