(Spycrab)

(Iceking)

“Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.” - Edgar Allan Poe

Pinhead, The Lead Cenobite and Hell’s Priest of pain and pleasure.

The Tall Man, The Lord of The Dead and Phantasmic Specter of the unknown.

For generations, humanity has always been fascinated with the workings of life and death. As life is temporary and death is forever, many choose to cherish the gift that has bestowed upon them. However, there are those who aren’t satisfied with the sights shown by the world of the living. The desire to know, to experience and to be pleased pushes them to cross the gate from the tangible to the unknown. As their mind dissipates into a shadow of its former self, they become an undead themselves. What came back wasn’t the ones who entered, nor was it human at all, it was these two stone cold monsters ready to show their new-found pleasure to the world of the living.

In a final game of pleasure and pain, can Pinhead enjoy making The Tall Man suffer and enjoy making him enjoy it? Or will The Tall Man nail the last pin to put The Hell Priest six feet under? Come, we have such sights to show you as we unravel this puzzle once and for all in this DEATH BATTLE!

Before We Start…

To get this out the way, if you don’t already know, this is a remastered version of the old blog we at CrabCave made nearly a year ago, a complete revision of both of these characters and series. This doesn’t mean the old blog is being taken down, it’s archived but this is overwriting it.

Onto the matchup itself, Hellraiser will be given its original novels by Clive Barker and the movie series. We’re also including the various comics and novels written by other writers and commercials, guidebooks, scripts, the manga adaptation of the original novel and Dead By Daylight. Pinhead and Elliot Spencer will both be analyzed, we are not exclusively looking at Elliot’s time as a cenobite but his other adventures as well. As for Phantasm, we’ll be looking at the movie series, novels, the comic and the official website for more information. However, there are issues in finding the novelization of the first film and the comic online. As it stands, we only have the first 7 chapters of the novelization available to us and the comic has thankfully been found, although it's in low quality so bear with us on that front.

As for what won’t be used, any lost Hellraiser game and drafts for novels will not be considered, nor will the remake which came out in recent years. Phantasm has a couple bits of lost media we couldn’t really find and were in a different language, so we’ve decided to scrap those too. Sorry to anyone who really wanted the Russian Phantasm X Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover to be used. For more clarification, since these series are very confusing, here’s the media lists on both.

Lastly, it should be said that both of these series are fairly abstract and not explicit in their means of storytelling, some information will have to come up to interpretation but thankfully this won’t be too big of a problem. One more thing! This blog will contain graphic violence which will be shown in gifs as well as VERY sexual topics and imagery being brought up and shown in scans, we won’t show anything directly though but Hellraiser is not for the faint of heart when it comes to its visuals, so tread carefully.

Background

Pinhead

“Pain? How dare you use that word. What you think of as pain is only a shadow. Pain has a face. Allow me to show it to you. Gentlemen, I… Am… Pain.”

In the genesis of our creation, God and The Angels had granted mankind with a beautiful gift, the ability to dream. To aspire to the greatest lengths possible and to either make a difference in the world or enjoy the world for themselves, all before stepping into the pearly gates. But just as easily as humans could use dreams for greatness, dreams could be turned into wicked desires that go against the divine order. Thus, sin was born from man’s cravings of feeling something new beyond what the prison of flesh called their bodies could give them, a place where they could give into their perversions and be the animalistic beast they think man was made to be.

But their twisted salvation came in the form of a puzzle box called The Lament Configuration, which, when solved, summoned Cenobites. Demons from the pits of Hell, but what are demons to us, angels to sinners. And the Cenobites blessing came in the form of endless years of torment and mutilation of the human body. This ancient race of entities, following the unholy ruler of Hell, The Leviathan, have had many members over the years, yet few have led let alone impacted the regions of Hell greater than their primary leader. Known by member names, Lead Cenobite, The Hell Priest, The Cold Man, The Dark Prince, but you can know him simply as Pinhead.

He’s not a fan of the name either for the record, it doesn’t exactly portray the dignity of the horror and suffering a Cenobite of his rank inflicts, and that deserves some real good respect. As before he was Pinhead, The Hell Priest’s origins started as a man known as Elliot Spencer, a soft-spoken but brave man serving as a captain for the British Army during WW1. Being the head of the pack, Elliot saw everything, every dead man and comrade in every battle. With every drop of blood he saw spilled, he slowly started to lose his faith in God and humanity as a whole. After the war had ended, the damage was done and Elliot experienced intense PTSD, not feeling that he deserved to live. To numb this pain and to give him pleasure, he searched for an object which could do the trick, The Lament Configuration, and after solving the box, he was met with both the pain and double the pleasure. He was torn apart and transfigured into a Cenobite, an agent of The Leviathan and his memories of his previous life would be wiped. He would now deliver the same masochistic suffering that he was granted onto the next pain seeking soul which would open the box.

Such souls came and went, but two particular souls arose in Frank Cotton and his niece, Kirsty Cotton. Although Frank was killed and sent to Hell for an eternity of suffering, he was eventually brought back by his brother's blood and then fully given life by his brother's wife giving him more blood. When Kirsty unintentionally called upon Pinhead and his Gash, which is the name of his group of Cenobites (it's a really bad name I know), she managed to get away from their clutches by cutting a deal to bring them their lost soul in Frank. Despite getting his soul thanks to Kirsty, the Cenobites still wished for her soul, and even after being sent to Hell by her, they would arise again at a different time desperately trying to obtain what they thought they owed. But she managed to slip away every single time. What’s weirder is the time her and Elliot spawned places, where she became a Lead Cenobite herself and Elliot went back to being a human. This was an arrangement made possible by The Leviathan itself after Pinhead cut a deal with it, saying that he would bring about much more emotions in a state having experienced every pleasure which Hell had to offer.

