By Vexen Crabtree 2005 Jul 20
"Hellraisers One and Two feel like a spiritual home for me; like a big black duvet of comfort and familiarity. Panning up to see the glory of Leviathan is my unholy equivalent of religious ecstasy."
I love the diatribes pinhead gives on pain, humanity, suffering, the meaning of pleasure and pain; his teachings, beautiful words and priestly demeanor are what make the films, for me. I love the demonology of Hellraiser 1, 2 and Hellraiser: Inferno; learning how the demons occasionally turn a Human into cenobite: A being overloaded with such pleasure that it is hellishly overwhelming.
I don't see myself as pinhead, but as one of the Human demonologists who, throughout the series, are the individuals who study pinhead and who dream of the box.
The films are about indulgence. If you indulge, without foresight and without restraint, you will destroy yourself, and the cenobites are the tools of that destruction, and the methods by which you learn that it is true: Human desire has sensible restraints that shouldn't be crossed!
The Church of Satan states that "Satan represents indulgence, instead of abstinence!" as its First Satanic Statement. In this respect, pinhead and the desires that unleash him are Satanic. But, the sensible pro-Human refrain is that "the difference between indulgence and compulsion. Indulgence can be controlled, compulsion controls", pinhead is the story of people who cross this line and destroy themselves and those around them. Satanism, along with the teachings of pinhead on desire, are the portals through which we can learn where these lines of self-destruction are, and learn to stay within them for maximum indulgence combined with graceful life, as opposed to self-destruction.