HELLRAISER (1987) & its marketing

 The poster graphics are appropriate for the film.  The tagline is absolutely stupid.  Pinhead, as he's known colloquially (he never had a name in the actual movie) was not THE villain.  It's debatable as to weather he's even the LEAD villain.  He seemed to be the spokesperson for the group of 'cenobites' that were seen in the movie.  It's not even clear if the movie features ALL of the 'cenobites' that exist in the set-up that Clive Barker conjured up.  Of course, it's possible that even Clive Barker would not be able to answer that, but usually a well made movie is the result of rather immersive understanding of the content within the movie, and that usually includes details that are not explicitly stated in the script and / or the movie itself.  But that only goes so far.  Someone was asking the writer of FALLEN DOWN (1993) as to weather the main character would have voted for Trump.  The writer of that movie didn't seem to have a definitive answer.  There's just some things that are left up in the air like that.  Characters in a movie I suppose can live on in the writers' imagination to where the writer can pinpoint exactly how they may have changed and where they would be in their life if they were in fact real people, but I can't imagine that being the norm for a writer.  Especially writers who write about people other than themselves...  SPOILER AHEAD: Of course, the writer of FALLEN DOWN may have just had difficulty answering the question because you have to wonder given the trajectory of the character and his downfall how it would have played out differently...  Aside from the cops just letting him be...  which is a question I ask about myself sometimes and never am able to answer.  Given my influences and personality etc., what about my life could have really been different, realistically?

 Anyway....

The film (HELLRAISER) will tear your soul apart.  "Pinhead" will not.  He's not even going to tear apart the soul of anyone in the movie.  The tagline really should have been IT'LL TEAR YOUR SOUL APART, not HE'LL TEAR YOUR SOUL APART.  I guess they were trying to reel in people who were conditioned to thinking a horror movie had to have a mascot type villain.  Even "Leatherface" from THE TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE is often thought of as "the villain" in that movie, although he, like "pinhead", was only a piece of the terror that ensued in that movie.  I think somehow the barrage of FRIDAY THE 13TH and NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET sequels pretty much cemented that mentality of there being one central bad guy in the movie.  I think that's largely what made the ending for SCREAM (1996) so surprising, originally.  The identity of the killer was otherwise pretty obvious from the beginning and never stopped being obvious.