With his humanity back, Elliot had a plan. After looking into the history of there being other Hells with other Deities, Elliot learned of a way to obtain more power then what Hell could possibly give him, and all it took was getting the original box he opened and getting some help from an ancient demonic creature. When awakened, Elliot took his plan out on the world. By calling upon the maimed sinners from Hell onto our world, Elliot planned to recreate Earth into his own vision of what Heaven should look like, with him as its God. Unfortunately for him, this was short lived, The Leviathan had planned all this from the very moment Elliot made the deal to become human. It was just toying with him the whole time to experiment with the emotions of its favorite Priest. In fact, The Leviathan made both Elliot and Kirsty live out deluded lives in a mindscape for years. After it was all over, Elliot was forced to go back into the role of Pinhead to serve The Leviathan once more.

So let it be known, sinners rejoice and enter a world where your deepest and unholiness desires can come true at the end of a hook and chain. Let the Lead Cenobite, the Angel of Suffering, show you an endless bliss of brutality and torment which will tear your very soul apart.

The Tall Man

“Your end approaches but it is not yet. Take great care how you play. The final game now begins.”

For as long as man has walked, the universal truth and greatest mystery of our existence has been right there with us the entire time, spreading like an all-consuming virus throughout this green and blue sphere we call home. Where life goes, death follows suit with absolute eternity. While most make what they can with the precious time that we have on this planet, there are those who become infatuated with death, theorizing the real purpose as to why we are here and most importantly, what lies beyond the grave? What secrets will we know once we leave the burden of the tangible and embrace the surreal reality of the unknown?

All that was once unknown to mankind would be revealed in small towns all throughout the world, as the towns community was torn from the inside out, loved ones died, their funerals seemingly already prepared, and their caskets stolen. Above it all stood the mausoleum, where sightings of deformed monsters, remnants of the stolen corpses repurposed to terrorize the town. It must’ve been a dream, things like this didn’t exist, but the madness never stopped being real until the scarred faces of the townsman came face to face with the man behind it all. The man who would grant them the knowledge of what comes after death, but even death is no escape from him, standing 7 feet above ground ready to put you 6 feet under it, the Mortician of the undead that has been waiting for this moment, The Tall Man.

The concept of such inhuman figures breaching the boundaries of mortality may have been too much for the townsmans to comprehend, but The Tall Man’s cruel and calculating mind understands the fear he induces and he enjoys it. But even the cruel were cowardly once in their life, and in Tall Man’s case, he was once a man known as Jebediah Morningside. A kind hearted and soft-spoken Moritican from the 19th century who became a medic in the Civil War, seeing the horrors of war first hand and how easily people are killed. Fascinating him with the idea of life and death but also traumatizing him with war so much he carved the answer to it all. After the war was over, he took up being a scientist and dabbled in several formulas and practices made to test the connection between the world of the living and the world of the dead. Culminating in his greatest creation, The Dimensional Forks. These were created to be gateways in the space-time continuum, allowing for interdimensional travel, with the desire to know the unknowable in the back of his mind, Jebediah took a step in. And he came back. But he didn’t come back as normal, whatever he saw broke, making him find life as a value insufficient and death as an artform beautiful. It transformed him into a putrid and disturbing human with a new set of supernatural abilities befitted for his presence. He would become the Lord of The Dead, ruler of a legion of the undead and commander to the minds of his previous victims; he would soon attempt to conquer Earth.

He decided to start small of course, an army to combat the forces of Earth would need time and resources to build. For over 150 years he took residence in the confines of small towns all across the world, working in cemeteries to collect bodies to be turned into the Lurkers and their minds to be turned into the Sentinels. He made many go missing, arranging their own funerals and then stealing the body once the public eye was turned away. Almost everyone turned a blind eye, almost, a pair of eyes in particular threatened to thwart the Tall Man’s plan forever, Mike Pearson. Mike’s brother’s friend had recently been killed, and when he saw Tall Man lifting his grave like it was nothing into his trunk, he got others to believe him that there was something going on. With his brother, Jody, and his friend, Reggie, by his side, they would fight back against The Tall Man’s tricks until Mike woke up. Convinced that this dream was real, Mike was taken back when Reggie said that Jody had died in a car accident prior, Mike was just coping with his brother’s death. But then The Tall Man reappeared and proved that nothing was what it seemed.

This was only the beginning for Mike’s experiences with The Tall Man and the truth about what he had become. See, The Tall Man wanted an army of the undead not just for taking over the world, but also for slave labor on the fittingly dubbed Red Planet through The Dimensional Forks. It was this planet that housed The Overminds, entities that gave Tall Man the ability to exist as a vision, a collective dream that spread from person to person and manipulated their dreams. Soon, millions of people like Mike would be in comas and their dreams became very real. Tall Man had kept Mike alive for the sole reason that Mike could access one of the oldest functions a dreamer can do, that being dream reality. No joke, there is a connection with the space-time continuum allowing for dreamers to have their dreams become reality in the form of alternate universes. The Tall Man had trapped Mike within several dreams, shifting his mind to where he dreamt a reality where Tall Man won in his war against humanity, as the truth of Mike’s own existence became clear. Mike was always planned to be Tall Man’s ultimate pawn, his assistant that would make Tall Man’s dreams come true. And so they did, Tall Man took over the world by storm, tearing humanity apart with a nasty virus and destroying civilizations with oversized Sentinels. Only one man stood in his way now, that ice cream truck driving old man, Reggie. Who stuck to his promise of protecting Mike, he spent years searching for him and fighting Tall Man’s forces before taking the fight straight to him. Although sadly the series has halted beyond this point :(

We may still have many unanswered questions as to what is going on and why Tall Man is the way he is, but maybe that’s good. After all, the desire for answers to questions that were never meant to be answered for mankind is what turned a hopeful soul like Jebediah into the cold hearted overlord that is The Tall Man. Perhaps some things are better left as mere imagery, phantasms, delusions of our disorder mind. If our minds knew the truth, we’d only get the realization that the nightmare of The Tall Man is never over.

Experience & Skill

Pinhead

An explorer in the furthest regions of experience of all things pleasure and pain, Pinhead’s seen and done a lot in his lifetime. Backtracking to his life before he became a Cenobite, Elliot served in WW1 as a captain of a British Expeditionary Force participating in one of the Battle of Flanders. This experience in combat and leadership carried over to his role as Lead Cenobite, where he ruled over Hell with a cold iron fist. His order is so absolute that even the most abrasive Cenobites will follow his command without question. He led The Order of The Leviathan to combat rebellious sinners in a total war, fought other Cenobites like Alastor and James Moriarty, killed Goddesses who opposed The Leviathan, and upon taking Lucifer’s Armor, fought him evenly.

He is no ordinary Cenobite that’s for sure, he has seen and experienced every single pleasure Hell had to offer and laid waste to more lives in 2 days then most Cenobites do in a lifetime and kept on killing until he was able to drown someone in the blood of his previous victims. Hell’s warfare is very complex, involving tactics and strategy far out of mankind’s league and books of which will engrave the information in your mind. Automatically making you a skilled fighter just by the crack of a book. Pinhead became a Cenobite in the mid 1920s and remained one for 87 years before making a deal with The Leviathan for another chance at being human. Which he then used to prove his other strength, his cunning. He has obtained knowledge of artifacts and places of Hellish origins, using them to his advantage whenever he has the chance. He can also be very sneaky with his kills, avoiding being seen when in the open and picking people off one at a time from behind.

The Tall Man

We might not truly know what Jebediah saw when he stepped forth into the Dimensional Forks, but whatever it was it gave him what he asked for, answers of life and death. Jebediah before was already a genius, a Mortician who also dabbled as a scientist, he spent years studying and practicing formulas about the afterlife until he came up with his greatest invention, The Dimensional Forks. Which are literal gateways into the space-time continuum that allow him to enter alternate realities, parallel universes and earlier periods in time. Keep in mind, he designed this and made this with 19th century levels of knowledge and materials. After such knowledge broke him, all that was unknown to him in his mortal life was now known to him again, including the boundaries between life and death and reality and dreams.

Now as The Tall Man entered right at the time he left, he terrorized small towns for over 150 years, tearing them from the inside out and ravaging their graveyards. He haunted Mike’s dreams for over 51 years and eventually took this coma worldwide as he, a collective vision, moved in the minds of millions. Letting him do a full takeover of Earth and all of its military personnel in the process, performing the classic tactics of letting a virus weaken the pollution first and then send in heavy forces to finish the job. In the same film he was fighting a multidimensional battle taking place across several timelines with Reggie, a Vietnam veteran who dedicated his entire life to killing The Tall Man. Boy did he fail, because The Tall Man himself has never failed in the history of Phantasm so far, I guess when you’re over 7 feet no one can stop you.

Equipment

Pinhead

The Lament Configuration

“The box. You opened it. We came.”

Otherwise known as simply the box, The Lament Configuration is by far the most iconic aspect of Hellraiser. It acts as the means to summon Cenobites and traverse Hell itself, but its true origin is much more bizarre. Human emotion, in particular obsession, can manifest itself into reality in the form of puzzles made from parts of The Leviathan which when solved, grants Hell passage to enter our world. These puzzles can be anything from literature, music, tunnels or a puzzle box. There exist over 100,000 of these puzzles and the box is no exception, or boxes, there are still several Lament Configurations all over the world. All of which act as the embodiment of the forbidden knowledge and the user’s desire. It is much like pain or the poor in this regard. It is a concept that is always with us and cannot be completely destroyed as a result.

Origin aside, the box is incredibly powerful and can play music! Jokes aside, it's given a human solving it slowly causes a doorway from Earth to Hell but in a Cenobite’s hands it creates a portal, allowing Pinhead to freely traverse between worlds and summon Cenobite allies to his location at any time. It can shoot out chains, suck people into it and in turn send them to Hell. Pinhead can turn the box into an unsolvable and unusable diamond to stop anyone trying to send him back to Hell. Interestly enough, solving any singular box manipulates The Leviathan itself into the same positions at which the box is being reconfigured. Because of this, the box can channel The Leviathan’s power to perform crazier abilities, such as…

Empathetic Manipulation: Working on this box gives the manipulator intense feelings of depression as well as an obsession with solving it.
Perception Manipulation: The Lament Configuration on its own can amplify the senses of others.
Limited Madness Manipulation: Light shined from the box can cause insanity inflicting torment on the mind, this is very brief however and can be overcome only a few seconds afterward.
Limb Creation: No matter the size, the box can shoot out many arms and legs to pull off your own limbs, enough to kill your soul alongside the body.
Pain, Matter & Soul Manipulation: The pain the box can enable is said to actively increase molecular resonance and velocity and operate down to the subatomic level, even reaching the soul.
Lightning Manipulation & Retrocognition: By producing 100,000 (second time that number has been mentioned in this section) volts, the box can act as a time gate sending people nearby to the past of others. They aren’t able to interact with anything once there however.
Metaphysics, Space & Time Manipulation: The effects of the surge of metaphysical energy caused by the box opening has some sort of effect on the space-time continuum. What effect exactly? Well, it can stop and start up time and sliding victims across centuries of space-time in a single moment.

Cenobite Armor

While the leather gear makes for a fittingly killer look on any Cenobite, it's more useful than you’d first assume. Not only does it hold almost all of Pinhead’s handheld weapons like amputation saws, trepanning drills, small chisels and 3 silver syringes along with many more, but its exterior makes them seemingly indestructible due to being made of The Leviathan, only able to be penetrated by things also of The Leviathan such as Leviathan clad bullets. If he wants to look less like a BDSM monstrosity and more like a general, he also has the appropriate armor for such, but it unfortunately lacks his signature skirt.

Pins

As the name implies, Pinhead has quite a knack for his pins and for good reason, they are the source of his power and cannot be pulled out or removed by anyone other than himself, where he can use it as a makeshift weapon.

Hooks & Chains

Nothing quite screams a good time in Hell more than a collection of hooks and chains maiming the human body, and Pinhead is very adapted to using these chains as a main method of attack. These chains will always attack at the Hell Priest’s command and can move on their own accord without help just as efficiently, efficiency strong enough to rip into a person's body and suspend them, break through concrete, hold cars mid-air and stop and tear a train open to kill everyone inside and destroy the train. What makes them deadlier than sheer strength and speed is Pinhead’s ability to generate them from really any direction, they can suddenly burst through walls, the roof, his back, his face, your face and more.

Chains are obviously a very abundant torture tool used by Cenobites, so they are bound to have hundreds of variants differing from the standard hook chains. There have been regular chains with no hooks, chains with retractable hooks that open up after impaling to decapitate or drag their victim and likely some other versions we haven’t quite seen yet.

The Pillar Of Souls

This rectangular prison may seem like a morbidly crafted abstract piece of sculpture, and it is, but do include the fact that it was crafted in Hell. The souls of sinners are trapped within it, demonically frozen in time and space. Pinhead can summon this pillar whenever he desires, making it a dangerous finishing touch on any kill.

Harrower Sword

A magical sword he stole from the Harrowers, a group of supernaturally blessed individuals who fight the forces of Hell, Pinhead used the power of this sword to obtain a direct link with The Leviathan’s power and resources, granting him great power to smite goddesses with.

Cleaver

Moving on from his magical weapons, nothing beats a good old clever to make the most painless death extremely painful.

Knife

Sometimes you gotta keep suffering simple, which is why Pinhead has one meaty knife to cut up his opponents.

Sickle

Tied to his belt, Pinhead has a sickle he can use to not only cut someone up, but entirely in half.

Saw

Mostly a regular saw, it's useful for surgical practices, if you want to lose your bones at least.

Terrorsaw

Imagine the regular saw, but terror, more accurately with a giant and sharp chain, hooks attached to the top and a flamethrower coming out the engine. No wonder it's called the Terrorsaw.

Hooked Whip

Combining his iconic hook and chain with his freaky everything else, he has a whip to ensnare and lash at his victims.

Sledgehammer

Perfect for smashing open Lament Configurations

Gun

If you can’t tear their soul apart, then you might as well blow their brains out with a pistol.

Misc. Weapons

Hell has amassed many ancient weapons from different periods of time, weapons that pose a threat to a Cenobite, which The Order of The Leviathan uses as its main source of weaponry. Meaning both Pinhead and his army have access to an assortment of swords and axes so sharp they can cut through stone, gold and silver spears, scythes, bows, crossbows and arrows that can penetrate armor, different shape and size shields as well as literal fucking rifles and pistols with infinite ammo and the power to destroy whole buildings.

Baseball

Pain can’t be his only hobby I guess.

Santa Outfit

Open that damn box if you want presents.

The Tall Man

The Dimensional Forks

Created for the sole purpose of travelling into the unknown, The Dimensional Forks, or Spacegates for short are by far his greatest invention and have stuck with him for years. They may look like normal poles but they are gateways in the space-time continuum allowing for interdimensional travel to anywhere and any time, with these Tall Man is able to enter The Red Planet, Dreamscape, alternate realities, timelines and parallel universes within a multi- dimensional multiverse and let him travel through time as well. It does this by producing a vibration intense enough to cause a vent in reality, letting Tall Man and whoever falls victim to these gates dwell in a world between dreams and reality altogether. Speaking of which, you don’t go into these forks by choice half the time, they are able to cause a force to suck you in.

What’s worse is that these aren’t confined to any specific area, Tall Man can summon these forks to his location at any time and can spawn multiple of them at once. Bad news given that they aren’t just for travel, they provide Tall Man with more situational but very useful functions that can help out in a pinch. Such as…

Electricity & Fire Manipulation: It can let out powerful glares of lightning through its metallic structure and leave wherever it appeared in a burnt crisp.
Empathetic Manipulation: Going through the Spacegates will induce a super collision of emotions, images and dreams of everyone you’ve ever known, loved and hated twisted together into an amalgamation onto your mind.
Weather Manipulation: At the end of the original Phantasm, the Dimensional Forks being set off caused a fierce storm to form around the mausoleum that made every character struggle to withstand its winds.
Vibration, Gravity, Density & Electromagnetic Manipulation, Paralysis Inducement & Power Amplification: The forks can let out a powerful vibration and electromagnetic surges around them that stun people in place, making them struggle to maintain balance due to the forces entering your body. That’s just a light one, these energies get exponentially stronger over time to where they’re able to create whole earthquakes that knock people down and amplify gravity to such a degree that it increases your weight and sinks you to the floor.
Dimensional Manipulation: As stated in the image above, these devices are described as dimension warping on top of being able to travel to dimensions.

Sentinels

After he’s done preparing corpses to become part of his army, he salvages the brain and encases it within a metal sphere to become by far his most iconic weapon, the Sentinel. Despite being implied to have the memories of who they once were, these bloodsucking spheres are under The Tall Man’s control 24/7 and if they get out of line, he can hush them like a dog. Not that he particularly needs to though, he has thousands if not millions of them from the victims he’s claimed from countless towns. All of which are metaphysical and equipped to the teeth with weaponry to end anyone who opposes The Tall Man.

They may be small with a diameter of only 12 centimeters, but they’re made out of a rare material using an anti-matter plasma cell to propel itself across rooms in seconds, as they can reach speeds of up to 110 km/h in 70 microseconds guided by a gray-matter wire web. They’ve showcased quite an arsenal, most iconically they can stab into the heads of anyone and drill into their brain to harvest it but they can also extend a human eye for The Tall Man to watch out of, whip out buzzsaws, ram into enemies with spikes and explode, shoot lasers, control minds, summon The Dimensional Forks and even shapeshift back into their human form.

Golden Sentinels

A variant of the classic Sentinel, Golden Sentinels are more dignified than their silver counterparts, not attacking directly but instead lurking within the body of the user like Mike or The Tall Man himself. If The Tall Man is impaired to a point where his body cannot go on, the Golden Sentinel will burst out of his head and continue the hunt. Being far more powerful than regular Sentinels, its propel system is run on turbocharged anti-matter plasma cells, allowing it to bust through doors and travel so fast that it produces smoke as if it's catching fire. To add more versatility to this device, it has spinning blades all around itself to dig into the body, retractable sawblades on its sides and reportedly can fire positron lasers.

J Sphere Sentinels

Though we haven’t seen much of this variant, the J Sphere’s description describes it as being made of dark matter while still being propelled by an anti-matter plasma cell. It's got the typical saws and cobalt lasers that come with being a Sentinel.

The Orbitals

Also known by the name “Colossal Sentinels”, these are giant versions of the traditional sentinels the size of a whole football field, able to keep up with helicopters when flying and fire massive lasers capable of splitting skyscrapers in half and entirely incinerating them.

Hyper Dreaming Program

Tall Man has access to a technology program centered around dreams called “The Hyper Dreaming Program.” While we do not see much of what this program can do, we know it consists of several pieces of technology that can see, record, analyze and graph information gathered in the dreams of whoever is hooked up to it.

Virtual Dream Recorder

One such technology is the Virtual Dream Recorder. This thing can induce a specific rem-state that drifts the user into different levels of dreaming. It maps out your subconscious slowly as you go further into your dreams, finding out what makes your nightmares.

Brain Remover

Does what the name implies and does it very well, a trademark for turning people into Sentinels and removing their minds from their flesh.

Switchblade

Tall Man Knife by MaxFunnies2550

To kill off characters who will eventually come back in sequels, Tall Man has a switchblade to make his kills count.

Baseball Gear

Yeah this is a real thing, you’re just gonna have to deal with it.

Fangoria

Tall Man’s a fan of all the classics. He’s got a ton of magazines starring horror icons, from Freddy Krueger to… Pinhead!? I see him back there in this gif, you cannot hide from me.

Santa Hat

Fellas, it’s gonna be a red Christmas this year.

Abilities

Pinhead

Cenobite Physiology

In order to wage the war against the chaos infused flesh in Leviathan’s name, Cenobites are made to be extremely powerful entities. To do this, the human body and soul are casted away into a chamber which transmutates both aspects, cladding their new form from the flesh of The Leviathan and drawing their unholy power from their god, who is a being of pure energy who in turn gets his power from misery and pain. In this transformation, the sinner’s twisted psyches and distorted perception of reality are made real and manifest themselves in the form of powers and abilities specific to them, meaning all Cenobites powers are different in nature although they still have the same roots. So while Pinhead may not be capable of the signature abilities of Cenobites, his exposure to what all of Hell has to offer gives him access to a majority of a Cenobite’s kit.

Cenobites are completely immortal, they do not age, they do not get sick and most pleasurable of all, they can endure for an eternity of nothing but unfathomable pain. They feel every moment and pain, good or bad, that they have gone through in their life as well as all possible emotions. The most efficient way of killing them is through dismemberment, but besides that they can live with their heart ripped out among other damage. Being carved from The Leviathan the same as Lament Configurations, Cenobites cannot see anyone not tainted by The Leviathan nor can anyone who hasn’t summoned them view them. Like any good demons, Cenobites are able to make deals and pacts with other demonic entities in order to obtain a great deal of power, such as when Pinhead forfeited his soul to The Leviathan in hopes to be resurrected as a human. Other deals he’s done have increased his powers both temporally and spiritually, increasing the strength of his abilities tenfold.

Soul Manipulation

Upon opening the Lament Configuration, your soul is forfeited to Pinhead for him to do what he will or release it if he chooses to. With such ownership, Pinhead really likes to, say it with me folks, tear it apart. No really, his hooks and chains, along with the rest of his kit and abilities, are practically made for the sole purpose of ripping open your soul the same as it does your flesh.

Mind Manipulation

Along with affecting the soul, Pinhead’s not a stranger at taking a crack at your mind too. It is to him as easily readable as a book and as easily enterable as a window, allowing him to access a sort of mindscape, mental spaces in which Pinhead is able to interact and harm with the victims mind, literally feel the morality of his victims and their desires along with controlling it, at least to some extent. Past incarnations of himself were able to warp the surroundings of their mindscape to create scenarios and creatures to attack others, implying Pinhead can do the same. Though this control is dictated by others opening to his will or taking over by force, it's not something he can freely do.

Memory Manipulation

Having been revoked of his own memories by The Leviathan, Pinhead can dish out a similar and cruel fate to his victims by placing restraints on those he has turned into Cenobite’s memories to suppress maddening thoughts and remove it just as quickly or alternatively wipe your memories altogether. Similarly, when Kirsty was a Lead Cenobite with the same powers as Pinhead, she was remove, access and give back vital memories of his time as a Cenobite. And in Hell, memories, especially intense feelings within the consciousness, are able to physically weigh you down.

Teleportation

Obligatory mention of teleportation is needed for any supernatural slasher now isn’t it?

Telepathy

Besides reading and invading minds, Pinhead can directly communicate with anyone’s mind anywhere to further taunt them, allowing him to speak to future and past versions of himself to gain information on what time has in store for him and to warn them of upcoming dangers.

Telekinesis

Using his mental prowess, Pinhead can telekinetically move and throw objects like his signature chains, CDs and people and break things with a mere thought, even material as strong as concrete. With this same telekinesis, he can exert a force in the form of black motes to shield him from damage. Basic magic spells in Hell have also shown telekinesis of sorts, crushing creatures into a tight and mangled mass of what it once was.

Levitation & Free Movement

With his telekinesis, Pinhead can levitate himself in the air and walk on water, very ironic I know.

Intangibility

While having the powers of Pinhead, Kirsty Cotton was able to phase through the floor and remain an intangible force within the walls before eventually becoming normal once more.

Dream Manipulation

For his main trick in any movie past 4, he has the astonishingly powerful ability to, brace for it, extend his movies runtime. In all seriousness, Pinhead has been shown constantly entering people’s dreams, like dreams that take place in “a time between times”, and manipulating it to a degree.

Illusion Casting

Pinhead has been shown to be able to create building sized illusions that get more real the more you descend into their labyrinths, acting as undiscovered worlds in a nonsensical maze that has gibberish codes spelling out ancient spells like how to repurpose life essence written all over the walls.

Perception Manipulation

The fine print of sights of pleasure and pain greater than anything you’ve ever known doesn’t lie, it is one of many sensations brought about by Pinhead’s command. Pinhead can induce blindness and give the blind the ability to see, he can also remove you of your taste, touch and smell along with it or make you see something completely different to what is actually going on or as representations of what’s actually there. Making you question what is and isn’t real, the perfect living Hell for those to rot in.

More devastatingly, Pinhead can amplify your sensations to a frankly absurd degree. Overloading your brain with smell so strong you can smell sap on the wooden floor, literal darkness, and hundreds of thousands of birds outside. Feel so well you feel the collision of motes on your skin, every breath, every blink and past residue from food you ate yesterday. Hear so well your head is filled with a thousand dins, turning air simply touching your ear to air so fierce it sounds like a tornado, turning the flatulence of your bowels into the sound of thunder and hearing the literal voices of a thousand others in your head. See so well that the entirety of the Earth is now known to you, seeing the weaves of your shirt as an elaboration of threads and if you shut your eyes, you can see your memories. All of which happens simultaneously and instantly, and all it ends up doing is sending you directly to Hell for further notice.

Pain & Empathetic Manipulation

The pain and suffering of wayward sinners is Hell’s daily breed and Cenobites are known to relish in this pain, as whatever pain that Pinhead inflicts is reflected back onto him as if to torment him. This isn’t to say being on the receiving end is any better, since Cenobites can twist anything that gives you pleasure to cause more pain than a thousand hot needles slowly being pushed into your eye. Pinhead himself has showcased this ability, increasing one's pain to feel the pain of others down to the cellular level and pain that doesn’t even exist yet, the decaying and death of flesh as their lives are brought to an end, which ends up turning the victim into a painting.

Fear Manipulation

To maintain order over the living, Cenobites have instilled fear in the hearts of many for countless millennia which they can reactivate through touch to make you freeze in fear and shock as your mind retreats and your perceptions distort.

Regeneration

Though Cenobites enjoy intense pain as much as the next guy hates it, they can’t always be bleeding out of open wounds, so they naturally have a healing factor to regenerate from injuries that would otherwise kill a normal person. Such as being shot with harpoons, getting their guts shot out and ripping their own hearts from their chest. It's to the point where the only viable way to kill them is to dismember them, which seems to be the limit for a Cenobite’s regeneration.

Blood Manipulation

If his usual tricks of getting back to full health don’t quite suffice, Pinhead can do what many others can and absorb freshly spilled blood to heal himself and his body from nothing but his spirit. There have been many instances of Pinhead using this control over blood offensively as well, like causing your blood to burst from your body with a motion of his hand and turning his own blood into acid strong enough to melt asphalt through an incantation.

Life Manipulation

In Hellraiser, when someone absorbs another’s blood, their very life force is absorbed along with it in a single touch. Which is why they can heal and resurrect themselves with it in the first place. This is only a regular spirit’s capabilities, Pinhead’s abilities are far more complex in manipulating the very foundations of life. With his bare hands, he can strip, grind and tear the life out of you and give life to inanimate objects like origami cranes, which can similarly suck blood out of victims and of course, fly.

Biological Manipulation

Low-ranked Cenobites are able to speed up the process of naturally decaying dead bodies, decomposing them to a skeleton in record time.

Disease Manipulation

Pinhead you gave me aids?

For a supernatural series involving perverted pleasures, it only makes sense that Cenobites can… manipulate aids I guess? Okay well it doesn’t really make sense but Pinhead is able to give you some sort of form of aids with rapid development that results in you becoming nothing but skin and bones in mere seconds. Thankfully there are more diseases Pinhead can spread than just aids, he’s so disease stricken in fact that a mere touch from him will give you an infection that hurts like fire and spreads to your heart rapidly like a rash.

Transmutation

An ancient practice in Hell, while most would require some sort of a ritual to perform the act of transforming the imperfect flesh of overs, Pinhead can cut to the chase and perform it instantly. He can turn you into a painting made of your own flesh, a bumblebee or a whole swarm of wasps.

Corruption

Dead or alive, Pinhead will always find a use for his victims, whether it be fusing them into an amalgamation of cenobitic flesh or turning them into what is known as a Pseudo-Cenobite, basically a lesser version of a Cenobite. Pinhead’s created forms for those he’s already had the pleasure of killing, like a hulking giant with multiple arms and eyes or a brainwashed Cenobite under his control.

Absorption

Fascinatingly, his Cenobite body is apparently so malleable that it can magically absorb projectile weapons like bullets and spit it back out of his body with no issue. Going back to his control over the life of others, Pinhead can draw life from the corpses of the undead to heal himself back to full health and perfecting his own anatomy, developing into something that can sustain itself.

Accelerated Development

I don’t even have words that I can say about this one. He can just make you pregnant no matter the state of your body and when the baby is born, it grows at an insanely fast rate.

Energy Manipulation

Over the course of his appearances, Pinhead’s been shown to control a specific type of energy to great effect. Such as forming himself from energy released from the box and when he had access to The Leviathan’s power, his energy abilities grew as he was able to create a spinning forcefield around himself that drained his opponent’s powers until he could land a killing blow.

Electricity Manipulation

To kick his chains up a notch, Pinhead can release a deadly shock that travels through his chains capable of blowing your whole head to mush and sending bolts of lightning with a wave of his hand.

Fire Manipulation

When Sherlock Holmes had taken the mantle of Lead Cenobite to fight a war against James Moriarty and his pseudo-Cenobites, don’t question it, he showed the ability to fire blasts of hellfire. Implying Pinhead is able to do something similar.

Ice & Heat Manipulation

Any good damnation should be as hot or cold to the sinner’s dismay as possible, and Pinhead can more than fit this description with his ability to alter the temperature of objects to quickly melt metal or turn water into ice sharp enough to stab through someone’s mouth. He can use this to a more drastic effect too, creating walls of fire and random explosions and a room capable of freezing someone’s body entirely to where their body breaks like glass.

Technology Manipulation

Despite being turned into a Cenobite long before technology had developed very far, Pinhead’s actually been shown to control minor pieces of tech in a way, like when he created fake videos of fake events on a TV to mess with the head of the viewer.

Darkness Manipulation

Somehow more strangely, Pinhead is able to command his very shadow as if it was an alive entity and create constructs made out of pure and impenetrable darkness.

Paralysis Inducement

To immobilize his victims, Pinhead can mutter an incantation that physically freezes your body and forces you to act against your own will to bear witness to his glory.

Sealing

While not a go to for Pinhead given that he’s never showcased this himself, a basic Cenobite ability used for an eternity's torment is trapping someone inside their own body, mind and soul and making the act of freeing yourself an act of destroying said aspects.

Fog Creation

Among the many spells he picked up during his genocide of magicians is the ability to produce a large and fast traveling fog from a quarter mile long range that engulfs whole cities and makes all those caught in it die in the purest form of pain, and that’s if your lucky. Otherwise it can transform the victims into demonic anomalies, often multiplying their features like arms similar to his own corruption, and multiply wounds, causing something as small as a cut develop into a lethal injury.

Enhanced Senses

As guardians of the realm all about sensations and pain, Cenobites, and even some sinners, have massively heightened senses to indulge in, which Pinhead himself has done. These senses are no joke, as they let the user sense things at the sub-atomic level, letting them smell the salt in a baby’s tears, taste a bumblebee on a grain of lost pollen, hear water flowing down the veins of a dying leaf, see a flake of dead skin between floorboards and hear the heartbeat of a butterfly.

Enhanced Memory

A rare pleasure in Hell is the ability to recall memories so efficiently you think they are genuinely real and are thrown into a temporal backlash.

Extrasensory Perception

Naturally, these senses border on a supernatural level to interact with things that should otherwise be impossible. Allowing the user to feel terror in a bird’s heart, taste the darkness, to see music and in Pinhead’s case, smell the stench of chaos and sense how many abortions someone has had, sure okay fine. I don’t need answers.

Clairvoyance

Pinhead has an uncanny awareness of events transpiring across his series, he can somehow learn about your past actions and motivations and listen to people talk whilst he dwells in Hell through Leviathan like projections or on his own accord. Cenobites are even able to project this knowledge to others, letting them acquire the knowledge of what is going on behind the scenes as well as the emotions others feel.

Shapeshifting

By skinning someone with his fingertips and then stitching their skin onto himself, Pinhead can appear as a normal individual but able to pull the skin off like a cartoon character. He can also use magic to perform a similar result, but that’s not nearly as funny.

Creation

With powers of the pinnacle of what a Cenobite can be, Pinhead’s capabilities are comparable, if not utterly superior, to that of The Chatterer, who could create new Cenobites formed from the reflection of his own pain and suffering in Torso. Who now roams around Hell looking for his creator.

Existence Erasure

To cover up Hell’s order and arrival from the call of a box opening, Pinhead has a habit of erasing the location where he was summoned in every way, including any evidence of it. The location is torn away, the streets crudely being stitched back together like a crack in the earth but in a way that is undetectable physically, only existing metaphysically.

Dimensional Manipulation

As an expert at working The Lament Configuration, Pinhead’s gotten so good at solving it with his telekinesis that he can twist and turn its working to become a two-dimensional square before turning it into an unsolvable diamond shape.

Portal Creation & Dimensional Travel

If The Lament Configuration isn’t cutting it, Pinhead’s not without options to leave and enter our reality from Hell. He can condense matter at such a rate that it spawns a portal between Hell and Earth and freely create portals to Hell in his Dead By Daylight Mori to drag you straight to it.

Reality Warping

Once in Hell, Pinhead becomes a much bigger threat then he appears to us at the tangible surface. As he can manipulate your own personal Hell to torment you with everything that you hate, creating whole stories that mask your life all for Pinhead himself to punish you with the horror that is reality. He’s able to separate your own flesh and spirit, figuratively and literally making your body destroy your soul, he can mass duplicate you across the sky and when the time comes, he can start the torture all over again. Cenobites manipulating pain and pleasure in the form of music were able to displace air and change reality altogether by giving people glimpses into Hell, which Pinhead showcases himself, being able to tear the fabric of reality on his own.

Subjective Reality

By targeting your belief, Cenobites can transform whatever you think is real into something that actually is real, like making someone’s face permanently make an expression, causing you to die in real life if you die in your dreams and making your mother randomly break her back if you step on a crack simply because you thought it would. They can manipulate the result of your belief too, turning hopes of surfing on ocean waves into the reality of being caught in a lava flow.

Time Manipulation

When the time has come for him to land the killing blow, your eternal damnation is far from over. He will make you relieve the entire events of your suffering again and again, with any death only setting you back to the beginning, making you go mad with desperation to get out.

Acausality

Since there is no time in Hell due to it existing beyond time and space, Pinhead along with the rest of the things in Hell do not adhere to the laws of space-time and can act independent of such. In fact, it's stated that Elliot’s decision to open The Lament Configuration bound his past, present and future into one timeless decision. So while he’s vulnerable at this state, he’s pretty much immune to any attempt to manipulate the past, present or future anywhere else.

Dead By Daylight Perks

It only makes sense that the biggest masochist in all of horror would find himself in the midst of what is now the biggest crossover horror game with the most painful community, Dead By Daylight. Where Pinhead would find himself serving under yet another cosmic entity, this one literally being called The Entity. Pinhead wouldn’t be hunting survivors unarmed, he obtained a few nifty “perks” designed to mess with generators and little down the survivors chances of survival. Among these include…

Deadlock: To induce mental anguish on any pitiful survivor trying to escape, Pinhead will call upon the entity to block the generator with the most progress on it once a generator is completed.
Plaything: Using totems, Pinhead can apply the Cursed and Oblivious status effects onto any hooked survivor so long as the totem is up.
Gift Of Pain: Replaces the traditional hooks to sacrifice survivors to The Entity with Scourge Hooks all about maiming and draining as much blood from a victim. Hindering their ability to be healed successfully while also making them easier to track down.

Resistances

Pain Manipulation: Cenobites literally get off to it, it's kinda their thing. Pinhead has such pleasure towards his own pain and agony that he prefers his captives take their time torturing him. He was shot multiple times in the chest, got his pins carved out of his face one at a time, left to burn in a fire that broke his bones and collapsed the building he was in, resulting in debris falling on his ribcage and ripping it open. He was still walking after all of this and enjoyed every second of it.
Soul Manipulation: While Pinhead’s soul still does exist, he has sold it to The Leviathan and it remains trapped within The Leviathan’s structure, which is why Pinhead’s main body is described as soulless.
Empathetic & Memory Manipulation: Cenobites feel every pain and moment of their being, including all types of emotions filling their heads at once.
Sleep Manipulation: Unaffected by a spell which caused other Cenobites to fall asleep.
Limited Biological Manipulation: Cenobites can remain active even without working organs.
Poison Manipulation: Unfazed by the toxic gas of a Cenobite, which was described as being able to dissolve lungs through its toxins.
Likely More: While a bit unclear, it has been stated that no incantation in the Hellraiser universe was able to stop him at his peak.

The Tall Man

Undead Physiology

The series makes it crystal clear that the man that once was Jebediah Morningside now stands as something much darker and far from human, popularly believed to be an alien. His blood is now a putrid yellow and he has cybernetics running through his body, mostly legs, letting him endure extreme amounts of pain that would kill any mortal man like it were nothing, survive in planets without oxygen and even see through walls. In dire situations, his body can distort into sticking a worm thing out of his wounds to attack anyone near it and he has implanted a Golden Sentinel directly into his head that houses his brain and that will shoot right out of his face and attack if he is incapacitated.

Body Control & Regeneration

Through his unorthodox physiology, Tall Man has been shown to control his body even after they are cut off from the main half for long lengths of time, allowing him to transform the body part into terrifying monsters while he regenerates the body part back given time.

Shapeshifting

As if his biology couldn’t get any stranger, Tall Man has the power to transform into anyone and anything, mostly using this to turn himself into an attractive woman to lure people in for a quick kill or a giant monster with several appendages. He can also use this in a battle sense, forming a fleshy body for himself out of the bodies of countless other monsters that multiply by the second to completely drown someone in their disgustingly organic filth or to trap you to a flesh cobweb.

Paralysis Inducement

The Tall Man with something as simple as a touch or a stare can make you drift out of consciousness so that you are unable to move, speak or think and make it so where you feel yourself going deaf, only able to hear your pounding heart, and make your muscles incapable of movement.